How to get started with mobile development

Question

Now that Nokia will soon ship my pre-ordered n900, I thought I would familiarize myself with mobile development - maemo seems friendly enough for a guy who's done development only on Linux since days of Amiga and C=64 and is in love with Python.

However, I have no clue whatsoever on stuff like UI:s and especially mobile UI:s - also, I would not like to learn to code just for n900 but in a more broad sense. Looks like most guides etc are very platform or device specific, so any suggestions on like "UI best practices" tutorials, books or websites that are general to all mobile platforms - not just for say Maemo or iPhone.

Answer 1

Everything you're finding is platform specific because device development simply is very platform specific. The API sets are widely different. The UI paradigms, including how controls are created and layed out, are different. The processes themselves are handled are vastly different.

There simply are no "one size fits all" rules or recommendations other than maybe broad hand-waving like "remember you have limited resources, so keep your memory footprint low" or "the processor is not a desktop, so things take longer. Code complex algorithms accordingly". As you can see, not terribly concrete or useful.

The unfortunate thing is that you really have to just pick a platform and start to learn it. If you want to try your hand at multiple platforms, you basically have to learn multiple separate skill sets (and often multiple development tools as well).

Answer 2

Actually, that is not really true. If you learn how to use the two main windowing toolkits (GTK+ and Qt) in Maemo, you will be able to write GUIs for all sorts of devices. Nokia has purchased Trolltech, the makers of Qt, and they have released all the GTK+ changes back to GNOME. This means that both Qt and GTK+ are open source so you can port them to any platform.

In fact, Nokia has already done some of the porting for you - they are porting Qt to Symbian which runs on millions of mobile phones. Both Qt and GTK+ run on many platforms, not just linux, so you can write programs for Windows with these two toolkits as well. Note that you are not going to be able to create applications that take advantage of the native operating system's Windowing software, like Aqua, but you'll be able to get a native look and feel.

Learning either one of these Windowing systems will stand you in good stead for developing GUIs and nearly any platform you can think of.

Answer 3

Forum Nokia has good documentation about user interfaces for mobile devices, of course these are simple general rules as already said here, but take a look to this page: http://www.forum.nokia.com/Technology%5FTopics/Design%5Fand%5FUser%5FExperience/ (see also the essential links at the bottom)

Answer 4

The mobile UI isn't GTK+/QT folks. And there is a "one size fits all".

It's called the Web. Learn HTML5 and start writing mobile applications.