Over The Air 2009

Just dropped in on Simon Maddox who is doing a session on an introduction to the iPhone SDK. His name might sound familiar cos he came into our office for a chat the other day!! I make know claims that I will understand any of this bu some of it might rub off so here goes…

Objective C… the best way to learn this, according to Simon, is doing the course on iTunes U. Well he’s a Simon so he MUST know what he’s talking about. Apparently the course is produced by Stanford University and this, he tells us, is a good place to start! The best book is Cocoa Programming for Mac OSX and is good for iPhone even though this says it’s for Mac OSX…. also iPhone in Action and it’s his favourite iPhone development book. I wonder if he’s on comission. Well I’m still on batteries with only 40% left so lets crack on! ooh more books Begining iPhone 3 Development book fans!

Wow… the guy in front has a Kindle… nice!

Now we’re on to x-code and we’re looking at the quickstart guide that comes with it. He’s starting to go through how to use it… hold on tight… Hey there are drag and drop elements and it explains the use of each object and you can drag and drop on to your stage and then… oh there’s code 😦 Man I’m lost already… Maybe I’ll Facebook for a bit…

Just glanced up and there is more code and he seems to be speaking a foreign language…. sh*t this is an hour long sessions and I’m confused after 15 minutes… what to do…. twitter maybe, followed by flickr?

Hmmm the guy next to me (a recruitment consultant and the only guy here wearing a suit) has just upped and left which is a little rude, but is it as rude as Facebooking in a session?

Interestingly Simon has created this app that I just downloaded that tells you the geographical phone number for any 0870 or other premum rate phone number. More about that on his blog here. Now he’s talking about strings and ‘hello worlds’ and command lines. I’m trying to look like I know what he’s on about and nodding sagely… another one bites the dust but I can’t leave cos I’m too far into the room. 30% battery left and another 2 people have walked out…

Tom Leitch from BBC World Service is here and he looks like he understands it all and there go another 2 people. Maybe I’ll start counting how many people are left… maybe not. A guy behind me just smiled knowingly, surely he can’t read what I’m typing from there… how embarassing!

Looking around I thought that the people with laptops open were either blogging or looking at the back channel but more people are on Facebook and Twitter…

Just posted an expression of my confusion on Twitter and I’ve had a reply from tenbus_uk declaring his own confusion, but he’s in 311. Still… a kindred spirit!

The session is broken up briefly by someone dragging a trolley outside the window.

No one has left the room for 10 minutes.

25 minutes left of the session.

24% of battery left

The battery icon has gone red

I’ve lost the will to live…

How can I escape….

They photographers have arrived, better look interested and intellegent!

Interesting… London iPhone developers group meeting at the Apple Store on the 7th October.

We lost some and just gained one and there is more clanking outside… I think this will be my last session today. Simon is taking questions from the floor from people who know a lot about stuff and he’s giving well structured answers.

I’m going to sign off now but thanks for reading (all the people at work!!) and I hope to blog a little from TEDx in Manchester next week.

Over The Air 2009

Just popped out for a quick Coke Zero and bumped into Lord Robert of Winston. A little disappointed that he didn’t remember me from a previous project I did with him last year. Maybe his anger at the institution in which we filmed affected his memory of the occasion.

Anyhoo, I’m back in Huxley 311 for the next session for which I will be running solely on batteries. My screen brightness is turned right down and I’ve got 75% battery to last the next hour…

Bryan Reiger has had trouble with his presentation and thus starts with any questions much to the amusement of the audience. He runs a small mobile design agency in London by seems to also be Canadian… I see a pattern forming! He is a clever chap who does lots of stuff which he’s plotted on a neat timeline. Note to self… look up Bill Buxton… I think I’ve seen him talk… He says he’s a Whovian too which goes down well with the audience.

He starts of talking about animation tool which starts with the script and storyboards to assist with layout and flow then you go on to models and layouts to add structure to the elements of the movie… I’m not sure this is what it was advertised as but interesting nonetheless!!… Dope sheets sound cool but are otherwise known as timelines for what happens and when and resource management. Then we have pencil tests to sketch out ideas in more details before you commit to final rendering. Animatics shows you a complete story but not a finished one, this can include stills and voice over… now he relates this to mobile… and on to Wireframes.

He asked people what they were… and got a lot of different answers to do with layout, behaviour, flow and asks if they are really fit for purpose. FLOW going from A to B…shows how it is tought to show flow in wireframes as it’s open to interpretation. (I know how he feels!) it’s difficult to put across the elements form your imagination and how things transition. So how can you show flow in a wireframe….How do you fill in the gaps… maybe you add in more wirframes and text (this is really familiar, I might learn something here here!) He says he adds a quote from silence of the lambs to see if anyone actually reads the document anyway… and they don’t! The you might need to amend after client (interference) feedback so you add more and make more of a mess of your wireframe. Now he’s on to UML (not sure what it is) but the diagram is describing a light bulb but no one guessed it!!. Standards require literacy so everyone on the team can understand them. As your docs get larger you are shifting much more information that people need to understand. (Help me understand how to stop this madness please!!) No one understands what you’ve done, it’s not in the format that some have expected and now they want a prototype….

Something Interesting

Prototypes… paper is lovely but limited and code can be too costly and time consuming. Why increase the complexity. HTML good for prototyping some web projects but what about apps.

Another useful diagram is displayed and I really hope he’s going to put this presentation online so I can review it later…

More Interesting

So what is the better way? What are we left with… what is the software equivalent of the cutting room floor… Theatre design illustraion animation… looking back into his previous experience to see if he could find a solution. Sketches are good and cheep but also the animatics he referred to earlier using some Gorillaz as an example to show the animatic side by side with the animation.

Apps are interactive and not linear so we need disposable data models (don’t panic!) Define layout using scenen views and show changes using shots, and flow using events…Looks like he’s showing some kind of markup (XML) to describe the actions and interactions. Making a visual dataset. Did it on recipe cards with post its and scanned it into Fireworks that has a good sequencing feature. You can quickly itterate the visual design on top of these cards using the XML… (I’m getting lost now) He’s used something called mobile processing that allows you to pump XML though it to appear on the device. Looks like a good idea (perhaps perhaps perhaps!) The modeling app took 2 day to do but he reckons they now take a day a pop to do them. After 6 months of using this app and approach reduces documentation and increases the number of prototypes you can produce. Good to pass on to the developers who then didn’t need the wireframes so much and gave more understanding across all teams. (sounds like a dream to me!) The insights gained from models are fed back… ability to increase user testing cos more people can use them and improved the quality of feedback (happy accident apparently).

In conclusion… we are all toolmakers…necessity really is the mother of invention… make simple tools to solve your (real actual) problems…slowly refine your tools over time… He finishes on a big photo of MacGuyver!!

Questions… well all I want is a copy of his presentation to show the folks at work. Someone mentioned Balsamiq but he batted it off saying it’s not too good for mobile and I’m inclined to agree.

He works for yiibu

Over The Air 2009

Just doing a little bit of work and then returning to the conference sessions soon.

Over The Air 2009

Next up….

Over The Air 2009

Dan is back to tell us that Blackberry do have free apps and that BBC Worldwide have provided a lot of support for this event and neatly segways into Jason DaPonte from the BBC. He’s asking people to put forward questions via @jasondaponte on twitter. More questions equals quicker talking equals lunch sooner!

He says mobiles can do anything… there are more mobiles than people and great things can happen if you make the right thing. 49% of the UK public have used data over mobile but by 2012/13 50% will use data each week. The BBC define mobile is any interaction with the audience over a mobile device which is Personal, Sociable, Portable, Immediate and Location aware… but it’s not just a tiny version of the web. You can get content to people more immediately as it’s right there on you at all (most) times.

Messaging… person to person but not just about texting… example of soap opera built by BBC Teens over sms and mms where you recieve stuff from the characters where you can only signup to one characters so you had to converse with friends who have signed up with different characters to find out the full story. Most activity took place when kids were out of school so they interacted with each other around the story.

Mobile web where they have made a new BBC homepage for mobile platforms and enable an element of customisation and allowing it to be location aware. He shows 3 different versions including WML, smart phone and desktop and giving the appropriate view for your platform.

Mobile media. Mobile iPlayer is a good example with the same benefits as big iPlayer…
Apps and Widgets… shows 2 lists of apps that have been divided into paid ones and cool ones that either make your life easier, unique, fun or make a better media device.

Near field comms… BBC Collect project using QR content for people to navigate through BBC archive content. This was done in London Zoo and I recall it being a really exciting project that seemed to go nowhere but now seems to be going more mainstream with a UK based artist. Also the Radio1 bluetooth loo where you can pick up content (hence the loo where people spend a lot of time at festivals!)

Out of home… using BBC’s big screens and giving people mobile content to take away.
He mentions that there haven’t been enough tweets!!

The future… more mobiles but connected objects e.g. shirts that are connected, you can send a hug to the shirt of the young lady on the screen. Nice idea!! or an RSS feed to your brolly so it knows when it’s going to rain and reminds you to take it with. Wearable devices for military use which look a little worrying (find your enemy though mobile enabled goggles). harvesting video content from users for the Shoot the Summer project and encourages mass participation. 4 out 5 best selling novels in Japan started as mass participation text projects…

Your mobile is just the first connected device (closing statement) Nice QR on screen.

Nice applause for Jason and a good big up for the BBC and the license fee from Dan (ripple of applause).

Lunch woooo!

Over The Air 2009

Caroline Lewko (Carolyn she says but it says Caroline on the screen, maybe it’s a Canadian thing!)  is talking about how it’s raining app stores. She moved to Toronto where they don’t pronounce the last T!

So Caroline/Carolyn… how do we survive the app storm. She’s 2 points down already for saying Frickin’ twice. Mike Myers has a lot to answer for!

She tells us the industry changes a lot and can be frightening and she asking people to come to more events like this but as long as there is shwag and bean bags I think she’s preaching to the converted. She’s from a company called wippconnector where she’s the CEO. She’s fighting against suits but showing that at a conference you don’t have to wear a suit and that she in fact was a developer, in shorts, t-shirt and sandals herself. She might have stopped a few pacemakers, she says!! She’s a little excitable and is talking about how people told her wireless technology was a non starter and why would anyone be interested…

Things will continue to change but it’s  not going to be all app stores… you can get caught in app stores, try to embrace then  or protect yourself from them. App stores have been around for a while since 2001 (palm and handango which I remember well). There is massive opportunity as there are 110m ipods, 800m cars, 1bn PCS 1.2bn internet users (0.2bn of which have no computer!!) and 3.6bn phone users. It’s the biggest phenomena in history. Nice stat is 4 births per seconds but 25 mobile phones sold per second worldwide… Mazal Tov you’ve had a phone!!!

Apple changed the rules by making it easy and telling people what could be done, even though people had been doing it for a while. She has a recipe for success, marketing for a specific device, being integrated…. but there are other coming on board to take a bit of the apple (bad pun from Caroline/Carolyn). Which is the best one for you and where do you want to develop apps for and she shows a long list of stores… notable include China Mobile with 493m subscribers, OVI from Nokia and iPhone with 1bn downloads. They all give 70% revenue share which sounds good for developers. Coming up is the Vodafone store (launched this week), GetJar are the largest freeapps store and Blackberry (cannucks apparently) but there are no free apps there but they give developers 80% share.

Survivial tips… define your market, chose your region for localisation etc…, pick your platform, check out the charges, time to launch, payment timing, revenue model, Don’t underestimate submission effort, pricing, get noticed – app store placement – optimisation and marketing, Monogamy is overrated – don’t limit yourself to one store and operator, measure and analyse to be sticky and spready (what is spready? oh apparently it’s to do with viral marketing – of course it is – and following the stats and analytics). This looks like some good advice from our Canadian friend. She also mentions that there are jobs that focus on submitting stuff to app stores and people are hiring!!

She’s showing her beta version app store wiki at www.wipwiki.com/index.php/appstores

Her company is about connecting developers and they do WIPJAM sessions to facilitate this (but not here it seems). They deal with lots of big names and is looking forward to the rest of Over the Air… the crowd is warming an she got a fair applause… Yay Canada… I wonder if she knows Chris Yanda?

Over The Air 2009

Rick Fant knows he’s at a conference cos he’s notes that no one is looking at him just at their laptops!! That’ll be me. He’s got not powerpoint which means I’ll have to be light on my fingers…. ooh hold on a sec, there is a bit of powerpoint and I’m not listening hard enough…

He’s from Vodafone but was at Microsoft so he’s bringing a different view to the telco. It’s a brave new world he tells us but he’s not Aldous Huxley. Vodafone will be moving into applications and services aggressively and formed a division (cos that’s what they do) to facilitate this. They are eager to get services into the device or something… and he’s getting all businessy on us, I see a pattern forming here. It’s all about apps and the services behind them and not so much the devices they are on. They have 3 things they want to do… the customer should be in control, which apps are available and which services they choose. They are not platform agnostic though and have preferred versions and devices, their motto is ‘Power to you’. The customer should have the right services, apps and platforms and feel they are leading the industry to allow this to happen. The environment should be open, in terms of software, app stores and standards etc… It should all be compatible and will allow any sort of application as long as it doesn’t contain objectionable content, harm the network or crash the phone. They should approve your app within 10 days, that sticks it to Apple eh!! They want to make it easy for developers and will deliver a common environment on which to develop. Should be cool and useful (not enough to just be cool). Trusting Vodafone with knowledge and data and wants to be trusted by the consumer and also the developers who bring the apps to the communities. The aim to be transparent and honest but admits this is a tall order that requries a lot of business and industry change…

Whoohooo it’s a brave new world… new slide, new graphic!! Now we’re on to desktop into mobile and how these services are going to be deployed. Taking the best of the web on to mobile. Taking all the best and familiar protocols into the new mobile environment. Vodafone carries Opera browsers in Symbian S60 phones… giving the user rich applications and allowing quick development and fast distribution. Taking the desktop and making it available on mobile… didn’t he already say that? He’s notices that there are limitations in terms of resolution and input devices but they are hoping to address these issues but admits that it will not be 100% mapping from one platform to the other… no shit!!

What are Vodafone doing with widgets… tell us, do! New devices launched to allow the new widgets to be used at their best. Supporting web standards,  collaborating with JIL, simplifying commercial environment and monetisation. He wins the mistersnappy prize of… er… whatever, for the first mention of the Cloud but I’ll take it back because he’s said Paradigm twice… bad Rick Fant!! Now we’re skipping through different devices on Vodafone that will run the same service to provide these tools to users (360 services) and will allow developers to use the same CSS/HTML/Javascript across all platforms which sounds promising.

They are working with a consortium but decided on their own app store and a widgets platform that will run across all platforms including apple etc… This is jil.org and it seems technically interesting but I’m not sure I understand it… ho hum! It’s designed to enable apps. On to handset APIs that are just being brought to the market by jil. Network enablers… not sure what that is… ah… defining a widget platform. These people are fast and clever so I hope that I can keep up… no finger cramp yet!! He expects 1.1bn users will be potentially able to acccess widgets on this platform, that’s a fair chunk of the world! Vodafone endorses widgets and their app store that takes information and apps from jil and other sources as well. Developers will be able to take an SDK from jill.org that will give them the paths to success and enlightenment (probably).

Your opportunity are to innovate, distribute and make money. You can give widgets for free if you choose and people will be able to recommend and will be fed into their directory.

Rick sums up  and is greeted by a larger ripple than the last speaker!!

Over The Air 2009

Nick Allot takes to the stage. He’s the Chief Technology Office at OMTP. He’s talking about Widgets and Ways the Wonferful Web is inmpacting applications…

He says that in a year you won’t be able to tell the difference between apps and websites which is an interesting theory. He says there should be standard platforms on which to build. They should unlock the value of the mobile networks. He’s talking about the OMTP mission which is increasing app usage, championing consisitency and making life easier and web is the answer… it’s the application platform going forward.

He’s building a story to explain… Enterprise apps space. Office vs Google docs but the average user doesn’t know the difference. Google docs innovation is threatening the bread and butter business of people like MS. HTML5 and Google Gears is bringing a lot more innovation through location info, local web servers, database access and worker threads (?). Now web apps are fully functional.

Now on to compilation technology, not sure what this is but I’m gonna find out! Ah ha, developing in familiar technology and compiling it down into native code… clear as a bell! Web 2.0 iPhone apps taking web tech parcelled for mobile platforms and sold (resold) to users.

Why… web is easy to program, easy to distribute and is mass market as proven by google, flickr, facebook etc… who have not developed native apps but cross platform apps. Native still has a role to play, it’s well established, efficient code execution, access to lo level APIs on the web…

Mentions companies that are forging the way in this area… BONDI ( sponsors), Google, Nokia, Palm WebOS etc… where it’s the applications that count.

Now he’s talking about BONDI (a new way of working!) I’ll not blog this but you can probably read it on their website anyway! Ooooh there is a nice org chart… well not so nice… but it tells us about what they do and how it fits into the technological infrastructure (apparently).

Now he’s bigging up talks across the next 24 hours… Device status, a different approach to fragmentation so you can learn what devices have what functionality and how to exploit as much of it as you can… Geolocation, that everyone is enjoying at the moment… Security, problems, death by prompting, removing trojans and malware, root certificate hell and legal and contractual variables. Bondi has a flexible system that allows the market to solves these issues… He’s showing an example of their widgets (but seems to have forgotten that he said he was recommended events across the next 24hrs) and is slipping into sales mode for BONDI!! Their part of the competition with a neat surfing machine as a prize. Neat!!! OOOoooooh more sales and their company delivery plan and yes, he’s got a road map that would make Obama and Netanyahu proud 🙂 He’s talking about technologies for people to use and hints that there are others that he can’t talk about. Now he’s gone and leaves the stage to a gentle ripple of applause.

Over The Air 2009

Someone has started talking and all is now quiet… but who is he? (Dan Appelquist apparently from Vodafone R&D)

He’s telling us that everyone said this event couldn’t be done… the bean bags get a mention but here we are. This is met with mightly ‘Obama’ style cheering!

He mentions that we are just over an hour away from lunch but before that there is going to be his intro and one session. There is going to be talks about Widgets, Service Design, User Experience, More Widgets, App Storys, APIs (BBC, Lonely Planet, Sony Ericsson, NHS etc…), Mobile Web, Open Source,  Even More Widgets, Augmented Reality and more… schedule here.

Matthew Cashmore takes to the stage to rapturous applause an he announces that the Bean Bags are here to take away but not until the end of the day!! There is Beatles Rock Band on the Wii in the corner (where I will be later). He’s pointing to people in blue caps, they know where the beer is and apparently wine and cigars!! Finally Matthew introduces us to the Dalek (who is not called Brian)> Matthew has achieved a dream of getting a Dalek at one of these events. The Dalek talks and everyone cheers!

Back to Dan… There is a free room to organise your own bit of conference which is a neat idea. Sign up at the back folks. Now the competition is being launched by Margaret from Betavine. I’m not involved in this as code is all foreign to me but there are a lot of people where who are and they’re chomping at the bit. There will be no cheating and no dodgyness and no previously written code – so that’s told you! There are prizes for the winners and many categories including Best Dr Who hack, Best Top Hear hack, Best bbc.com hack etc…. Dan is back again and he wants to see a hack that combines Dr Who and Top Gear data… that should be interesting!!

Introduces the other organisers, well done chaps! The sponsors get a mention and they are desperate to ‘cool up’ the corporate sponsors while telling us this isn’t a corporate event!!

The first events will be here in the Great Hall so I won’t have to move from here on my comfy bean bag!

Over The Air 2009

They will be mine!

Settled in to the main hall with a purple bean bag, some free flowing power and an apple. Should kick off soon by it’s amusing watching Matthew Cashmore running around getting everything ready!!