I have managed to spend most of my career as a developer and architect not doing mobile development. I had a brief dalience with Waba back in the early 2000’s. I was looking for a simple way to write apps for my Palm Pilot and at the time I was boycotting C and C++¹.

Every time I thought about mobile applicatoin development the thing that ended up turning me off was the devices. No matter how good the development environemnt might be—and most of them are abyssmal so that doesn’t help—I found that I have no desire to cram anything useful into the small screen size and sub-par interface designs found on most such devices.

And then came the iPhone.

And now I’m finding myself interested in branching out. No, interested is too tame. I really want to jump into mobile development with Android. I am even ready to give Blackberry a try again. And with the annoucement of the iPad, things are looking more interesting every day.

It goes beyond mobile. Working on iPhone apps have re-ignited my interest in desktop application development. I have been doing mostly Web development for so long that I had almost forgotten just how much better a native app can be. Sans the enforced framing and quirks of the browser-based world, my imagination of what I want to make do with a computer do is expanding again.

I won’t be giving up Web development any time soon, but I will be spending more of my time working with mobile devices. And I’m grinning from ear to ear about it.

¹ For no good reason at all. I just didn’t want to work with low-level languages in those days.