Client: Miura digital design agency, UK
Date: Feb 2010 – Mar 2010
Tech: Drupal 6, MySQL, XHTML, CSS, jQuery (Javascript). Bespoke module and theme development. Multilingual components.

This project involved translating the existing Symbian website (symbian.org) into Japanese whilst enabling support for future languages to be easily added. Every single translate-able element on the website had to be worked on and it had to work properly on mobile devices too. Content translation was provided by the Symbian team and I was responsible for making the necessary changes to the codebase.

The original English website was built in Drupal with a heavily customised theme. It contained dynamic Flash content (including the use of sIFR) and utilised a number of Views and Blocks as well as various different Node types. I was able to utilise i18n and other associated modules to enable translation support. Beyond this I had to hack a few modules and the theme with custom code to ensure translation worked seamlessly with the existing website structure and content. These changes included updating the Trigger module to be locale-aware amongst other code changes. I also ensured made it easy to create language and platform-specific CSS and Javascript with a simple selection algorithm.

After leaving Symbian I went to work a mobile software startup whose primary concern was a mobile social networking app written in Java MIDP. Now, if you want to stay as true as you can to the “write once, run anywhere” principle for mobiles then Java is really the only choice since almost every phone out there has some sort of Java support, albeit each with its own various inconsistencies and quirks. Writing a mobile Java app was also a whole lot easier than writing one in Symbian C++. The availability of great development tools (Eclipse, JUnit, ProGuard, etc.) didn’t hurt either! Having worked on a mobile Java client I decided that if I was to build my own mobile app I’d have to do it in Java.

Then iPhone came along and 2 years later it’s now obvious that if you have a good idea for a mobile app and don’t mind learning to develop on the Mac then you might as well as write your app for the iPhone, thus giving yourself a real chance to earn a decent income from it. Many of my fellow engineers have had iPhones for a while and some of them are even starting to write apps for it, some lured by the prospect of making a killing, others just wanting to do something cool for what is hailed as the “Jesus phone”.

My T-Mobile contract is about to expire and I started seriously thinking about whether to upgrade to an iPhone or an Android handset. After much deliberation, I bought myself a lovely little T-Mobile G2 Touch instead (also known as HTC Hero). It runs Android 1.5, the latest stable release of Google’s mobile OS. Android development is essentially done in Java (the bytecode format and VM varies) using APIs which are different to the MIDP ones. You can use Eclipse to code, test and debug your apps. It’s an open source OS, which means you’ll be able to find deployable versions of the OS on the web which even include features from the upcoming 2.0 release of Android (e.g. multi-touch) folded into the current stable release.

If you read around you’ll find that the Android Market and consequent ecosystem for paid apps is almost miniscule compared to the AppStore (see article and comments and follow-up), but I’m hoping that this will improve in the near future. And anyway, if the Android app platform doesn’t really take off then atleast I’ll already have some mobile app development experience by the time I get my iPhone

Update (Sep19): I’ve shifted the instructions for updating the HTC Hero/T-Mobile G2 Touch firmware into a new post