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WP7.8 is the absolute epitome of troll face.

If you're a user you bought a phone which had a staggeringly poor selection of applications. Just when it looked like it was starting to get some traction Microsoft announced thant WP8 would be based on a new API, WinRT. WP7 Silverlight apps would run on WP8 but only in compatibility mode. What about XNA. Well some Microsoft bloggers have been talking up MonoGame but the actual details of what will happen are going to be kept secret until launch. I.e. no SDK.

So obviously at that point no one in the right mind is going to develop for WP7. If you go here

http://pages.appcelerator.com/Q32012AppceleratorIDCSurveyReport.html

You don't need to give it real data, just random junk for the name, phone number and email

Or this might work

http://www.appcelerator.com.s3.amazonaws.com/pdf/Appcelerator-Report-Q3-2012-final.pdf

There's a graph of developer interest on WP7 on page 7. In Jan 2012 40% of developers were thinking of developing for WP7. By August when it had fallen to about 20%. The reason for that is that Microsoft had announced a new and better but incompatible platform.

This is not the first time this has happened. Development for Windows Mobile essentially stopped when people like Opera and Skype found out that WP7 would be incompatible with their WM6.5 code. Admittedly Microsoft bought Skype so sooner or later it will be an WP exclusive. But Microsoft didn't need to buy companies to make them support Windows - those companies did it because it sold well.

So if you're one of the schmucks that bought a WP7 phone what do you get? WP7.8. It's got the same start screen as WP8. but it can't run WP8 applications. People are going to develop apps for WP8 because that is the future.

So you've got a phone that looks a bit like the future until you try to install anything new on it, in which case it won't let you.

As someone who went from WM6.5 to Android it's actually funny how much of a catastrophe Windows Phone has been.

I'm not particularly interested in native development, maybe I should be, but I've looked at a number of technologies, initially Flex with deploy via Air, then Phonegap and finally settling on Appcelerator.

Particularly for slower Android phones, Phonegap HTML5 apps really suck with many reviews having the classic "really like the app, but it was just too slow to be use-able". This is a killer and this issue will go away in the first world, but will never go away in the developing markets, just look at Aakash.

So at the moment, if you are careful with your component solution, Appcelerator offers (IMHO) the 'best' cross-platform native compile solution (it even has a webKit plugin so you can deliver HTML5 apps) for iOS/Android. Blackberry is in beta and I have no idea when WP7 will be supported.

One downside....you need to buy a Mac.

Ever heard of Appcelerator Titanium? Check it out, it's a Javascript environment for developing applications for iOS and Android.

The web site didn't make it clear whether or not I would have to buy a Mac and pay $99 per year in order to run Appcelerator Titanium programs that I wrote on an iOS device that I own,* as I would with Xcode. And without reading several pages of legalese and giving them my country and state/province of residence, the web site wouldn't let me download it to try it.

* Currently I have occasional access to but do not in fact own an iOS device.

One solution would be to use Appcelerator Titanium: http://appcelerator.com./

I've used this and it's a doddle to create a standalone webkit browser running your app. You can also embed Ruby or Python or (I think) PHP in your app if you want and there's an online packaging service that packages up your app to install as an .msi for Windows or other formats for Mac and Linux. Also, this is a fully featured Webkit browser with full CSS3 and HTML5. It's not the crippled version supplied with Adobe AIR.

It may also be helpful to know that if you drag a Google Chrome App (which is basically a web page zipped up with some metadata) from the browser to the desktop and then launch it from the desktop, it comes up without any chrome. Well, yes it's still Chrome but there's no... oh stop it, you know what I mean.

http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/f4f-mobile-ordering/id425143797?mt=8 Quick and nasty mobile ordering app to demo to customers. But PhoneGap is rubbish if you want a decent HTML5 native app solution use - http://www.appcelerator.com/products/titanium-mobile-application-development/ its not free but the best product we have come across.

Eclipse/Aptana is like Mozilla/Firefox: friendly and powerful, but also huge and slow. I'm looking forward to Aptana/RadRails 3.0, announced for 2011-Q1. From the beta it seems they have been reworking the UI and eliminating a lot of cruft and semi-abandoned modules that never worked in the first place. Also the recent acquisition of Aptana by Appcelerator looks promising, it could mean fresh money and better Ruby and Javascript features.

http://www.appcelerator.com/products/

There you go kiddo. It ain't Fortran but it will let you avoid locking yourself into the iPhone land.

Well, then look into the Titanium framework. You code in JavaScript (and HTML, CSS) and it cross compiles to native apps for iOS, Android, Blackberry and desktop apps. http://www.appcelerator.com/ I have only dabbled for a short time, but seems quite cool.

never heard of it, so thanks for the link

If you learn HTML/CSS/Javascript you can target Android/IOS and the Web.

Tools you can use include:
Appcelerator
Sencha Touch plus Phonegap

You can read this article for more information and other options.

One is open source and the other is enough closed. However,I think approaching both platforms is the way to go.The more platforms you support ,the wider your potential customer base will be. Android = Java , iOS = Objective-C. Both have C as a base. I think you will be just fine.

By the way, if you dislike Objective C, try these Javascript frameworks for iPhone development: Titanium (which is cross-platform to some extent with Android) and PhoneGap.

This makes life as easy as navigator.camera.getPicture(getPicture_Success, null, options);

I'm surprised that no one mentioned Titanium, which is an Open Source alternative to AIR that lets you package up native apps for all of the mentioned platforms.

http://www.appcelerator.com/

The UI is CSS based, and you can combine several scripting languages (Python, Ruby, PHP) along with compiled modules to handle most general application development.

Sorry, but there's a big difference between an AJAX app and a native app.

Certainly, this is true, but that doesn't mean the technologies of an AJAX app can't be used to develop an app on a native platform. Appcelerator's Titanium is a platform that specifically compiles down javascript, css, and html into an application that can run on the Android or the IPhone, with promises for more platforms on the way. I actually found that to be a glaring omission in this article, though it did throw a bone to Rhomobile's Rhodes framework. I'm sure there are many other types of cross platform mobile frameworks out there though that seek to minimize the amount of relearning that individuals have to do. It sounds like you anticipate Flash taking a similar role.

Javascript is a surprisingly elegant language.

Fixed it for you. :-)

Well, there's AIR. You can use just web-standards to develop for it. And you have the benefit of WebKit plus their JavaScipt engine, which I think is a version of Tamarin. On the free side, there's Titanium, and Prism. But these are site-specific-browsers. If you meant something that you could package into a gzip/tar and send over the web, I think you're left with the usual feature-sniffing and mass-o-files stuff that we all know and "love"...