well the time of flight for light to mars is about 20min. so don't get your hopes up about mining for bits way out there. although transactions would still work perfectly fine supposing you had a downlink to an earth based station.

but coming out of the sci-fi scenario for a sec, depending on the business you do, having a script in place to adjust the sale price of an item to the bitcoin spot is trivial. and thanks to the nature of bitcoin one can even have the BTC amount sent to an exchange and traded without user intervention. For a merchant this would lower the currency risk substantially.

lets take this thought to its next logical step:  I see a current hole in the bitcoin economy for a brokerage like service to handle and simplify such an exchange. if a service could be built with enough liquidity it would open the market up to many more merchants as well remove a bit of volatility from the exchanges.

Just recently got my hands on one of those newfangled android tablets (nexus 7 to be precise) and am quite intrigued on jumping into application development before all the undergrads get back to bother me.

I've got a decent programming experience, but it's mostly with C for embedded microprocessors, and a bit of parsing and graphing captured data using python, so the whole world of gui development is new to me. I started with a search on google and am working on getting the tools and background knowledge needed.

Mostly, I was wondering if there was anyone here that could share their experiences of when they were breaking into this field or point towards some beginner/intermediate level guides.

I hope to get to producing a few neat ideas I have to track my bitcoin endeavours and of course share the more useful ones.