Mobile Platforms are Fighting for Developers [Infographic]

I stumbled across this infographic on the mobile developer journey from Vision Mobile.

Very interesting stuff, and here’s my summary and opinion:

• It takes a developer 3 times as much time to learn Symbian that it would take to grasp Android.
• Java ME looks like it is not entirely dead because it’s so wide spread and there are lot of apps on the market. Questions remain about the quality level of these apps.
• App stores are the preferred distribution channel for every platform except Java ME. That’s because it’s almost impossible to make a generalized offering of apps for a product base that’s so divers (device features like screen size, processing power, memory, …).
• App stores have a very positive effect on the time-to-market for mobile apps.
• 42% procent of the projects have good or outstanding results in sales and return.
• Over a quarter of the project seem to have poor results.

At the top of the the infographic it says that the choice of the platform by developers is based primarily on commercial reasons, a good conclusion of the research. I’d like to add that choice of platform is also based on ease of development, fun and to a certain degree trendiness.

In a not so distant past I got involved in a Symbian based project and based on that I would like to propose that every Symbian phone should be refunded and recycled. There is just nothing good that I can say about it.

Development on Android and for the iPhone seems to be pretty nice though and way easier compared to Java ME or Symbian.

Java ME isn’t bad in theory but device manufacturers usually implement the specs in different ways and most of the time they do so very poorly.

The possible target devices are also very different, making the development of an application that runs well on all Java ME capable devices virtually impossible.

If you have Java developers, do them a favor and invest in development for Android based devices.

By the way, if you’re looking for my project management blog, you can find it at JourneymanPM.com and everything else is still here in the project management category.

Podcasting, Whiskey, Beer and Skype 5

Last Thursday, tech aficionado Davy Buntinx and IT specialist Marco Frissen from Tech45 invited my to their non-tech talkshow podcast “Praat“. We tested Skype 5.0 Beta and it worked wonderfully. Great quality, multi-user video conferencing, super easy user experience. Even you granny could pick up in a jiffy. Give me a call whenever you feel like it, my username on Skype is heymans_bert. This is what using Skype 5 looks like.

Clicking the picture will take you to a random part from the show that didn’t make the final cut (it’s all in Dutch by the way).

We talked about project management, personal development and a bunch of other stuff for an hour and then I mentioned the box of whiskey I happened to have next to me in the room. We switched subjects.

Davy knows a lot about Belgian beer, he’s quite the expert on obscure Belgian breweries and he’s a walking beer trivia encyclopedia. Needless to say, it got pretty interesting. We did another full hour of show and finally only cut the part about the whiskey and beer for the podcast.

I was doing some product photography this weekend and ended up shooting all the bottles we talked about. So instead of listing them here I’ll just show you this slideshow containing all the bottles we discussed. Yes, one of them is definitely not whisky but Mezcal, that one just happened to be in the box too.

Should you have listened to the podcast you might have noticed that I called the Lagavulin 12 a single casks whisky, that was a slip of the tongue, off course it’s a single malt. It’s my favorite whisky, until I find a better one.

I made a map of the beer bars and specialized whiskey outlets we mentioned in the podcast. If you ever plan to see our little part of Europe and would like to visit something exclusive, take note. I added quite a few interesting places we didn’t mention as well.

The people on the podcast can be found on Twitter @dirtyjos @mfrissen and myself @bertheymans.

extra: if you ever have had doubts about the correct spelling of ‘whisky’ vs ‘whiskey’, check out this article of the NY Times, it explains it once and for all (hint, only say ‘whisky’ if you’re referring to Scotch)