Friday, 25 September 2009 to Saturday, 26 September 2009.
At the Imperial College in London.

Check out the website for more info:
http://overtheair.org/

Posted: July 21st, 2009 under Conferences.
Comments: none

So what did I think of Over the Air?

Well I will definitely be going next year, thats for sure. It was great fun, and very informative too. When your so focused on developing a product, its sometimes easy to loose track of the bigger picture. Events like these really help to keep an open mind, and keep things in perspective. Its also great to meet other developers in the same space, and exchange ideas.

A big thanks to everyone who help setup Over the Air, I really enjoyed it :)

Posted: April 10th, 2008 under Conferences.
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This session was with Dr. Paul Coulton of mobileradicals - Lancaster University. Despite the misleading title, it was not a talk about big purple sunglasses! It was about creating uniquely mobile experiences.

And it was great.

The session was really thought provoking, and ideas where whizzing through my head almost constantly.

I really encourage you to check out the mobile radicals website, and have a look at the different projects they’ve got there. There is some really interesting stuff. Experiments with RF Tags, Accelerometers, etc. There is so much scope outside of what we’ve got on mobile today.

Posted: April 10th, 2008 under Conferences.
Comments: 1

This session was with 2 guys from Idean; Petri Heiskanen and Harri Lehmuskallio.

I think this was a fantastic session. It was great how the discussion evolved into a open dialogue between the speakers and the audience, and for me it was really great to see interaction between an artist and a user experience designer.

The biggest thing I got out of this session, was it has allowed me to change the way I think about UI design. Typically (and stereotypically in fact), a programmer tends to design a UI around functions, and sometimes you can easily see a UI that has been designed by a programmer. I’m not trying to slag of programmers, everyone is different, but generally programmers are not good at UI design.

After this session, I found myself thinking about UI design in a totally different way (i.e the user’s experience, not features or functions). “Right, I want this application, and I want it todo this!”.

It has also opened up my eyes to the importance of a user experience designer/engineer. This is something Steven has been saying for a while, and after this session, I can so clearly see the benefits of having someone purely as a user experience engineer, where as before I had trouble seeing it outside the role of an artist. The 2 things are so so different, they are not the same!

Posted: April 10th, 2008 under Conferences.
Comments: 1

This session was with Tomi Mickelsson from Idean.

I’m embarrassed to say that although I have downloaded the Android SDK, I have not really had time to take a good look at it. This session was good for me, because it allowed me to see a bit more in depth what Android was in terms of developing an application.

The main things I took away from the session was that Android seems to be coming along nicely. Not much to say I know! Things like xml driven User Interface definitions, a new UI layer replacing the utterly useless MIDP layer, are all steps in the right direction as far as I’m concerned. Apparently, although it supports Touch, it is single touch rather than multi. The difference being that with multi, it can track more than one movement (i.e on the iPhone you can move 2 fingers in an outward motion to zoom out). But things are changing alot with Android, so I wouldn’t be surprised if this changes.

I suppose the biggest thing this session showed me, is that I really need to set aside some time to have a really good look at Android.

I’m wondering about setting aside a day where everyone in our office can freely experiment with Android, and see who can make the best app/game in a day? :)

Posted: April 10th, 2008 under Conferences.
Comments: 2

This session was with Paul Su and Lakshmi Dontamsetti from Aplix, and Óscar Gutiérrez Isiégas from Vodafone.

When talking about MIDP3, I always get this feeling of it being a little too late. Now, the core development of numerous applications and games that I have worked on has been primarily j2me MIDP2, so I am certainly not anti j2me, but its advantages are slowly being eroded away by different platforms. I don’t think j2me is going to disappear, but I think its never going to fit the bill of its original testament (write once, run anywhere), and what surprises me is that there isn’t more being done in MIDP3 to reduce future fragmentation (they are doing some work to solve this though).

My biggest issue with j2me is probably its signing process, and security model. As far as I’m concerned the whole thing is broken. According to Paul Su, this is out of the scope of MIDP3, so it looks like nothing is going to change. The only solutions that have been introduced to solve the certificate fragmentation, involve spending a shit load more money (and infact do not really solve the problem completely). I am talking about Java Verified of course :)

There are alot of useful new features coming into MIDP3 though, and I encourage you to take a look at the slides to see a quick overview.

Posted: April 7th, 2008 under Conferences.
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This session was with Ronin Cremin from dotMobi.

I must admit, although having heard about SVG, I had little to zero knowledge on how it works or its uses. Going to this session really opened my eyes to the potential uses of SVG.

SVG is essentially XML that you can embed into your HTML document (providing the browser supports it). You can also use an external file, linking to it with an object element, which provides you with a optional fallback that the browser will use if it can’t display SVG. It comes in 3 flavors (Normal, Basic and Tiny). Tiny is for Mobile and is currently a cut down version of SVG, but I think the next version is going to include support for gradients, opacity and scripting.

SVG is NOT a total replacement for a graphics file. For example complicated images, photos etc, are just not good in SVG. That isn’t what it was designed for. SVG is fantastic for things like Maps, and simple images. They can scale infinitely, and provide a really good way of not having to worry about things like screen size. According to Ronin, around 50% of phones on the market today, that people actually use for browsing, include support for SVG. This is a pretty good number, and I imagine in a few years time, that number will be very close to 100%.

I think the 2 main plus points of SVG are:

• File size
• Scaling

These 2 combined make for a very useful image format for mobile.

Oh its also worth mentioning, for those that use WURLF: According to Ronin, the SVG information in WURLF is currently inaccurate, but if you have the correct information, please contribute to wurlf and help keep it accurate :)

You can find more information about SVG on the W3C and Wikipedia.

Posted: April 7th, 2008 under Conferences.
Comments: none

This session was with Brian Fling (Fling Media). Unfortunately there was also supposed to be someone there talking a little more in-depth about the SDK, but I still found the session really useful.

Some things I took out of the session was a really good overview of the 2 types of apps for an iPhone. Essentially there is a Web App and a Native App.
The Web App is essentially a web 2.0 website (and should then work in all web 2.0 browsers - although the list of theses is currently very small). When people talk about a Web App, the platform they are really talking about is WebKit (which is also the browser of choice for Nokia N95s).
The Native App is written in Objective-C, and gives the developer access to lower level features like Phone Book etc. From my perspective, unless you need to use the lower level access of a Native App, a Web App is the best way togo. There is also the fact that a Native App is distributed over the IPhone store, which is a closed Deck (just like those of the Network Operators). This for me, is another minus point against writing a Native App.

Brian’s a really great speaker, and I got alot out of the short session we had (which was also cut short by the Fire Alarm!). If you have the chance to meet him, I highly recommend you do so. It will be well worth your time.

Posted: April 7th, 2008 under Conferences.
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This friday and saturday I was at the Over the Air event in London. I haven’t been to a conference / developer workshop for quite a while, so it was good to get out and see whats going on, and Over the Air was a great opportunity to meet and talk to people working in mobile. Over the next few days I hope to write some posts about my experiences at the different sessions I went to at Over the Air.

If you missed Over the Air, you can find a few videos of the two days here. I believe they were all taken by Mark Kramer. Thanks Mark :) He also caught me in a video, damn you! ;)

You can also find aload of photos on Flickr here by Daniel K. Appelquist.

By the way, if your going to London, don’t get caught out like I did, and assume you need Underground every day (it gets very expensive). I bought Underground tickets for 3 days, and we only needed 2 days for 1 trip. Ah well, I know for next time :)

Posted: April 7th, 2008 under Conferences.
Comments: 1