ReadWriteHack

Are you an iOS developer thinking about dipping your toe into the Android pool? If so, you should read developer Nick Farina's post about his experience developing on Android after developing on iOS.

Farina compares the development environment (he writes that you'll hate Eclipse at first, but once you get used to it "you'll enjoy some seriously amazing, productivity-boosting code completion, refactoring, and automatic fixing."), provides slick side-by-side code comparisons (spoiler: Java and Objective-C look a lot alike) and addresses the fragmentation issue.

Building mobile apps with HTML5, CSS3 and JavaScript may be easier than picking up new languages like Java and Cocoa, but you're still going to need to know how to do some programming. So what skills do you need to make good apps? O'Reilly Radar writer Howard Wen talked to Programming HTML5 Applications Zachary Kessin about what you need to know.

Last year we looked at the best code editors for the iPad. At the time, there weren't many competitors on Android.

That's changed, and there are now at least two that are particularly well suited for programming on the go.

RunKeeper, a mobile application for tracking your exercise and online community for fitness buffs, opened its API to the public today. Dubbed the HealthGraph, it will provide access to the variety of health and fitness data stored in RunKeeper, such as exercise, sleep, weight and blood pressure. Developers will then be able to build new applications that build upon and make sense of this data.

You can find the API documentation here.

That joke about how your smartphone can "even make phone calls" is pretty cliche by now. But it raises the question: why hasn't anyone done anything to improve the state of voice calls on smart phones? After all, we're carrying around powerful computers in our pockets, but the technology involved in phone calls on smart phones hasn't evolved much.

One company trying to change that is Thrutu, an application that adds real-time features to Android calls. For example, using Thrutu you can send money with PayPal from within a call, share and view a photo or "doodle" on a shared screen. It adds a number of possibilities for collaboration using mobile phones.

Today, Thrutu announced that an API that will enable developers to build new features or integrate existing applications with its platform. You can request access here. Use the reference code RWW1 for priority access.

Earlier this month Attachmate laid off the developers working on Mono, an open source implementation of Microsoft .NET sponsored by Novell. Attachmate acquired Novell last year.

Today Mono creator Miguel de Icaza announced the formation of a new startup to support the open source project: Xamarin.

In a blog post Pavel Feldman explains how to use WebKit Web Inspector outside of the target browser. WebKit Inspector can communicate with WebKit-based browsers through the Remote Debugging Protocol, providing a debugging environment very similar to the one found locally.

Some reasons to use Web Inspector this way include debugging mode applications and IDE integration. However, from what I can tell, Safari on iOS and Chrome on Android don't yet support the Remote Debugging Protocol.

Jo is a JavaScript framework for mobile applications. It's fully compatible with PhoneGap, which it relies on for creating native applications. It's designed to be as lightweight as possible - its minified & gzipped JavaScript is just over 12KB with no dependencies. In addition to mobile Web apps and native apps, Jo can be used to build dashboard widgets.

Joe was built by Dave Balmer, a veteran Yahoo developer now working for HP on WebOS.

Dominic Szablewski, the creator of the JavaScript game engine Impact has released a library for creating iOS apps using Impact that don't rely on UIWebView to run. Unlike apps created with PhoneGap or Titanium, these apps run in pure JavaScript. Apple has already accepted Szablewski's first two apps built using this approach.

"They bypass the iPhone's browser altogether and use Apple's JavaScript interpreter (JavaScriptCore) directly. All graphics are rendered with OpenGL instead of in a browser window and all sound and music is played back with OpenAL instead of... well, having no sound at all," he writes.

Since data scientists Alasdair Allan and Pete Warden (disclosure: Pete writes for ReadWriteWeb) presented information about how iPhones store a log of your location data in an unencrypted file, there's been a mix of reactions. Some are outraged by the privacy implications. Some don't see why it's a big deal, citing either the forensic community's prior knowledge of the logs or the fact that many people share location information on Foursquare. Others have been intrigued at the possibilities of exploring their own personal location information.