Over the Air – 24 hours of mobile development and mobile conferences – September 25th – 26th 2009

Key note by Nick Alliot (OMTP), Rick Fant (vodafone), and Caroline Lewko(WIP)

The global trend was said to see the desktop applications to be more and more ported onto mobile devices, requiring the same level of standardization and development tools that the desktop web has benefiting for the past years.
It became clear that the ratio of web developers to native apps developers (100 to 1) was very much in favor of pushing forward web activities for mobile devices.

The BONDI APIs are part of the possible answers to the problematic, through fast standard activities driven by reference implementation, offering local APIs to browsers such as device status and geolocation, all thinking about the security of devices, apps and users and letting the market and the developers decide the level of protection they require. The next delivery of the BONDI APIs is expected to be V1.5 for Q1 2010.

Rick Fant from Vodafone then presented the new “360″ new web connected services and Vodafone apps division to go with them, following as much as possible open standards to allow any developer to produce any application as long as they are not of objectionable content. It seems Vodafone 360 services will have connected widgets supporting the latest web standards, and should be delivered for Xmas 2009. Supporting ideas like connected contacts, the 360 services should be available on S60 devices, and will also incorporate JIL widgets, W3C standards and handset APIs to enable developers to quickly produce applications.

Following Rick, Caroline Lewko, from WIP, presented here company’s products and the API wiki they host, including an interesting summary of current application stores that are flourishing on the market. It is indeed more than 15 mobile app stores that have been recently, or will be soon available on the web, amongst which it can be forth noting the presence of the following

• china mobile
• vodafone
• orange app store
• Nokia OVI
• blackberry (that chose a ‘no free app’ approach)
• get jar (independent, mostly free apps)

More information on http://wipwiki.com/index.php/appstores, http://www.wipconnector.com/ and http://wipjam.com/.
This key note, although slightly too commercial I think to be very honest (sponsors oblige I guess) gave the tone of the trend: app stores, app stores, app stores and a bit of the design process. It is important to note that many factors are still ignored from developers and even development companies in their process to develop mobile apps:

• Keeping an eye on the target not to miss it is important. Too many mobile application started with a good idea but did not succeed as the market evolved quickly during the development.
• Don’t forget UX or the application will get dropped
• Platform choice might be a difficult one to do, but will be critical to reach the target market
• How do you apply charging and generate revenue through the apps you sell?
• The submission process might be long and painful for some app stores, faster for others. It is yet to be understood fully why the android app store releases the apps straight away after submission when the Vodafone process is said to take up to 10 days, and the apple one up to…. 4 weeks!

UX mobile design

The first session I attended concerned application design through an iterative process of paper prototyping and user reviews. All details about this session here http://blog.ekynoxe.com. Presenter was Tom Hume from Future Platforms.

cross platform programming

The second session of the day concerned the creation of cross platform mobile applications. Wolfram Kriesing pointed out that there are many ways applications can be built and distributed on mobile devices: as part of the pre-installed software, as a native application such as a Symbian bundle, as a web application which access is limited to mobile phones browsers, and as W3C widgets.
The emphasis of this session was to make developers realize that developing a native application will only reduce the number of users it reaches, but this is only one aspect of the problem.
Widgets should not only be thought as only a mobile application, but should have a wider range such as the ability to be published on iGoogle or other desktop web platforms. But as there is no killer app that can do everything and do it well at the same time, a better approach is to concentrate on simple use cases only, and execute them well across many devices and OS.

Recommended specifications to follow include:

• JIL spec
• BONDI spec
• W3C spec
• open source “phoneGAP”
• nokia WRT (only nokia)
• G Chrome OS?

Ericsson Labs APIs

Ericsson labs presented their APIs. Unlike common belief, they are not Sony Ericsson, but do work on mobile application APIs, providing also coding resources, hosting for some applicationss, a showroom for publication and hosting of IMS solutions. Their model highlights a centralized provision of telco enablers and internet enablers. At the moment, Ericsson provides mobile Java communication APIs, Mobile Java push to allow push notifications to be sent to mobile devices, Mobile Maps as a set of J2ME and web developer tools for developers, SMS send and receive and Web location to enhance web applications with location based services. Their coming APIs will include mobile location, streaming media, media fabric (Ericsson does aggregation from providers and streams to devices)
At the moment, these APIs are available on JAVA and Android phones, but Ericsson Labs is pushing to extend their coverage of technologies in the future.
All web APIs are available from any platform as they are exposed as a REST architecture.

W3C recommendations

Later on, at one of the W3C sessions on mobile web best practices, it’s been obvious that the recommendations on mobile devices include the same set than for desktop devices for their basis, but also incorporate mobile devices specifics such as follows:

• No popups as everything happens in a single window, it would not make sense.
• No link using the “target=blank” property to minimize the number of windows opened on the mobile device’s screen, if the device allows it anyways.
• Work in one column only, because of the limited width most mobile screens only accommodate
• Get the markup right so as to limit the possibility of errors at display, which can be more critical on a mobile device than on a larger screen.
• Use DL list instead of tables for tabular data for mobiles. It appears that many mobile browsers are unable to render tables relatively to the small size of the screen, forcing the view to scroll horizontally which is both inconvenient and can be impossible to do.

The flip cards given out at the session summarize these points, but require the reader to also comply with desktop standards.

Mobile push notifications

Mobile push notifications (by dale lane, http://dalelane.co.uk/blog/?p=938)
Alongside the standard polling and long polling techniques to retrieve new data from a mobile application, some platforms use SMS push in order to trigger the device to fetch data such as Betavine.
Another solution developed by IBM is called MQTT for MQ Telemetry Transport. It has been created for applications with time critical issues such as fire alarm for deaf people for example.
The technology, which resembles SIP in some ways in its subscribe/notify mechanism, is available online with client libraries available in many languages, but some aspects of the protocol have been deliberately kept in the commercial versions, such as security with encryption of payload data.

On the subject of designing the application not require too much data exchanges, it has also been suggested to incorporate caching, which can be done using google gears to cache on the background

The Hackathon!!

Some of the best projects in the Hackathon of Friday night included:

• Drinker, an app that helps you count the pints you’ve had by displaying a disk that grows bigger with the amount of drinks (supposedly easier to press)
• Project Blue bell which use bluetooth signals from mobile phones in the conference hall to generate both a musical and a visual representation.
• An offline wiki editor for android.
• A Bondi password generator/storage. This was generating a random password and keeping it on a mobile for the user to find easily afterwards.
• A hangman game for which the words are based on the twitter usernames of a given hash tag. This has been hugely successful and continues to live and expand outside OTA09.
• The non coding but truly amazing hair blowing holodeck project from ewan spence

The highlights and what to remember from my point of view

• TWITTER TWITTER TWITTER!!! We can’t highlight enough how much the tweets have played an importance in this conference. Unless you have experienced it for real in such a reunion of geeks, you can’t really understand how much twitter can deliver! It’s quite impressive the amount of updates and exchanges that have been taking place over the two days of the conference and even after it.
• Good ideas in the contests, and good small apps that can go forward quickly! I can cite directly the creepy friendhangman from Makoto Inoue or Something around you by Alfredo Morresi, Stefano Zingarini, & Robert (Jamie) Munro
• Teens Dragons Den gave some critical insight into the future of oure apps and the market segements we are targetting right now. One of the most striking remarks that must be remembered, not only for teenagers apps, but I think for any app that will hit the market was “can you get it on ‘regular phones’? None of my friends use Android.” Just remember who the target market is and build on purpose is the message here!
• BONDI APIs have been very much in the line of fire from all developers during the contest, and later on twitter, as many tweet suggested. Several developers dropped the idea of using them altogether saying there “The BONDI SDK isn’t an SDK, there is a runtime … but no actual developer tools!”. That can summarize quite well the general feeling about it as only one contestant in the competition, Kai Hendry for his BONDI password generator, managed to have an app working with the BONDI APIs.

Altogether an amazing two days of interactive conferences and great fun.
Thanks to you all for that, and thanks for the bean bags that did raise a few looks in the tube back home!