bitpew

> I need the pro version of Unity3d to generate iOS, Android or VR games for the Oculus Rift

Not true anymore. You can generate iOS and Android versions of your game with the free version of Unity3d (although with a reduced featureset in comparison to the pro version).

There is a open source iBeacon library for Android:

https://github.com/RadiusNetworks/android-ibeacon-service

Decoding the iBeacon packets is quite easy, but you need a device that supports BLE. Currently there are only a handful of Android devices that support it.

I recently (Feb 2014) had the opportunity to evaluate different iBeacon hardware for a project.

http://roximity.com

* "ok" price

* horrible customer communication

* in reality to want to sell you their services and not the iBeacons.

* not configurable (proximity id, major, minor)

* really long shipping time to europe (4 weeks)

https://www.sticknfind.com

* "ok" price

* nice form factor (small)

* not really iBeacon compatible. They say you can flash their beacons to make them compatible, but i haven't found out how since their support is not responding.

* not configurable (proximity id, major, minor)

http://kontakt.io

* good price

* great support

* major, minor configurable. proximity id not

* form factor kinda bulky

* they seem to be able to deliver huge amount of beacons

http://www.easibeacon.com

* great price

* great support

* nice form factor (same as stickNFind)

* fully configurable (proximity id, major, minor)

* the company is relatively young

Can't say anything about the battery life yet, but the batteries were replaceable in each case.

Thanks for the "Advanced C++" tip. "Eloquent Ruby" did the same for me when i was looking into ruby.

"Effective Java" is a similar book for Java.

I have used RubyMine when i was developing apps with Rubymotion. It was a little bit rough around the edges back then (oct 2013) but the code completion was already quite useful.

It looks like they even support debugging from within the ide now.

May I ask where you are located?

Around here (Central Europe, Austria) it's the other way around. It's a little bit harder to find good Android jobs than iOS jobs.

Maybe because Java has always been one of the more popular languages here and the amount of Android devs is just higher than the number of iOS devs.

It's true that C# is not as prevalent on non-Microsoft platforms as it is on Windows but there are a handful of mid-size to big multiplatform projects using C#.

e.g.

- Xamarin (multiplatform mobile apps)

- Unity3d (multiplatform games)

- Monogame (multiplatform games)

- Unreal Engine 4 (build system)

I guess Swift could fill the same gaps. I would especially love to be able to develop multiplatform mobile apps with swift since switching between ObjC and Java all the time is quite taxing.

Not to speak for the OP, but two features bear resemblance to functional programming languages:

1) Function Types ( = higher order functions)

This allows functions to be passed around as function parameters or return values.

2) Immutable variables via let

let a = 1 // a is always bound to the constant 1

a = 2 // error