With only 10 days to go before the WIPJam at OSIM I’m all too busy polishing my best trainers for the event to think about anything else… but making sure that the event will be as interesting and entertaining as possible to all! Call it the stress of the organizer… So in need for reassurance I gathered a few of the hot topics of mobile development today that should spice up our conversation.
Open is the new closed writes Andreas Constantinou from VisionMobile hi-lighting the fact that nowadays everyone claims to be open if not open source. But then adds that we’d better become informed shopper when it comes to openness and stop believing the “Wash whiter than snow” blanket statements coming from various open source and open projects in mobile. This is just what our first unpanel will set-out to do! With 4 representatives from various projects, Symbian Foundation, Access for Limo, Eclipse Foundation, and Motorola for OHA, joined by an operator (Eplus) and a long time open sourcer David Axmark (Founder of MySQL) we should be able to cover the entire spectrum of governance…
Why care you might ask? Governance is boring, administrative stuff and in the end they ‘re all the same… Or almost… (vote here for the best open source license for example)
My answer to this would be rather simple… governance will impact everything you can or can’t do in and around a platform… from annihilating your business model to blocking your product’s route to market (thinking a bit negative here)… ever tried to become a member of OHA or submit a code fix to Android to set-up an Android distro? Still waiting for the outcome of a JCP for APIs you need to launch your app across multiple phones? Still battling to get your apps through the Appstore or through an operator? Looking forward to put your hands on the Limo or Symbian code? All points that we can take with our panel of experts…
24% of mobile developers have started to write apps for netbooks according to EDC and will definitely check this with our participants. Thanks to Intel we will have a truckload (or so) of netbooks in demonstration at the device bar… and a great discussion group on the subject of netbooks and new devices… what could we make of them? What do they change to development patterns?
And if these 24% are correct, what I’m even more excited to find out are the motivations behind this move? Are these Windows Mobile developers scaling up to larger screens and hopefully larger volumes or Linux mobile developers doing … well roughly the same thing, or whether there’s just no logic at all…
Developing for smartphone is like entering the Babel tower writes Paul Krill for Computer World stating that the large number of native runtime is a limitation to developers and stating that html 5 could hopefully be our saviour soon!
Fragmentation has been a statement of fact in the mobile development world for as long as one can remember, and the situation has only become worst with the rise of iPhone and Android. The resulting dilemma was all fairly well summed up by Mobile Sorcery in Total Telecom or as I heard at a recent mobile marketing seminar , “All big brand want an iPhone app as the key to their mobile marketing strategy until we tell them this is only 2% of the market, then starts the real discussion”. Which makes Caroline’s platform choice panel part of OSIM and discussion group on platform choices particularly timely, or if you’d rather talk to the protagonist of the article directly anyone from Eclipse, Motorola, Limo will be present.
Seeing html5 as the new saviour of mobile fragmentation though is pretty new. Anyone looking at the vast numbers of browsers, widget frameworks, web API initiatives could certainly ask whether we’re not heading towards yet more fragmentation. The usual explanation by those involved telling me html5 is a standard and we need to wait for it to be ratified to see unity. I’ll be waiting then… but only until we hear what our unpanel has to say on the subject with W3C, Bondi, Vodafone, Siruna giving us their thoughts on the all-web future of mobile development.
If this has tickled your curiosity, you can now register or start posting questions you would like to debate! The comments on this page are made for this!
See you in Amsterdam! and remember it’s free to attend for developers!
Thibaut
@campbieil
Tweet This Post
Subscribe to Updates
Just to correct a reference
The resulting dilemma was all fairly well summed up by Mobile “Distillery” in Total Telecom
Sorry Tim,
All my apologies! Good thing that school starts again this week I can work on my orthography!