Upside is doing a fair bit of mobile learning development and we blog about it regularly. In the process of development, we are often forced to explore the various tools available.

I want to share some tools which may assist you in developing mobile learning applications.

On broad level those tools can be categories into tools for:

• Enterprise application like LMS, LCMS
• Games
• Augmented Reality

Tools for Enterprise application like LMS, LCMS:

Enterprise applications can be created as Native or Web based. There is a good post mentioning the difference between them here.

Tools to develop Native applications:

SDK provided for mobile device

• IPhone
• Andriod
• Blackberry
  • Using Blackberry widget SDK you can develop native application in HTML. We used it to make our LMS client on Blackberry. The Widget SDK is available in device software 5.0 onwards.

• Sony Ericssion WebSDK based on Phonegap
• Samsung

But the issues with them are higher development cost and no cross platform support. So your application will tied down to one platform. There is an alternative though

• Java ME
  • It requires MIDP/JVM on mobile device
  • Each mobile device has some variation in implementing MIDP profile
  • It is not available on IPhone

To lower the development cost and to achieve cross-platform (to some extent) there are some tools/framework

• Phonegap
• Rhomobile
• Titanium
• ELIPS Studio 3
• MoSync
• QT

Tools to develop Web applications:

You can develop mobile web application using any tool which you normally used for developing web application. But as IPhone has distinct UI there are some tools to achieve that effect:

• iui
• jQTouch
• iWebkit

Tools for Games:

You can always use native SDK provided for mobile devices like IPhone to develop games, but then you will have to start from scratch. To make it easier, you can use engines/frameworks which will help you in developing games.

• EDGELIB
• Unity3D
• JGame

Here is the link containing list of engines specifically for IPhone and with the release of Android NDK you can create some really cool games for Android devices.

Tools for Augmented Reality:

• Layar
• Unifey

Let us know what tools you are using in your efforts, we’d really be interested in knowing.