[Mobile-sig] Putting my project on the backburner

[David Boddie]

This is a low-traffic list so I expect that people have pretty much figured
out what they're using on mobile platforms and are just getting on with
making things.

Anyway, since I'll be starting a new job soon and don't expect to have a lot
of free time to spend on personal projects, I thought I'd mention that I'm
not likely to be actively working on my own project in the near future. The
current state of it can be found here:

  http://www.boddie.org.uk/david/Projects/Python/DUCK/README.html

One of the most recent things I worked on was a simple weather application:

  https://bitbucket.org/dboddie/weather-forecast-android

It's not very "native-looking" but it is functional and I applied a lot of
the lessons I've learned over the last couple of years to the process of
making it. As I found myself writing the same code over and over again, I
took code and put it into common modules so it could be reused, and that
made later applications more concise.

Ultimately, the project was more a case of satisfying my own curiosity about
Android as a platform than it was about making something for widespread use.
It allowed me to be able to write apps for my own devices without having to
fire up a multi-gigabyte-multi-gigahertz development environment, and that
was interesting enough for me to continue working on it.

I'm not sure what lessons others should learn from my experience, if any.
I consider Android (and the other mobile platforms) to be very different
from the other computing platforms I've used in that I see it as being
extremely consumer-focused. Development _for_ the platform is obviously
intended to be a smooth experience, but development _on_ the platform itself
doesn't seem to be a mainstream use case. Users are supposed to use software
on Android, not develop it in the traditional sense.

Anyway, that's maybe fuel for a discussion. ;-)

David