I woke up early for Saturday and went to WorkSpace for MobileCampVancouver, an informal meetup or “unconference” for people interested in the mobile web. I was a little anxious about going as I am not exactly “in” the mobile community if you could say there is one and I didn’t know how I might fit in (coupled with pondering how I might fit in 3, 4 months from now). But the morning started with short and sweet 3 word introductions - great for someone like me who might ramble and easily forget ramblings of others. No really, I was able to see that attendees were from a variety of backgrounds and interests.

This was reflected in the next part of the day, a panel session with 5 people of expertise in varying mobile-related topics. In camp-style, each panelist introduced what they were into and then, choosing which topic you were interested in, we split off into groups for discussion. I joined a group with panelist Dr. Richard Smith from SFU who has interest in mobile social networks.

We talked about creating interfaces for mobile social network applications, whether a mobile version of a “main” application reflects a subset of the main functions or is another “satellite” application targeting what people want to do when they are mobile. There was talk about difficulties in deploying these applications: getting it on the phone, connectivity, access to phone functions, and so on. Finally, I think we were talking about issues of privacy control and such but this part of the discussion seemed a little unfocused. On one hand some people wanted to talk about the basic user needs / desires and how a service can fulfill / respect them, on the other, there was interest in looking at mobile social net applications in the larger, impacting our social world context. Both topics are equally interesting but not always mixed and there was not enough time to go into either that deeply.

Following the panel session people who had something to present or demo “signed up” and these sessions were organized over three time slots and three spaces. There is a complete list of presenters and topics on the BarCamp wiki, including links to some ppt slides and such, but here is what I saw:

John Boxall (Handi) - “Building iPhone-compatible websites with iUi”

• iui is a little javascript and CSS bundle for developing web applications for the iPhone
• it allows you to easily create list-based applications that mimic the look and feel of lists (eg. music menus) on the iPhone and iPod touch
• based on three main objects: lists (defined with ul and li tags and nested), panels (the final destination of a list path), dialogs (for example, a search dialog that is displayed at the top of a screen)
• list structure and navigation style may seem restrictive but there is beauty in its restriction: users are familiar with the navigation model and they can use the web app without feeling like they have “left” their iPhone application space
• someone showed me facebook for the iphone and it is pretty nice, even in Firefox. Check it out - I might start going here instead of the main site. (I am not sure if it was made with iui, possibly not but you can get the idea of designing interfaces using the iPhone list model.)

Dennis Knothe (Nokia) - “Introduction to S60 web-runtime and S60 widget development”

• Widgets are downloadable and installable web service applications for Nokia handsets.
• They are created using HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and with support for Ajax. The programming model seems similar to dashboard widgets - you have a collection of html, javascript, css, and image files that get zipped together, the extension is renamed .wgz and that is the package downloaded by the user
• There is access to some basic phone functions, more is to come in the future
• Widgets reminded me of i-Applis which I dabbled with while at NTT but I think that as they develop more they have the potential for more flexibility. From what I remember, i-Applis were pretty restrictive with accessing the web and phone functions.
• Want to test your Widget on a selection of real phones? He told us about the coolest thing - Remote Device Access for testing applications on phones somewhere in Finland. If you are a Nokia Forum Member you can reserve access to a phone and when available, upload and install your application. You can see the screen of the remote phone and view log files. Maybe you knew about this but I didn’t and it’s totally cool.

Igor Faletski (Handi Mobility) - “Developing Mobile 2.0 applications with Nokia WidSets”

• WidSets is a service based on Widgets
• You build your collection of Widgets for getting information from the web onto your phone
• Again, these are similar to Dashboard Widgets and many are very simple games or information displays
• Some nice examples shown: widgets for flickr photo streams, jaiku, and one that I want to explore more: ShoZu
• There is a Mac-Dashboard-like interface for viewing WidSets on your phone (and I think it is also called a dashboard). It is bigger than the screen size and you move around it using navigation pad. You can manage the placement of widgets on the Dashboard through the WidSets site (accessed from your computer)

After these sessions we had lunch followed by a hack-a-thon but I didn’t really know that the hack-a-thon had started. It was more like a lot of standing around and chatting. But it possibly geared up later - I left mid-afternoon to donate some more time to the thesis. But very interesting and I look forward to the next!