Shock! You can make a simple mobile app…and faster than you think!

Somewhere in the part of the world where curiosity seekers seek lies a little habitat called Mobile. Here, people go hungry if they don’t get fed, that is, when they lose access to those ubiquitous, ‘you really want me now’, increasingly useful mobile apps.

I didn’t think I knew much about this place, until one day, I saw that my home ground was a deja vu. Right on my very own iphone dashboard (I counted them) were approximately 75 apps. How did it happen? Quite obviously, I downloaded them all, slowly over months perhaps, but still, the herd was overtaking my screen.

Well, well. We’re talking iTranslate, Zhing, Brightkite, iBlueSky, Dogtag, Skype, NPR, Pandora, FMtouch, Stanza, Ruler, NightCamera, Spanish, Showtimes, Ichillout/iZenGarden, Foursquare, and Evernote, among many others. Apparently, I’m famished, not to mention I must find them tantalizingly useful. It’s true — when I’m on the run, the information’s right there,  less floundering.  Nice!

Now, after a few additional trips to the land of Mobile, I’m also learning, with some counsel, that I can actually make one of these too. Although mobile development tools like Corona that works on the iphone require understanding of code like javascript and actionscript, there’s also Build an App that lets you create something simple in less than an hour. Unbelievable how fast things turn around to encourage mobile participation.

But if you’re really smart, I’m told by Barbara Ballard, author of Designing the Mobile User Experience and President/Founder of Little Springs Designs which offers up an incredibly informative mobile design site, you’ll want to use an open source tool like Phone Gap that works on the iphone plus the Blackberry/Android platforms as well (AND they offer online training!).  Their pitch and ours: it simply makes more sense to build an app that can leverage several platforms instead of just one. And with more app stores from multiple vendors on the horizon, the appeal is obvious.

As for myself, I’m not living and breathing life as a designer in the mobile terrain yet but I have to say it’s fun to realize that there’s interesting opportunity ahead for any of us creative types who have an idea for a useful service. Whether we’re just prototyping an idea or actually diving straight in to do it ourselves, we don’t have to pray for bumping into a competent geek to jumpstart our idea. I’d say that’s a bit of a wow! What about you?