Greetings....

[WILL]

Oh yes, it's all pretty and fully featured now huh?

Android is definitely an application vacuum compared to the iOS. I'd say both are still on the fronteer as far as the new and exciting. Especially with the iPad 2 still just coming out. (We haven't gotten it quite yet in Canada. March 25th for us.) And who knows what devices the Android people will be coming out with to compete.

Here is the development run-down as I've experienced it...

Developing for iOS:

Need an actual Mac! This is because Xcode is required for just about every part of the management portion to compile and to upload your apps to/from your iOS device for testing.

Next you'll want to have FPC and install their templates for Xcode. Lazarus unfortunately is not very stable on Mac right now, so it might only hinder your progress, I'm sad to say. (It's still great on Windows, but ultimately fails on Mac due to the GDB debugger issues.)

Your code will have a little bit of Objective-C in it to make it fit nice into the iOS architecture/platform. The rest will be Object Pascal, but rather some things will be a little different which the FPC people like to call it Objective-Pascal. More can be read about this here

You could use Delphi Prism if you wanted to try the MonoTouch / XNATouch route. It's fairly new and untested, but there have been whole talks and white papers by Dr. Bob and the like. I predict that these wouldn't be as fast as the more native FPC+Xcode approach.

For API, you'd be looking at SDL, OpenGL|ES, OpenAL and fmod that I know of have seen working so far.

Developing for Android:

I've not done much of any research for this side as I sorta swing the other direction, device wise. Despite the large market trend these devices do seem neat and could serve as a nice payday for game development too.

FPC/Lazarus seems to be the only way to go for now. RemObjects is developing Cooper, but we only know that it'll be out sometime this year. It would seemingly allow you to seamlessly develop for both iOS (via MonoTouch) and Android at the same time, however there are issues with that too.

On top of that, all I really know is that FPC is your only non-Java approach for Object Pascal.


Sorry I didn't know much more about Android, I'm just facing the other direction for devices. If you are interested in developing for iOS as well you should get a hold of me sometime, I've been working on a project that I hope will someday appear on a portable device near you.

[code_glitch]

Ah, starting a business... I am all too familiar with that one. Our school does Young Enterprise; basically you set up a company with students from your school under the legal help of the Young Enterprise programme. I am currently the Managing Director and I know exactly what spending 2 months sitting around doing Admin is like - hell lol I'll second FPC for literally everything.

Brainwave: They should have a prize if you can find an architecture used by a handful of people that won't compile for