dale lane

Heading home from Over The Air with our BBC bean bags!

Over The Air is all over, and I’m back home again (in time for the first proper snow I’ve seen in years, but I digress… 🙂 ). Just time to jot down a few quick thoughts.

It was talks and presentations in the day, with a hackday competition in the evening.

Starting with the presentations – there were some really interesting topics, brought alive with questions and discussions from the attendees. I got to hear about and try out a bunch of new things, such as sessions on programming for Symbian phones, a session on how to develop for Android, and sessions on Java ME and MIDP. I went to a session on Google Gears for Mobile, hearing about how it is implemented and learning about how to develop with it.

I’m not a great web developer, but I went along to a couple of sessions on developing for the mobile web which were fascinating – one from W3C on design approaches and their “mobileOK” validator, and another from DeviceAtlas which gives you a database of mobile device information you can use to dynamically customise web pages.

I went to a session on network APIs – where people from companies like Vodafone, BT, and the BBC showed off the APIs that they make available to developers, with some very cool live demos. Another session on cloud computing for mobile from Amazon Web Services showed what they can do to provide computing power to phones.

I’m sure there is more that my sleep-deprived brain is forgetting just at the moment, and that doesn’t even include the sessions that I didn’t get to. There was a lot of stuff to learn about in a couple of days.

Then there was the hacking in the evening. I wasn’t as hardcore as some, and did have a nap for an hour or two at about 5am before finishing my stuff off after breakfast. Most of what I wrote was in C++ but I also got to hack together a little Javascript – not a language I often use.

I didn’t finish everything I wanted to, but I was pleased with some of the bits that I did. And I was lucky enough that a couple of my hacks were chosen by the judging panel at the end of the event, picking up the prize for the “Most elegant solution to a problem” and the “Best mobile web application” categories.

Tags: overtheair

This entry was posted on Sunday, April 6th, 2008 at 10:07 pm and is filed under tech. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.