So yesterday was pretty interesting, and not just because of the free Android phone (I was in the audience at WWDC when they gave away the iSight, next time at a conference I want a pony or a unicorn). More on the G2 later.
For once at one of these conferences the keynote was really fantastic. Last year’s was interesting, but not earth shattering. This years really was revelationary and I found myself sitting thinking I’d been a real laggard on playing with bits of HTML5. Tim O’Reilly summed it up best with his wrap up post.
“If you’re like me, you had no idea there was so much HTML 5 already in play. When I checked in with my editors at O’Reilly, the general consensus was that HTML 5 isn’t going to be ready till 2010. Sitepoint, another leading publisher on web technology, recently sent out a poll to their experts and came to the same conclusion. Yet Google, Mozilla, and Palm gave us all a big whack upside the head this morning. “
The thing that really got me thinking here is that the sort of experiences you can build with HTML5 bring new challenges. They’re more data playgrounds than webpages and we’ll need a new kind of search engine, a new kind of SEO, a new kind of (or not) advertising serving system. Context will be of the moment and of the user rather than of the point of publication, it’s quite revolutionary.
It will also need a new sophistication in the user, or at least in the user interface. Michael O’Driscoll did a great ignite talk at I/O yesterday which relates to this. He was talking about statistics being sexy and being the most exciting career in the next 10 years. I think with the advent of more open data and the big data he was talking about he’s right. But in essence what the new HTML5 features require us to do in a way is to expose this sense of data exploration, with the data being comments, people, content, statistics, in a way that everyman can explore it. This isn’t meant to be pejorative or discriminatory. Statistics is poorly taught and the vast majority of the world are not good at it, or at exploratory scientific style thinking and questioning. So we really need to think about UI if we’re to really take the immense power of some of these technologies mainstream.
The new developments on browser based apps on Android look really fascinating, with the offline caching of elements really making for a whole new paradigm in apps on mobile. I’ve been looking at PhoneGap as something fun to play with for mobile app development and I’m now also wanting to really play with Android more. Both of them seem to be great lightweight app strategies. I admire people like FuturePlatforms, and am really excited to see what Tom Taylor and the Dopplridians have been cooking up with Spitfire but I’ll never be them. Any way I can build an app which does what I want without me having to delve into JavaME or ObjectiveC is such a win.
Giving me an Android phone was a really smart move as I was discussing with Chewy Trewhella… I’d never buy one naturally. I have an iPhone. The iPhone is the first phone I’ve actually not traded in for another one a year later and it’s the first PDA/phone which really works in my opinion. It’s intuitive. My 2 year old son can use it (although maybe that’s a bad thing) and the UI/UX is so “obvious” that I once saw him getting annoyed with a display screen in a museum because it wouldn’t swipe.
Having played with the G2 it’s really nice. It is a fingerprint magnet, it’s keyboard isn’t as good as the iPhone, however it does have a good camera (sadly I had to use the iPhone’s one to photograph it). The 3G on it is great too and simple touches like an icon which tells you when it is sending and receiving data rather than a spinning network thing actually is a really big leap forward. The browser is good too, not quite up to the iPhone’s standard but good. I can’t yet see the point of the trackball or why sometimes it does something in one program but not in another, but then I’m someone who is used now to one big button on a phone and one button on a mouse. I’ll definitely be playing with building apps on it and it seems like others are too. Spotify was the one which blew me away yesterday. Spotify has in many ways changed how I listen to music as much as the original iPod did. I am an audio snob and like good hifi and CDs/vinyl. However the convenience of an iPod makes me not care about that quality so much. Spotify has started to make me care a bit less about owning all of the music I listen to as well. The subscription model is starting to make sense and I love the discovery element of it. Now that can all go mobile and can even be enjoyed when you’re not connected to the network through caching (the other big exciting thing from yesterday).
For me this video sums up how much the world changes through some of the things highlighed yesterday.
