1. No Flow error ( the application doesnt stop anywhere because of a bug)
2. Fonts/colors/ and text throughout the application is consistent ( there is no accidental bold or different font anywhere)
3. All the validation errors on the forms are graceful and shows the errors nicely.
4. There are no spelling mistakes any where on the application.
5. The form designs are nicely aligned and looks good to the eyes.

Essentially what you need to figure out is what do you intend to accomplish during your development. Simply speaking, there could only be three things

1. Its a background process on the phone ( like intercept SMS or Start a call)
2. Its a hybrid app ( such as something that access the contact book on the phone, as well as the web), also known as mobile-web sometimes.
3. Its a complete web application, just runs on mobile

Now for our development purposes, #2 and #3 is most realistic, although there are some cases where we have to touch #1. For the purpose of this article, we will leave out #1. But a lot of the solutions that we will introduce on this article,  also takes care of a subset of core phone apps as in #1.

Ok so here are our research results

RhoMobile

Phonegap

Appcelerator

Mosync

We have started on the same journey and as we go along, we will post tips and tricks that we have found useful. There are numerous articles online with detailed instructions on the “how to”s, but there is a lack of comprehensive lists, or index of tutorials if you will, to let developers know how they should dive deep into android development. Hence we decided to write this article in such a way that it will sort of serve a study plan for to-be android developers as well.

Prerequisites

1. You are  a Java developer or you are very familiar with Java
2. You know how to use the eclipse IDE

Setup instructions

1. Get the android SDK
2. Add android to your path
3. Add software on Eclipse IDE
4. Run the AVD ( Android Virtual Device) with some sample application to get a feel of it

Developer’s Notes

1. Check out the application framework
   
2. Memorize the following set of services that you can use in your application
   • Views ( All UIs, like buttons,grids)
   • Content providers ( Access the phone, like contacts)
   • Resource Managers (Provide access not non-code elements such as graphics fonts etc and things under the res/ folder )
   • Notification Managers (Used to create custom alerts that can pop up)
   • Activity Managers (  By definition: “An activity is a single, focused thing that the user can do”. This is what the user sees)
3. There is no main() method. The application starts by loading components, namely
   • Activity ( Think of it as a screen that has views. In the WAP world, this will be similar to a “deck”)
   • Broadcast Receivers ( Receive and react to the notification manager)
   • Cotent providers ( Makes data available to other applications)
   • Services ( runs in the background and actually does the job)
4. An example to put things in perspective
   An mp3 player applications has a list of songs, drawn by the Activity, The file list is retrieved by a service and the music is actually played by a service as well. While the music is playing a broadcast receiver can pop up a message saying the battery is low, while a content provider tells another application which song is currently being played so that it can tweet it
5. The components are all defined on the Manifest file

Once you have finished reading this far, and all the related articles. Do the complete Notepad exercise

Have the following things handy

1. Motorola device driver http://modmymobile.com/forums/downloads.php?do=file&id=28159
2. connectbot for shell access to your device http://code.google.com/p/connectbot/
3. Install adb here http://developer.android.com/sdk/index.html

Ok so to root it follow this tutorial

http://modmymobile.com/forums/567-motorola-backflip-general/555749-root-all-versions-backflip.html

Once you are done rooting, install the wifi tether from here

http://code.google.com/p/android-wifi-tether/downloads/list

if the Wi-fi tether doesnt work, try barnacle , this definitely works

http://szym.net/projects/index.html

Everything works pretty smoothly when you start wireframing, unlike a lot of the web based ones. We are using aviary toolbars to connect it to basecamp. Planning to write an API call to stream data directly.

Although it’s the most popular mobile OS, powering some 330 million phones, Symbian has been in limbo lately. On one side, it competed against the increasingly popular (and completely closed) iPhone, while many manufacturers, such as Motorola, opted to use the open source Android, which offers a much more similar experience to iPhone than most Symbian phones.

http://mashable.com/2010/02/04/symbian-open-source/