One of my goals this year is to expand my programming skills into the mobile and social arena. I have 2 facebook apps and 3 iphone/android app ideas that I am working on developing.

Last year I had started teaching myself Objective-C. But it was hard to ignore trajectory of Android. So I started looking at cross platform options such as Appcelerator’s Titanium Mobile project and PhoneGap as a way to quickly develop for multiple platforms. The real bonus has been they are based around languages I already know. Titanium is based off of Javascript, which I have been surprised at how much that language has grown in the last couple years. PhoneGap is a browser view with Javascript hooks into the the phone’s API’s.

After playing with both of them in 2010 I was able to create a PhoneGap app for the iphone, but I did notice how slow it felt on the iPhone 3g, I haven’t tested it out on my new iPhone 4 yet. Titanium was much more impressive with its hooks into the native widgets, which is what I’ll be focused on this year. I also became interested in the Corona SDK for mobile game development, which supports iPhone and Android, but it is based around the Lua language, which I haven’t had much exposure to yet.