Boy, time is flying by. It was almost six weeks ago that I went to MobileTechCon 2011 in Mainz, Germany. Anyway, here’s a quick recap.
Sencha Touch & PhoneGap
Just like at MobileTechCon 2011 Spring Edition, I gave two talks. The first one was about building cross-platform mobile applications using Sencha Touch and PhoneGap. It was the same talk that I gave six months ago and you can read all about it here .
Even though I got a lot of good feedback and some interesting questions afterwards, it felt like (most of) the audience expected some deeper insights into the frameworks and more practical examples instead of a high-level overview and some demos. It seems people know that these frameworks and tools exist and that they don’t have to develop native applications for every platform, but could use HTML, CSS and JavaScript instead to create cross-platform applications; and now they want to know how to do exactly that. If I give this talk again, I think I have to alter my slides first to reflect this changed expectation. Anyway, thanks to everyone who was there.
iEnterprise
In my second talk, I gave a high-level overview of how web technologies could be used to develop cross-platform business applications, especially for tablet PCs. I showed what is possible with the new HTML5 tags, e.g. audio and video, and what one can do with new CSS technologies like transitions and animations. I also demoed some WebGL and Canvas stuff.
Again, it felt like people expected more advanced stuff, which is good, because now that people seem to understand the advantages (and some minor disadvantages) of web-technologies for cross-platform development, we can do some serious stuff.
You can download the slides of both talks from either the download section or SlideShare.
MobileTechCon 2011
This was the third MobileTechCon and just like the previous conferences the organizers managed to put together an interesting mixture of talks around mobile related topics: There were talks that dealt with the business/marketing side of things as well as talks around software development for mobile platforms.
What I said about last MobileTechCon, which took place in March this year, is also true for this one. So, to quote myself: “I really enjoyed my time at MobileTechCon. The atmosphere was great - to which the location hugely contributed -, organisation was good, food was nice and most importantly, lots of nice people to talk about mobile stuff. And, of course, it was nice to meet a couple of people I don’t see that often.”
See you all next time…