Mobilism hot topics panel

May 9th, 2013

The programme for this year’s Mobilism conference in Amsterdam looks hot, hot, hot! It will wrap up with that hottest of hot things: a hot topics panel. Hot!

By the way, there are still tickets available. I suggest you grab one if you haven’t already. It’s a great gathering but for some reason it’s not selling as well this year, which means this could be your last chance to attend.

I’ve really, really enjoyed the previous two Mobilisms, and I always get a kick out of moderating panels so I’m pretty chuffed about getting the chance to host a panel for the third year running.

The first year, the panel was made up of Mobile browser vendors (excluding Apple, of course). Last year, it was more of a mixed bag of vendors and developers. This year …well, we’ll see. I’ll assemble the panel over the course of the conference’s two days. I plan to choose the sassiest and most outspoken of speakers—the last thing you want on a panel is a collection of meek, media-trained company shills.

Mind you, Dan has managed to buy his way onto the panel through some kind of sponsorship deal, but I’m hoping he’ll be able to contribute something useful about Firefox OS.

Apart from that one preordained panelist, everything else is up in the air. To help me decide who to invite onto the panel, it would be really nice to have an idea of what kind of topics people want to have us discuss. Basically, what’s hot and what’s not.

So …got a burning question about mobile, the web, or the “mobile web” (whatever that means)? I want to hear it.

If you could leave a comment with your question, ‘twould be much appreciated.

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Responses

sil

Question for the panel: what’s stopping you from making all the mobile apps you write just be pure mobile websites, with no installable "app" from an app store at all? What’s stopping everyone else?

(Note: this is not a rhetorical question. I am quite sure that there are reasons, legitimate ones, stopping people; I’d like to hear clear statements about what those are.)

Morten Høy

Q: Will tech. like ORBX.JS eventually replace or supplement HTML5 apps or native apps?

Vasilis van Gemert

Websites have to work on very powerful, new laptops with state of the art browsers, but at the same time have to work on equally new, tiny devices with crappy browsers and potentially crappy network connections. We have to make design decisions that accommodate all these devices, and this results in more modest designs. Or at least, this could result in more modest designs if you look at it from a performance perspective.

Something similar is happening with the way we interact with websites. There are so many ways to interact with a site — mouse, finger, keyboard, pen, voice, waving hands in the air, doing things with a game controller, using the remote of the TV, etc. — and it’s becoming harder to reliably detect these different ways of input. This could, or should, result in simpler forms of interaction. For instance, we can’t rely on the mouseover event to display hidden content anymore. Should you give the visitor the ability to swipe if you’re not sure if they’ll use their fingers, their mouse or something else?

So my question is: Since it’s hard, or even impossible, to detect the type of connection, and the type of input our visitors are using, will websites become more boring? Or should we just redefine what we consider to be exciting?

Previously on this day

9 years ago I wrote Ampersand

9 years ago I wrote Podchatting

12 years ago I wrote Orangutans, Oxen and Ogham Stones

15 years ago I wrote Greetings from Sitka, Alaska

The Spirit Of Endeavour has docked in the lovely town of Sitka. I’ve tracked down an internet cafe and I finally managed to upload some pictures to Flickr. I’ve also updated the gallery right here.

17 years ago I wrote Random New Media Company Generator

I’ve noticed a trend in the naming conventions of local New Media companies (although I’m sure this trend applies beyond the boundaries of Brighton & Hove).

18 years ago I wrote jonathanmacybiggs

Here’s a great site I found in my referral logs: Jonathan Macy Biggs. Behold the beautiful design and validating pages!