I think, therefore I am… a mobile developer

I seem to be increasingly focused on mobile these days, so much so that it makes me think back to a comment piece I ran in a development magazine I used to edit. The piece was on mobile development in general and was written by the hugely erudite Dr Neil Roodyn. He wrote about the various slings and arrows of mobile development in his usual relaxed style, but it was the title he used that stood out.

I AM A DEVELOPER, THEREFORE I AM A MOBILE DEVELOPER

What he meant by that heading of course was that as almost all application scenarios migrate in some form of other to the mobile device, so therefore any developer should consider himself or herself a mobile developer.

That was three years ago. Today, mobile continues to make just as many headlines. In particular, I’ve recently picked up on the dotMobi consortium who is trying to make it easier for the development of mobile content and applications to spread.

As anyone in this space will tell you, proficient software engineering for mobile is only achieved through thorough testing. Interesting then that their first, “hey guys – here’s what we do” fact is its Mobile Complete testing, monitoring and support solutions.

Also worth a nod perhaps is the DeviceAnywhere service, which provides users with connection to and interaction with live mobile handsets over the Internet. The idea with this service is that developers have complete virtual access to all interfaces of a device, similar to having that device in their hands. The result? Fewer bug riddled or badly functioning apps – we hope.

I don’t profess to be an expert on this consortium, but I wanted to highlight these guys in light of the general amount of mobile malarkey – and in particular the web on mobile devices – that I am seeing flying past my inbox at the moment. So I’ll leave it there, you can research the dotMobi Developer Forum at http://dev.mobi