portlandFan12

Your time is of course the major expense involved in supporting a new platform.

That is especially true of supporting Android, because Android development is free, and you don't need to buy any hardware to test your application. For simple apps like yours the Android SDK's emulator is very accurate and runs on Windows/Mac/Linux. (See http://developer.android.com/sdk/ )

The only money you would need to pay is when you want to publish your application on the Android market. It costs around US $25 to become a registered developer.

For other people considering cross-platform mobile development, for simple apps, one way to keep costs down is to use one of the approved-by-Apple cross-platform development environments.

The one I've used is called PhoneGap, but I think there are others.

You write your program in JavaScript/HTML5, and it is run in WebKit on all mobile OS's that support WebKit. (Android, BlackBerry, iOS, WebOS).

PhoneGap isn't exactly polished, and it's not quite write-once run-anywhere, but it is still probably the fastest route to getting a simple app up on multiple mobile platforms.

BizSpark isn't really free, is it? You have to pay full price once you fail to meet the eligibility requirements.

http://developer.android.com/index.html should get you started. It even has a link to "Target Devices" that shows you what percentage of active devices run each version of the Android OS.

For people looking at the torrent, Rob's talk is the one named "The Next Big Thing Or Cool-Kid Koolaid Slicing Through .mp4"

Linus gives his opinion on Go later the referenced thread:

http://www.realworldtech.com/forums/index.cfm?action=detail&...

> Hey, I think Go picked a few good and important things to look at, but I think they called it "experimental" for a reason. I think it looks like they made a lot of reasonable choices.

> But introducing a new language? It's hard. Give it a couple of decades, and see where it is then.

Google has a lot of computers, but they are not tightly coupled enough to be considered super computers.

I'd like to put in a good word for Portland (no sales tax, great food):

http://m.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=relocating+from+san+franc...