Lecture from Guest Speaker Chuck Hudson

Hello again from Cyberspace!

This post will cover a lecture from guest speaker Chuck Hudson. Mr. Hudson is currently Director of Applications at Control4, a member at PayPal Developer Council, co-author of HTML5 Developer's Cookbook at Pearson Education, co-founder at Control UI, LLC, and part time instructor at the University of Georgia, according to his Linkedin page.

The topic of the lecture was Mobile Development, and had a thorough explanations of key topics for mobile app development including:

• Monetary Models
• Mobile Design
• Technical Challenges
• Developer Accounts/Resources
• Android Specific Challenges
• iOS Development
• Planning App Release
• Localization
• Beta Testing
• Apple Distribution
• Android Distribution
• Measuring your success
• Supporting your Apps

Mr. Hudson was very detailed in his explanations, and gave good advice, specifically about what an app should do and how to chart his flow. His recommendation is to make an app do 1 thing really well for the initial release, then add functionality in future releases. He also covered some localization topics, and pointed out a pitfall that I fall for - if you add the functionality in your first release, you have to support it for every subsequent release. I often find myself getting caught up in the 'cool' factor of a feature, then I have to provide support for that feature later when I don't have the time or resources.

In addition to the topics above, Mr. Hudson demonstrated some 'under-the-hood' code for both Android and iPhone apps via desktop sharing. We saw the code behind the apps, the setup of the files, screenshots, and the publishing screens to a limited extent.

Overall, I was very impressed with the scope of the topics, and the knowledge of Mr. Hudson was evident throughout the lesson.