Daniel Vaughan.com

After looking at how Google Web Toolkit could be used to produce mobile phone applications I have written up an article here: http://www.bristol-gtug.org/?p=76

I attended the OpenMIC BarCamp event in Bath last week and was interested to learn about mobile widgets. Mobile widgets are basically mobile apps build with web technologies. They come in different flavours but all are a collection of JavaScript, CSS and image files together with an HTML file. These files are then packaged in a zip file with an XML descriptor (a bit like a war) and can be deployed to a mobile phone. I just deployed my by sending the file via Bluetooth. The application then can be started like a normal app although it is effectively a local web site running the browser full screen. Obviously the big wins here are that the JavaScript code is cross platform and the deployment does not require an app store.

As GWT generates JavaScript code I thought it would be suitable for packaging up as a mobile widget so as I have a Nokia phone I took the Nokia WRT kit and gave it a go. The results were very promising and my test GWT app worked very well on my phone, a Nokia E72.

The problem is of course that you cannot use RPC calls as you don’t have a server. However you can use JSONP to talk to a remote server which is perfectly adequate and this works well so far too. Using GWT to produce mobile widgets seems to have a lot of potential for creating mobile apps very quickly and with little pain. It would be great to hear from anyone else who is using this approach for mobile apps and any problems they encountered that I haven’t yet.

On Wednesday I went along to hear Ron Holland talk at Ecademy Bath. He was talking on the subject of creatively solving business problems. Ron is a very charismatic speaker giving lots of entertaining examples from his long and eventful business career and I enjoyed his talk a lot. In fact I enjoyed it enough to buy his book. Like many  motivational “business gurus” in the American style there seems to be a lot of NLP and other things I am not sure about in his approach. For that reason I will reserve judgement on how useful it is until I have read the book properly but after hearing Ron speak I believe reading it will certainly be enjoyable.

Last evening I went along to a BarCamp in Bath. It is really interesting that this sort of event has found its way to Bath in the last year or so. It was a little different to Singapore as it is a lot newer and less mature here but the speakers were good and the format worked well. The big difference was the demographic which was a lot more (almost exclusively) male and older than in Singapore. Also it was pretty much exclusively developers and did not have the VCs etc that you have at other events I have been to.

I am starting to think the growth of this type of UnConference throughout the world is marking the beginning of a shift in the IT industry. Developers in particualar seem to be attending events as individuals who are interested in their personal development rather than being sent to events as part of their day job. I see this as another sign of a shift towards independence of individuals in the industry and decreasing reliance on the organisation as discussed in Charles Handy’s book The Elephant and the Flea.

This is a fun video I cam across with some really interesting statistics about technology trends, enjoy.

UnConference in Singapore on Saturday was a really good event. I took several things away from it and saw some interesting start-ups. The most important thing I got out of it though was an “oh yeah” moment when Scott Rafer the keynote speaker made a very important point about cloud computing.

Recently I have been looking at cloud computing in the form of Google App Engine and see a lot of potential in it. The advantages I am attracted to being ease of deployment, scalability, not having to manage the server and low hosting costs. At the same time my main worry is being at the mercy of the platform provider, in this case Google who could potentially suspend an account and so any revenue stream for any product running on it at whim.

The additional point Scott Rafer made in favour of cloud computer though was that cloud computing changes the business model for web start-ups in terms of their need for VC funding. What he said was that in the past if your start-up is building a web application you need to have a decent set of servers in case your app gets very popular very quickly and you need capacity to cope. This type of infrastructure is a considerable capital expenditure and one for which you would often need VC investment in order to fund.

However, cloud computing such as App Engine changes this situation because if you app gets very popular very quickly the capacity is there instantly. Most importantly you don’t need to pay for the capacity until you need to use it. You only pay for the capacity you use and if your business model is correct you should have the extra revenue to pay for the extra capacity. This could remove the need for VC funding which is obviously very attractive to a start-up in so many ways.

Tomorrow I will be giving a talk on developer performance at unconference 2009 in Singapore. A sneak peak of my presentation is available here.

For my birthday a couple months ago I received a Garmin Forerunner 50.  It is a watch which comes with a chest strap type heart rate monitor which wirelessly connects to the watch to give you your heart rate.  Over the past two months I have been experimenting with exercise regime to improve my mental performance as recommended in the book Spark! As part of that have been going for a morning run at the running track. The Garmin device is useful as it tracks my heart rate throughout the run and allows me to make sure I am keeping my heart rate in the recommended zone. The best thing though is that when I get back I can upload the data to my laptop and see a graph. This means I can now compare my performance with my past performance and see the improvement which is great. The PC link was a bit unintuitive to figure out at first but now I love this little bit of kit.

Over the last few days I have been asking people the question: “What are the top 5 skills you look for in a software developer?” in preparation for my talk at unConference 2009 in Singapore in two weeks time. I have been gathering the results together in some sort of draft diagram and they are available here. I would really welcome any comments and suggestions for improvement.

The other day I bought a copy of the book Presentaion Zen by Garr Reynolds. I have been looking for a book like this for years. It teaches you have to do decent presention not just the standard “don’t put too much on a slide” power point tips but how to plan them though to giving them and most importantly how to make them look good. He is coming from a designery mac user’s world of less is more and I really like it. I will be trying to apply what I have learnt when i give my talk at unConference in Singapore next month.