What is my quest: To update my software development skills.
What to study: Phone app development
What kind of apps: Eventually games, but let's start with something simple...
Possible technologies: Native, Web, Cross platform?
Where to start? Well, I started by poking around the web for a few weeks looking at possible development frameworks and stacks.
I have an iPod Touch and a Macbook so native Xcode was an obvious starting point. Although I still want to develop native apps with Objective-C, I'd also like to update my web development skills.
HTML5 web apps look pretty good. The cross platform issue is solved by using a web based app, but you run into issues with offline use. Client side HTML5 solves this, but how do you market it?
PhoneGap to the rescue. I can wrap client side HTML5 into a native app wrapper that can target iOS, Android, Windows Phone, etc.
There are a lot of frameworks available. SpineJS is still in the running but I think it needs a bit more work on the mobile side. I really like coffeescript, but as a "classically" educated developer (code for "get off my lawn") I feel it's necessary to understand the foundation layers. So, I'm starting with javascript.
To learn javascript, I'm going to follow a great series written by Alan Young at DailyJS.com called "Let's Make a Framework".
Here's what my preliminary framework looks like. It's subject to change of course.
- PhoneGap/Apache Callback - native cross platform phone wrapper
- Javascript/Coffeescript - code
- BackboneJS/UnderscoreJS - MVC framework
- Jasmine - TDD/BDD
- Eco - coffeescript template markup
- Stylus - CSS markup
- Brunch - scaffolding (possibly)
