Preface to the First Edition

The first mobile applications I had the opportunity to work with were inventory control programs used in retail and manufacturing settings. The “terminals,” as we called them at the time, were heavy and expensive. They had big antennas, lots of clunky keys, grayscale LCD displays, and they looked like they came straight from the set of a science fiction movie.

From that austere beginning, my mobile horizons expanded when the Palm Pilot became the craze in the mid to late 1990s. My first significant PalmOS project was to develop an IrDA communications library for an application that printed calendars, contacts, and task-lists. Back then, the hip printers had an IrDA port and it was cool to beam your business card to someone. Ironically, I always enjoyed designing and writing the software more than using the devices themselves.