FOM 2011

Future of Mobile 2011

Future of Mobile

I couldn’t participate of Over-the-air ([tooltip text=”Over-the-Air”]OTA2011[/tooltip]) this year, but Adam Cohen-Rose blogged about it and I’m glad about it! So, to catch up with what happened check: http://blog.cohen-rose.org/search/label/ota11

Well, now back to FOM notes…

Instagram presentation

Dan Rubin avid user Instagram

How it started: with beta invites matching interests of product (in that case, designers, artists, influences, etc @jack – twitter founder). It generated enough interest so much that NYtimes also got interested on the instagram. The technology was kept simple and allowed scale.

Key decisions: internationalization early on (3rd week!!!), small team, single platform (iOS), minimum viable products each steop of the way (proof of concepts too), invest in community very early.

@brianleroux presentation (phoneGap)

Link to presentation at: http://www.slideshare.net/brianleroux/future-of-mobile-9281709

phoneGap was known as “the bridge”, “foreign interface” and “the hack”

The sad sample of HP webOS – it ended up bad…. finished.

Extensive documentation for phoneGap at: docs.phonegap.com

Interesting things: you can access devices features with phonegap too! works with jquery, jqtouch, etc. You can think of phonegap as a fancy browser!

We build your apps ‘in the cloud’

He suggests to choose a benchmark and stick with it. Monitor it and develop for it. (One example: performance)

Layouts favorites: flex-box, css media queries, meta tag with viewport, however he also mentioned that aesthetics can hurt performance…

Remember that the brand is cross platform!

Tip: “try to build an app without using a library if possible, if not, start using something that solves YOUR problem”

They used qUnit and Jasmine for testing.

For the backend design he said that every legacy system needs a proxy, RESTful JSON endpoints are fastest.

Code ghetto-photoshare and
demo at deep-flower-8321.herokuapp.com

Going offline, the solutions used were IndexedDB, SQLite

Phonegap build – also using responsive webdesign, yay! Continuous deployment, no SDKs required!!!!

debug.phonegap.com another useful tool, in your quest to overcome cross-platform mobile development.

If the “Demo gods are kind” it will work…

(he mentioned while trying to load demo… quite funny phrase in a way)

General interesting links gathered at the conference

http://www.webdesignerdepot.com/2011/08/characteristics-of-a-modern-portfolio-site/
http://docs.phonegap.com/
http://instagr.am/about/jobs/
http://brian.io/
http://developer.vodafone.com/
http://lightbox.com/
http://swipe.nokia.com/
http://www.steelyeye.com/
https://www.x.com/developers/paypal
http://www.abookapart.com/products/mobile-first
http://www.lukew.com/ff/entry.asp?933
http://www.magentocommerce.com/

Future trends: local, social, digital all via mobile (four megatrends shaping commerce)

x.commerce innovate
bmw design…
@nanwar

Cannot know what the future of mobile is but it is a 1 trillion opportunity!

Designing for different screen sizes

Think more than size, think about interactions and experiences

Not to use mobile as a word, more screens or devices…

1.the glance: sub-5 secs
2.data snack: sub-60 secs

Tablet vs mobile

Tablet: magazine (more public experience)
Mobile: private experience

iwatch concept, metawatch not a concept

Progression: classic web > web 2 > mobile first > touch first

Mobile games and html5

http://www.phoboslab.org/fom2011
@phoboslab
http://impactjs.com/documentation

Mobile game engines: unity, corona, cocos2d

Super mega browser farm 2 – social games played in browser

http://impactjs.com/

Observations:

  • scaling via css slow, via web-kit transform3d faster because triggers the hardware acceleration.
  • obfuscate your code with google closure compiler
  • “evented input” event to an element
  • button.onkeydown=… (in javascript)