Over the Air

I went along to Over The Air on Friday at Imperial College London. For those unfamiliar, OTA is an on going mobile development conference/hackathon that invites all developers regardless of platform to come together to discuss the state of the mobile platform.

It was also my first ever mobile development conference and it was certainly a relaxed one. For example for the keynote addresses instead of chairs we sat on multi coloured bean bags!

Combined with the free coffee, it made for a very pleasant experience!

The keynote speakers were:

• Rick Fant, head of Internet Discovery at Vodaphone,
• Caroline Lewko, mobile entrepreneur
• And someone from the BBC, whose name escapes me at the moment.

The main theme running through the keynotes was how we as developers should be creating platform independant applications called widgets. Widgets are typically written in Javascript, although you can utilise most languages, the benefit is that with one code set you can run your app/widget on multiple devices, increasing your userbase exponentially.

Aside from widgets, App stores, Monetising your product, Cloud computing and a large debate on Platform independence vs native code.

A natty OTA bingo card was also created:

There were a range of different sessions throughout the day, one of the more interesting ones was led by Henny Swan from Opera on the accessibility features of the upcoming HTML 5 and how we as developers can better code our web/mobile applications to support users with an impairment.

The final session I was able to attend (although I had to leave mid way to catch the tube), was run by the NHS and featured discussion on their API and getting access to their data. I mentioned to the session leaders that the College would be interested in creating web apps to support our students.