MoMo London: Barbara Ballard of Little Springs Design

I walked in late for this, but a few points from her talk:

1. Local applications (as opposed to browser-based ones) can enhance the UI which certain user needs mandate - via local storage, say.

2. Current browsers implement inconsistent standards and broken cookies. They also have a single-window metaphor for all browsing (as opposed to the tabbed or multi-window metaphors common on desktops). But I'd argue that there's a no-window interface on mobiles - these aren't WIMP UIs, they're menu-driven, and whilst we might borrow certain UI features (scroll-bars, say) from WIMP interfaces, we're not asking users to adopt a "windowed" mental model of apps etc.

3. "Where do browsers need to go?". Barbara pressed a few bad buttons here, talking about "user-generated mashups"... which seems to be her term for describing pulling elements of content together, a bit like portlets in the late 90s.

4. She talked about the advantages of mobile devices as input mechanisms, tying camera, sensor and location input into browsers and therefore rendering the desktop a poor cousin...

5. "Un-browsers" will come: local app and data logic, AJAX enabled, rich user input. Also mentioned the need for widgets on the phone. Interesting but IMHO only if they're bound deeply into the UI (i.e. not off an apps menu); and surely on the desktop widgets are all about finding needles in haystacks - niche bits of useful content? On the mobile where there's less content instantly accessible are they as relevant?

A couple of interesting titbits from this weeks I-mode newsletter...

NEC pulls out of Europe: ""NEC's varied range of 3G devices failed to compete when the bigger manufacturers came on line. NEC then spent some time with low-end devices such as the NEC E101 before concentrating more on i-mode devices for carriers such as O2. Despite being among the first to market with both 3G and i-mode handsets, NEC's impact on the market had declined to almost nothing.""

I'm not surprised; their handsets were uniformly awful; some of the recent I-mode ones got there as far as external design went, but the UI let it down badly.

A sign of operators trying out different structures for mobile content? "Since inking a partnership in February, Nippon TV and DoCoMo have been co-developing services and planning and producing special-purpose entertainment and broadcast content for broadcast TV, which is operating in Japan."

It's not surprising to see operators trying out different ways of structuring their content businesses, but I don't see why the TV model should necessarily be the one to pursue; why is TV the holy grail for content businesses?

Tom Peters on Minesweeper: "Microsoft is changing the game MINESWEEPER to placate those who thought the game was insensitive to landmine plagued communities worldwide. With the Vista release you will be able to, at least virtually, turn landmines into flowers"

JUnit Testing Using Java ME JUnit Frameworks: "Java ME JUnit extensions built especially for device application developers. Importantly, NetBeans and the NetBeans Mobility Pack plan on incorporating a Java ME JUnit-style framework with the release of NetBeans and NetBeans Mobility 5.5. The IDE provides a neat capability to add unit testing to your ME applications very quickly."

On Wednesday I went to see An Inconvenient Truth; today I read about a tornado over Brighton...