Research acquired

After a couple of hours of research I still don't know what I want to do but I do have more info to work with. There was a good blog post by David Green that I read talking about the development for the Android vs for the IPhone.

Basic principles that I came out with.

The two use different programming languages (Android= Java, IPhone= Objective C), so pick whichever you are more familiar with. Unless you have the time and a strong desire to learn another programming language with its different ins and outs. I don't really know Objective C, but I have heard that Objective C is the object-oriented version of C. At this point I am more comfortable and probably more capable with Java.

Apple is very protective of all its stuff. If you are submitting an app you have to go through a rigorous process to get it accepted. If your app does anything that Apple dislikes it gets vetoed. Also to be a developer for Apple you need to pay a 100 fee to get all the developer tools, such as an Xcode that comes with an ios simulator.

All the Android stuff is open source and there is a lot of resources to help out during the programming.

What to do? I called my brother who works at Verizon and has a Droid phone, and one of his ideas was to create an app that allows you to stream all your media (music, pictures and video) from your PC to your phone. It seems like they have a couple apps out there that do music pretty well but not many that can do video. The apps that I saw so far are gmote, andromote, and androrb or something like that. For the class it is ok if someone has already done it, just as long as we can do it better (better quality, more features, or cheaper).

I looked a little bit into using the Kinect to do something with motion sensing. The problems with that is that the Kinect hardware is just sending out raw data. So instead of just creating a game and hooking it up to a Kinect, we would have to figure out how Microsoft can map the different limbs and joints. I am not sure exactly, but that is what it seems like. Another downside to working with the Kinect is that I doubt many people in the class have one, so if I am lucky enough to get into a group that has one then it seems like a lot of the work will have to be done physically together instead of just coding from our homes and having meetings. I think I will need to do more research on that.

I am wanting to do something that will look good on a resume for anyone that is in the computer science field, and hopefully something that I could use after the class is done. I am not sure if a game would do that, or if some utility would be better. Back to the drawing board, or back to the books I guess.