What will be the most important mobile platform

One of the most interesting talks at Blogtalk 2010 conference a few weeks ago was the presentation "Apps are bad" by Ronan Skehill. The basic point that the speaker was making was that the best choice of target platform for the developers of mobile applications was the web rather than developing a "native application" for any particular mobile device platform. His reasons for saying this were the fact that there are too many different mobile platforms to keep up with andf in any case it is now possible to develop very high quality web apps that give just as good a user experience as any native application.

As part of the discussion thast followed the presentation some people raised the fact that you would categorise platforms differently depending upon whether you are a developer or a user.

From the developers point of view of developers they might categorise platforms based upon one of these:

• Operating system: Windows, Linux, Mac OS ..
• Browser: IE, Firefox, Safari, Opera ....
• Device Form Factor: Desktop, Laptop, netbook, tablet, smartphone ....

However, comsumers might be more likely to categorise using one of these critereon:

• Price
• Size/Weight
• Colour
• Brand

People used to speak of Linux as a potential target platform, but this is not really a single operating system. For example, if you read the list of Linux distributions on wikipedia it is several pages long. To make thinks even more complex, there is a complex set of ways to view the dependencies between these distributions as you can see from the page which compares the various Linux distributions which typically gets several edits per day.

Ronan's advice is to develop as much as possible of your application using web programming methods and only use native interfaces when absolutely necessary. There exist a number of application development environments such as Appcelerator Titanium which allow developers to develop applications for mobile platforms that combine the portability and ease of development of web applications with the power of a native application.

Blog Talk 2010 | Apps are Bad

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By co-incidence I also heard a talk recently from the Velocity conference (via IT conversations) which was talking about the MITE platform which seems like a very impressive system that allows people to monitor how the performance of their mobile applications are performing as seen by a number of different device types on a number of networks. I have not personally used this tool, but I have experienced applications which theoretically work on a particular device but in practice they don't actually work for users on 3G networks because the network is so slow that the application keeps timing out.

The video recording of our talk at the Blogtalk conference is now available on line

I am delighted to see that the video for our talk at the Blogtalk 2010 conference is now available online. The recording is quite good quality although I must admit I hate hearing my own voice. We must have run over the time limit because some of the Q&A portion is not included in the recording.



Of course it is not just our talk that was posted. All of the other speakers were also recorded and most can be found here, but some are not yet online because it is taking some time to upload them (by the time you read this I am sure they will all be up)

Report on Blogtalk 2010 conference last week

A number of people asked me to write up a report on the Blogtalk 2010 conference that I attended last week. This was a really interesting conference with lots of interesting topics being discussed, but since most of the people there were really great at using social media tools and they were all posting commentary all the time I don't think I can do really much better than to point you at the very active Twitter feed for the conference using the hashtag #blogtalk2010 or Emer Lawn's excellent summaries of day 1 and day 2.

I will write up a few blog posts later on specific topics that came up during the conference, but my general impression was to be amazed at the amount of buzz and excitement which can be generated when a bunch of like minded geeks get together. I was also delighted to see that my Alma Mater NUI Galway is looking both completely new and modern, while at the same time being reassuringly familiar from 30 years ago (when we used to call it UCG).

You can see the slides for my own talk with Gabriela Avram below. It went down pretty well despite being in a bad slot as the second last presentation of the conference when everyone was tired (including the presenters). A number of the other presentations are also available on SlideShare, but there is no unified feed for them available (yet). I believe that the conference site will be updated shortly with links to all of the presentation and video's of the various presentations (every move was captured on camera).

Who am I? Blogtalk 2010 presentation

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