This week we are at the Unite11 Unity Conference in San Francisco, California.

While Rick is here to learn some new Unity skills, both Rick and Michael are here to meet other Unity developers and potential clients, so if you happen to be in San Francisco this week, send us an email and we’d be more than happy to come meet and chat with you!

This is also a perfect opportunity for us to talk about how Unity fits into our strategy for the rest of 2011 and beyond.  Unity is an extremely big part of our future plans, for many reasons.

Up until now, iOS has pretty much been the only game in town for mobile apps and games.  In 2009 and 2010, almost none of our clients asked for Android, but in 2011 we started getting more requests.  Typically, we advised against developing for Android — either in parallel or in lieu of iOS — for the simple reason that while there might have been more Android phones out there, Android still wasn’t a great app marketplace.  And because of  the way standard app developments go (Objective-C/Cocoa Touch for iOS, Java/Android SDK for Android), developing an app on both platforms meant two separate developments — which, of course, means twice the cost.  So we would generally advise against Android because it simply wasn’t worth the extra time and cost.

That’s definitely changed (and continues to change) in the second half of 2011.  Android is becoming a legitimate platform for apps, and great new phones and tablets (notably the Galaxy Tab 10.1) running Android are out or coming soon.  Android really can’t be ignored anymore.

So what does this have to do with Unity?  Unity’s huge advantage as a tech platform is that it is cross-platform.  Which means, generally speaking, that developing apps in Unity means one development for both platforms.  Actually, it’s even better than just two platforms, as Unity apps are ready to run on iOS, Android, Windows, OSX, X360, Wii, and PS3.  And Unity adds more platforms all the time — this week, Unity is introducing developers to a new platform — Flash.  Which means we can compile our iOS apps to Flash with very little modification.

This is a huge advantage to our clients, not only because it keeps development costs down, but because it allows you to target multiple platforms for roughly the same cost, and therefore have even more markets to hit.

At any rate, I’ll have more to say about Unity and how it can benefit our clients in the coming weeks.  Right now, we’re off to the conference!