BANGALORE, INDIA: You are a developer. You know a programming language and can build desktop applications and/or web applications.

You are getting bored by this monotony and over all you have heard that mobile application development is really catching up, is fun and can also be a lucrative way to earn money!

In short – you are all gung ho about developing applications for mobile but don’t know what does it take and where to start. This is the article for you then.

At first, writing applications for mobile phones may look complex but one of the most important things to know about mobile application development is that it’s not development that is challenging – it is the understanding of the device, the platform and the ecosystem that is the key to building successful mobile apps.

Whether you are going to build a locally install-and-run application for the phone or a web based application that can be accessed from the browser on the phone is largely going to depend on the kind of features you have in your application, the availability of data plans with your target audience and host of other business factors.

Before you take a call on that, it’s important to know and consider some of the other aspects that makes mobile development different from desktop or web development. To begin with let’s start with what are the key differences that developers should be aware of when thinking of writing applications for mobile devices:

Screen type:

Size/form factor
This is by far the most important visible differences that you see when you start programming for mobile devices – suddenly the habit of putting lots of controls on the screen, not worrying about unimportant/unnecessary information being displayed, control layouts etc. leads you into creating a layout that is simply not useable on a mobile phone.

When designing an application for the mobile phones apart from the look and feel it’s also important to visualize how the application is going to be used by your end users and design it to make it user friendly.

E.g. on a desktop – if required to choose a country from a list of countries you would most likely use a drop down combo box which opens up a combo list with all the country names and the user can scroll to select the appropriate one. Nothing can be worse that using the same approach to select countries on a mobile device.

Firstly the combo list when open most likely will be bigger than the screen size not allowing the user to see all the countries and more importantly if the focus is on a control behind the combo box it won’t be easy for the user to scroll down too.

So what do you do in this case? Either size the control so that the list size is as much as can be accommodated on the screen and have scroll bars in it or even better open up a map control where the user can tap and select the country.

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(The author works as Developer Evangelist at Microsoft India)
(The views expressed in this article are that of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views or policies of CIOL)