Tom Hume

It's been a good week for a few FP clients past and present, and seeing as FP is a hefty chunk of my life, you get to read about it here ;)

• Locomatrix won the "Most Awesome Use of Digital Media" award at the Brighton & Hove Business Awards, last Friday;
• Trutap have partnered with Sony Ericsson, getting global distribution through their downloads portal;
• Flirtomatic have announced they've reached the magic million registered users - nice one guys :)

Flash on the iPhone?

"At the Flash On The Beach (FOTB) conference in Brighton, Sr. Director of Engineering at Adobe Systems Paul Betlem, confirmed that Adobe is indeed developing a Flash Player for the iPhone. However, Apple calls the shots as to when it'll be available."

What's that saying about the fat lady? I'd draw precisely zero conclusions from this. The fact that Adobe have someone writing some code for the iPhone doesn't mean that Apple will permit the Flash player to work on the iPhone or that they'll do any more than sandbox it within the browser. The latter would let them boast Flash support (and deliver a good full-web experience) without fragmenting iPhone development further (into native app/web app/Flash).

• An interesting debate comparing performance and accuracy of DeviceAtlas and the WURFL;
• Palm is having trouble getting profits from its sales. Have to say, I hear practically nothing of them in Europe nowadays. A shame as their Vx was one of my favourite handhelds for years (and I loved reading the story behind it in Designing Interactions);
• Android is estimated as getting 4% marketshare in the US. Gawd knows how you can work out such numbers ahead of time, but I'm intrigued to see how it works out... not that the first handset launch will definitely make or break the platform (or is even a proper Google phone, apparently), but Android and iPhone seem to symbolise openness vs closed-ness. And whilst my heart's with open, I can't quiet that nagging voice whispering to me that the best user experiences come from tight control, end-to-end. Openness is the new freedom.
• And then a story comes along to remind you that humanity is not homogenous, and hey, some places they might not even *want* the same stuff that gets the 2.0 crowd drooling: "Pricey, slow, feature-free phone fails to catch on in Japan", heh.
• Fun to see people starting to worm their way around Apple restrictions - not that a few edge cases doing it before they're shut down really points to any sort of real change.
• Linux-on-mobile is creating fragmentation; well, yes. Sharing an operating system with another device doesn't imply compatibility, much more than sharing chip hardware does. Android seems a brighter hope for Linux on mobile than anything else I've seen out there yet (most of which seems aimed at hobbyists so far).
• "DRMs haven’t worked, and may never work, to halt music piracy" - Big Steve on music.
• "Rejecting an application because it might compete with Apple is simply indefensible". Apple doing what's best for Apple - film at 11. Nothing new here, and it's not like this isn't covering familiar ground for them.
• RIM are quietly launching a flip-phone (quiet being a relative term when most of the industry seems to be being drowned out by a Sauron-like roar from Cupertino).

Bedtime for Tombo.

Bill Buxton came to Brighton. And I missed him.

/me hangs my head in shame.

So, I'm back from a weeks holiday and full of beans, and looking at my diary the next few months are fuller than I realised:

• I'll be attending the Brighton and Hove Business Awards next Friday (26th September), where LocoMatrix has been shortlisted for Most Awesome Use of Digital Media;
• On 29th September I'm heading up to a SkillsMatter talk on Pragmatic Agility. If you've never been to one of these, I thoroughly recommend them;
• The next day I'm on a panel at a Mashup event being held at the offices of BBH, on the topic of iPhone, Android and Symbian;
• On 15th October Joh and I will be doing a talk at the Werks in Brighton, expanding on my Barcamp presentation to cover off our experiences adopting Scrum at Future Platforms - very much following on from the talk we gave at SkillSwap nearly a year ago.
• The Symbian Smartphone Show follows on 21st and 22nd October; I'm expecting this one to be particularly interesting, given the changes going on in mobile right now;
• On 6th November I'll be talking at the Sussex University Enterprising Engineers evening, on experiences at Future Platforms building all sorts of lovely mobile products;
• And last but not least, I'll be speaking at Future of Mobile London on 17th November, on the strengths, weaknesses and tradeoffs of various mobile platforms;

Phew. All that and the Brooks 10k run on 16th November to keep me busy ;)

If you're going to any of the above and fancy catching up for a chat, do drop me a line...

So, Barcamp Brighton 3: absolutely fantastic. I'll scratch down a few thoughts before they evaporate:

• Really annoyed I missed Paul Silver talk on social networks and death: he brought it up at Tuttle last week and it sounded really great;
• Saw 2 talks on Selenium: I am going to be force-feeding this to our QAs until they burst;
• The last afternoon was appropriate New Age, given that we were in Brighton. Sunday closed for me with a yoga session with Jenny, meditation and GTD with Michael Rose, then a retrospective on the whole of Barcamp ably facilitated by Joh;
• The highlight was Rebecca talking on typography and design, which seemed to be the best-attended of the whole event (necessitating a mid-point shift in venue) and generated some really good debate afterwards. No Tantek, there is no repository of mobile typography. Yes Tantek, mobile fragmentation really *is* that bad.
• I also really enjoyed James' skit on Derrida and XKCD (so much that I forgot my promise of a good kicking if he ever mentioned Big D again), and the session which combined Thai OCR, DNA sequencing and minority African languages... but ended up being a database optimisation back-and-forth with the audience :)
• We decamped to a dark corner for the warts and all of Scrum - my talk on the last year at FP, which I may be repeating locally in the near future...

The only low point for me was the university food - but hey, out of everything that had to be organised and put together to bring an event of this scale to fruition, that's quite properly a long way down the list.

Already looking forward to the next one :)

"It's a fucking web browser. It runs JavaScript a bit faster than other web browsers. That doesn't add up to a Windows killer.

...

People are calling Chrome a cloud operating system because it is a "platform for running web apps". It renders HTML and interprets Javascript, you know, like every fucking browser made since 1995. It's also got Google Gears built in. Great. I'll alert Tim Berners-Lee.
"

I'm *really* enjoying this guys writing.

The next few months will be interesting, I think. I've been asked to join the W3C Mobile Web Best Practices Working Group as a W3C Invited Expert. Specifically, I'm going to be contributing to the work of the Content Tranformation Task Force over the next few months.

If you've been reading this blog, you may know that the task force's attention is on a topic which interests me: over the last couple of years the deployment of transforming proxies within network operators has caused headaches for mobile content providers, and led to some quite fiery debate in various online forums. I'm looking forward to contributing a perspective from the corner of the mobile ecosystem where Future Platforms and our clients sit: independent software developers and content providers.

And - I appreciate these words may come back to haunt me - I'm really looking forward to seeing the work of a standards body from the inside. This is an aspect of the industry I've never experienced - other than through the artifacts the W3C etc. produce - and I'm curious to understand it better.

dConstruct 2008: The Jones/Biddulph Connection: Designing for the Coral Reef

I shut the laptop and just watched this one :)

dConstruct 2008: Tantek Celik: Social Network Portability

Why does every social site make you

1. re-enter your personal information?
2. re-add all your friends?
3. turn off notifications?
4. re-specify privacy preferences?
5. re-block negative people?

Keeping multiple sources of info (social networks etc.) up-to-date is a maintenance problem.

The goal should be giving users complete control over their data. Portable data + consistent URL = data syndicatability.

Had an interesting chat with Mr Thorpe after this one, who raised the point that in many cases, you don't want to share your identity between sites: you want to maintain many identities and quite specifically compartmentalise them.

Leaving aside whether we can enable people to express very instinctual and deep-seated behaviour explicitly... will they want to? Could we take the N different inconsistent versions of ourselves that we project in the real world (all the time lying to those we project to that yes, they're seeing the genuine article), XML-encode them and set them in concrete online?