Todd Biske: Outside the Box

Presenter: Nick Jones

This session was a well-presented, broad overview of the web application space. Near the end, Nick touched a bit on choosing architecture for mobile applications, which gets into the decision on developing for the web, sacrificing some capabilities and usability, versus developing for a device, which provides more capabilities, but also introduces additional challenges given the average lifetime of a mobile device, let alone the broad number of devices and platforms available. It’s a bit disappointing that it wasn’t more broadly attended, although I think that part of the problem was that the session was targeted at Mobile Web 2.0, rather than on the decisions between writing a device or OS specific mobile application versus a mobile web application. There’s no doubt that more and more companies are going to start thinking more about how to leverage and support mobile access, so I expect that attendance will be increasing in these sessions in the next year or two, especially if we get a 3G iPhone in the next 30 minutes or so…