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Comment by gmac | Hacker News Reader

Approved and in the App Store today, this is a major part of the data collection for my PhD.

I'd be very grateful for feedback on all aspects of the website/app/broader research. And if you'd like to download the app and take part, that would make me especially happy!

It's similar to what psychologists call an Experience Sampling Method (ESM) study, but where ESM usually asks a lot of questions of a small number of people, I'm asking very few questions of a (hopefully!) large number.

Plus, of course, I'm using GPS and GIS.

(Note: I'm well aware that iPhone users and Hacker News readers are not 100% representative of the general population, but the richness and novelty of the data I hope to collect mean I can live with this).

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Love the idea. Too bad that I'm not in the UK.

If you'd made a (very similar) Android app as well, you could have tested if the use of a certain mobile OS makes a significant difference in happiness ;)

Yes, I'd like to have done that, it's just a question of the time it would take to learn a new development language/framework (and the money it would take to buy an appropriate testing device).

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.

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