Global Nerdy

The folks at ReadWriteMobile have written up a summary of Forrester Research’s report on what they see as the big 10 mobile trends for 2011. As with any set of predictions (and especially with tech industry predictions) you should take them with a grain of salt. Still, I found them interesting and thought-provoking enough to do my own summary of these predicted trends and what they mean from a mobile developer’s point of view.

A little aside: Forrester gives itself a “B+” for the accuracy of its predictions. That’s exactly the grade I’d give myself if I were in the prediction business: not as cocky as an “A”, which wouldn’t give you wiggle room to be wrong, and not as bad as a “C”, which basically says “I’m just guessing”. "”B” is a safe rating for yourself, and the “+” is just there to say “trust me”.

Mobile/social/local combinations will explode but generate little revenue. We’re still in the early phases of location-based software, so it’s no surprise that we haven’t yet figured out how to reap profit from it yet. Keep in mind that when a research company like Forrester talks about making revenue, they’re thinking of a companies making millions. There’s still room for a clever indie developer to make what a single person or a small group of people would consider to be a nice sum of cash.

2011: Year of the “Dumb” smartphone user. Not dumb users, but users who are upgrading from “dumbphones”. Gizmodo links to this graph in the New York Times and points out a fact that the NYT didn’t: that the vast majority of the people in the U.S. are still using “dumbphones” (the more polite term is “feature phone”). With economies of scale and subsidies from the telcos, smartphones are getting cheaper and may become the next phone for today’s current crop of dumbphone users. They’re not the early adopter type, and Forrester says that they’re not going to download as many apps as the early adopters, but will consume more mobile media. These users may require different approaches: different types of apps, different UIs, different marketing. You might want to consider them when working on your next app.

Mobile fragmentation continues. The present-day phone market looks like the desktop computer market of the 1980s: there’s so much variety. Some people have smartphones, many have feature phones, and there’s Windows Phone, iOS 3 and 4, and several flavours of Android. This means that for the time being, you’re going to have to weigh the pros and cons of porting your apps or writing them as mobile web apps.

“Apps vs. Internet”: An ongoing debate that doesn’t matter. Forrester says that as far as users are concerned, it’s not an “either/or” choice when it comes to apps vs. the mobile web; they’re happy to use both. What matters is what best suits their needs, or as my frient Kat Mullaly likes to say “Most people don’t care how you pull a rabbit out of a hat; they just want to see the rabbit!” If you’re a mobile developer trying to target the widest array of mobile platforms possible (see “Mobile Fragmentation Continues”, above), you should see if mobile web development with HTML5 is the right path for you. If your target audiences are either “SuperConnecteds” (Forrester term meaning heavy app users) or “Entertainers” (Forrester term for big gamers / media consumers), apps are still the way to go. (If you’re interested in app development, the App Hub is the place to go; if you want to try your hand at mobile web apps, check out the articles at Script Junkie and Dive Into HTML 5.)

$1 billion in mobile marketing. Marketers are expected to spend over USD$1 billion this year on mobile display ads. Someone’s going to have to develop them. Time to start networking with marketing and advertising companies!

Mobile will increasingly prompt users to interact with their environment. Forrester’s talking about NFC here, but there aren’t that many phones out there with NFC capability, and it may be a while before the technology really takes off. Still, consider the ways that people use their phones today – these uses didn’t exist 5 years ago! Phones are being used to find what’s happening around us, find (or alternately, avoid) people, get information about a place or thing (by providing info via text entry, barcode or camera input) and so on. They’re not just phones anymore; they’re personal tricorders.

4G Hype Bigger Than 4G Impact. No surprise there. It took years for 3G to catch on, and while 4G adoption might be a little quicker, it’ll still take some time. As a developer, I’d say keep an eye on 4G, but don’t worry too much about it just yet.

Companies Will Invest First in Convenient Services for their Customers. Forrester says that mobile product and service pros, especially those in the travel industry are going to invest in mobile services to keep their customers happy and coming back for more. Achieving this goal means providing their customers with the most convenient service. As with mobile marketing (see “$1 billion in mobile marketing” above), someone’s going to have to write these apps!

Casual Gaming: Big Stuff. While there’s a lot going on in modern life, there are still many moments consisting of waiting. Waiting in the grocery line, waiting for the commute to end, waiting for the next assignment to come – it makes for bits of downtime spread throughout the day, five minutes here, ten minutes there, maybe a half-hour every now and again. Those bits of downtime are the perfect place for casual gaming, and what better platform for casual games than an always-on-you personal computing device? I may be repeating myself, but only because it’s true: someone’s going to have to write those games. (If you’re interested in casual game development, take a look at XNA, the game dev framework that lets you target not just Windows Phone, but the Xbox and PC as well.)

“Mobile” Will Mean More than Phones. It means tablets/slates too. And ebook readers. And portable media devices. And even services (and their data) that we can access when we’re on the go, and that allow us to sync the data among all our devices. Which means that the cloud is important. You should at least become familiar with cloud computing, and better still, start experimenting with it! (May I suggest Windows Azure as a way to get into cloud computing?)

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

If you’re in the Toronto area and have been thinking about getting into game development, whether for “stationary” devices like desktops, laptops and consoles or “mobile” devices such as tablets, slates and phones, you might want to go attend this weekend’s Board Game Jam, which takes place in Toronto this weekend.

Once the sole province of enthusiasts, game are very popular these days. Console sales are doing very well, the Kinect is selling extremely well, gamer culture has found its way into popular culture as evidenced by chiptunes and Scott Pilgrim vs. The World, and events like GamerCamp (which took place in Toronto in November) are attracting more than just the hardcore nerd crowd.

When people talk about games, the first thing that comes to mind is videogames. After all, they’re big business, and people are playing them everywhere – at home, at work (who hasn’t snuck in a quick round at the office?) and now, with mobile devices, whenever they’ve got some downtime. Videogames are great, but there’s more to gaming.

Board games are currently enjoying a renaissance. According to The Economist, board games sales in 2008 exceeded USD$800 million and have been growing 20% each year. Settlers of Catan, which was once for the Dungeons and Dragons crowd only, is now a hipster hobby, there’s a very healthy selection of board games at Toys ‘R’ Us and there are crowds at Toronto’s board game café, Snakes and Lattes. Just as videogames have their own special charms, so do board games – they may be made of plastic and cardboard instead of pixels and data, but in both, it’s the gameplay that makes or breaks them.

Gameplay is what Board Game Jam is all about, and since it’s about making board games rather than videogames, this gathering will make game design accessible to just about everyone. As the organizers say, “On a mechanical level, it’s simple arts and crafts.” The bigger point of Board Game Jam is to explore the gameplay aspects of game development. What makes a game fun? How do you balance challenge, playability, simplicity, complexity and sociability? Can you build a game by taking a classic and applying a little twist to it, or would you rather build something completely different?

If you’re thinking of building games for the PC, phone or Xbox, you could learn a lot at Board Game Jam. As the organizers put it:

Most of the time, we’re talking about videogames. Because videogames are awesome. But it’s easy to forget that the principles that underlie good game-making don’t necessarily involve realistic physics engines, or even good control schemes. Much of game design has to do with abstract rules and mechanics that don’t have anything to do with technology.

Here’s what’s happening at Board Game Jam:

• Saturday
  • Morning: A crash course in board game design
  • Afternoon and evening: Make a board game
• Sunday
  • Morning and afternoon: Finish those board games
  • Evening: Board game party – the public plays the games built at Board Game Jam!

(The full schedule for Board Game Jam is here.)

Board Game Jam takes place this Saturday and Sunday, January 29th and 30th at the George Brown School of Design, 230 Richmond Street East, Toronto. The early bird price is no longer available, but the “late bird” price is still a mere CAD$20. If you’d like to attend (I’ll be there, at least for the crash course in board game design, where I plan to take copious notes and blog them), you should register for the event at their EventBrite page.

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

The 7th annual ShmooCon is on this weekend (things kick off at 3:00 p.m. Eastern today). If you’re into security, technology exploitation, interesting and inventive hardware and software solutions and hacker culture, you’ll probably find this conference of great interest, along with its west coast counterpart, ToorCon. ShmooCon’s taking place in Washington, DC this year.

There are probably all sorts of reasons you’re not there right now, most likely other commitments like work and family, not to mention that ShmooCon sells out within ten minutes of registration opening. You can still catch the proceedings because they’re streaming the conference live and free of charge! Their streaming video page has all the details, and you can pick out the sessions you’d like to watch on their schedule page.

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection,

They’re barely in their teens and look so impossibly young, but they’re writing apps for Windows Phone 7. These kids from Unlimited Paenga Tawhiti, a special charter high school in Christchurch, New Zealand, where students do self-directed learning and follow their own interests and enthusiasms. In the video above, they’re being interviewed by Ben Gracewood about a WP7 game they wrote called Pop-ins, which tests your geographic knowledge of New Zealand. (I can locate Auckland and Christchurch, but that’s as far as my New Zealand geography goes.)

In his blog entry about these kids, Ben writes:

With next to no outside help, these young developers picked up the WP7 dev tools [and] coded up a working game – testament to just how straightforward development for the Windows Phone platform is. Part of their motivation was that the Windows Phone 7 Marketplace is less saturated than the iPhone App Store.

They’re writing Windows Phone 7 apps and you should be too! Want to get started?

1. Download the free tools! The installer will do one of two things:
   • If you don’t have Visual Studio installed, it’ll install Visual Studio 2010 Express for Windows Phone, which will let you write apps and games for Windows Phone 7 and Xbox 360. Even though it’s an “Express” version, it’s got a lot of the features that make Visual Studio the best IDE out there.
   • If you already have Visual Studio installed, it’ll simply add on the necessary stuff to make it possible to write apps and games for Windows Phone 7 and Xbox 360.
2. Install the October 2010 update for Windows Phone Developer tools. This update provides enhancements and additional goodies to the free tools.
3. [Optional] If you’re more comfortable coding in Visual Basic than C#, download Visual Basic for Windows Phone Developer Tools. This will add support for the Visual Basic programming language to the free tools.
4. Try out the “Hello Windows Phone” exercise. It’s a nice little “Hello World” program that will help you get familiar with the development environment and the process of writing Windows Phone 7 apps.
5. Get your hands on these FREE ebooks on Windows Phone 7 development.
   • Programming Windows Phone 7, by Charles Petzold. 1000 pages big, and it covers both Silverlight and XNA development.
   • Windows Phone Programming in C#, a.k.a. “The Blue Book”, by Rob Miles.
6. Look around the App Hub. There’s lots of stuff in there for Windows Phone developers of all skill levels.
7. Keep reading this blog! We’re going to be covering all sorts of aspects of Windows Phone 7 development.

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

If you’re doing web development or design, you should be checking Smashing Magazine often. There’s always some useful article, tutorial or tidbit that you can add to your “utility belt”, whether it’s from their own articles or from the Smashing Network, a set of links to selected articles from design blogs. If it’s not in your collection of bookmarks or in your RSS reader, add it now!

Smashing Magazine have just published a book on HTML 5 titled Smashing HTML 5. Whether you’re an HTML newbie or Finnegan the Folk Hero of HTML, you’ll find this book useful. The first half of the book is the meat-and-potatoes part, covering the structure of pages and all the changes that HTML 5 brings to them. The second half is where the whiz-bang stuff that most people associate with HTML 5 gets handled: images, sound, video, JavaScript, canvas, forms, geolocation, storage and so on. Since it’s a Smashing Magazine book, it’s not just informative, it’s also nicely designed and pleasing to look at.

Smashing HTML 5 is currently available from Amazon Canada for CAD$30.23.

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

The East of Toronto .NET User Group always has something going on, and next month, they’ve got something big: they’re holding a Microsoft Web Camp in Ajax on Saturday, February 19th.

Microsoft’s Web Camps are big workshop events where you can learn how to build websites and web applications using Microsoft web tools and technologies. From ASP.NET MVC (my preferred way of building sites on the Microsoft stack) to the new WebMatrix to OData, Web Camps are a great way to get introduced to these goodies.

Agenda

Here are the sessions being held at the East of Toronto .NET User Groups’ Web Camp:

Session 1 – Implementing OData

The Open Data Protocol (OData) is a Web protocol for querying and updating data that provides a way to unlock your data and free it from silos that exist in applications today. OData does this by applying and building upon Web technologies such as HTTP, Atom Publishing Protocol (AtomPub) and JSON to provide access to information from a variety of applications, services, and stores. The protocol emerged from experiences implementing AtomPub clients and servers in a variety of products over the past several years. OData is being used to expose and access information from a variety of sources including, but not limited to, relational databases, file systems, content management systems and traditional Web sites.

Session 2 – An Introduction to WebMatrix and Razor

Microsoft WebMatrix is very light-weight alternative to building Web applications with Visual Studio. WebMatrix is designed for those who: are new to programming on the Web, want to build a small site quickly, prefer inline scripting, want to integrate with an OSS application, or perhaps all of these mixed together. In this session we’ll look at how to build applications using WebMatrix and the new “Razor” view engine.

Session 3 – Almost Instant Web Site

DotNetNuke is an ASP.NET framework for web site creation.  During this session, attendees will see how the DotNetNuke Framework facilitates the creation of fully functioning web sites, like the Toronto Code Camp web site, in less than 30 minutes.  The session will demonstrate the creation of a DotNetNuke site from the ground up including software installation, database configuration, site customization, and skinning.  Specific focus will be given to some of the issues that can trip up the first time users of DotNetNuke Framework.  Additionally, the new "Razor" plug-in for will be demonstrated showing off DotNetNuke’s newest feature.

Session 4 – Case Study – Optimist Club of Ajax

The Optimist Club of Ajax has just released its new website into the wild! In this session I will talk about how we used Windows Live Admin Center to provide services like email, calendaring and document management for the club. We will also discuss how we are leveraging a new feature for Internet Explorer 9 – Pinned Sites. With pinned sites enabled for a website, users can pin that site to the Windows 7 taskbar or add the site to the desktop or Start menu. Finally I will show you how we are leveraging Microsoft Tag. Microsoft Tag is a new kind of bar code that connects almost anything in the real world to information, entertainment, and interactive experiences on your mobile phone.

Where and When?

The East of Toronto .NET User Group’s Web Camp takes place on Saturday, February 19th from 8:30 a.m. to 3:00 p.m. in Ajax at the Ajax Community Centre (75 Centennial Road) in the Commodore Room. Admission is free, but you need to register.

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

I held the first Coffee and Code of 2011 at a venue new to me: Cloud Free Agent Espresso Bar, located in Toronto’s West Queen West neighbourhood (968 Queen Street West, to be precise). It’s a work-friendly café that also acts as the home base for its parent business, Cloud AdAgents, an advertising/marketing/communications/social media agency. Rochelle Latinsky, who works at Cloud, along with Managing Director Tamera Kremer, invited me to host a Coffee and Code at their café, and went so far as to lend me their downstairs meeting room. I’d like to thank them for the invitation and the opportunity.

The café, located on the ground floor, serves a variety of espresso machine drinks, from “plain old coffee: (a.k.a. Americano) to the cappucinos, mochas, lattes and the like, as well as teas and hot chocolate. Unlike many cafes, whose food offerings are limited to sweet snacks, they serve about a half dozen different types of sandwiches (including some veggie options) and soup and chili. As for their sweet snacks, they had a variety of muffins, scones and three or four different types of cookies. I ordered a tasty turkey and provolone sandwich made with ciabatta bread along with some roasted red pepper soup, and later on in the afternoon, I had one of their nutella-and-chocolate chip cookies – all were delicious.

It’s a bright, airy space, with glass walls facing south and west, which means lots of light in the afternoon. Most of the seating is at the three bars that ring the café, with the longest one facing the south glass wall, giving you a great view of the passers-by on Queen Street West. Conversely, they get a good view of you, and when I sat at that bar in the later part of the afternoon, there were two instances where a friend saw me at the bar and dropped in for a conversation.

You might think that a bar might be too narrow a surface to do work, but it was more than enough space to accommodate my 17” “Dellasaurus”, which is a bigger laptop than most. I walk around with an accordion on my back, so I have a warped idea of what constitutes a “portable” computer.

For the curious: the Dellasaurus – that’s the nickname we’ve given it at Microsoft Canada’s Developer and Platform Evangelism team – is a Dell Precision M6500. It’s essentially a kick-ass server machine packed into a 17” laptop body. It has a quad-core Intel i7 chip, 16GB RAM, 1GB video RAM, mechanical and solid state hard drive, and it runs Visual Studio and rips DVDs simultaneously without skipping a beat. To borrow a line from my hero Ferris Bueller: “It is so choice. If you have the means, I highly recommend picking one up.”

The bars are great for hanging out or working solo or in pairs. If you’re getting together with a couple more friends, there is a table in the corner:

This is a work-friendly café. While a handful of cafes have made it clear that they’d rather not have people using their establishments as workspaces (some in a friendly manner, others in more passive-aggressive ways), this place makes it clear in the “Free Agent” part of their name: they invite you to come in and get some work done. Most of the seats are within a power adapter cord’s reach of an outlet, and they offer free wifi. As they say in their page about the café, it’s “designed with the untethered class in mind”.

Whether you’re an indie coder going a little stir crazy in your home office or if you just need to get out of cubicle-land for a bit, you might want to give Cloud Free Agent Espresso Bar a try. I’ve had many a good experience “café coding”, and Cloud has all the necessary ingredients to be a great place for that sort of thing. I expect that it’s going to be one of my regular go-to places when I’m not on the road and I need to get out of the home office.

In addition to the café, there’s also a meeting space downstairs that they rent out. The Cloud folks were kind enough to loan it to me for Coffee and Code to try out. It’s a nice space, with seating for about a dozen people, a good number of outlets and large wall-mounted screen with webcam. It’s perfect for offsite meetings or small seminars.

They even gave me a free pot of coffee and pitcher of icewater with cucumber slices in it:

Rent on this space works out to about $40 an hour, and they’ll throw in a $20 catering credit if you book it for 2 or more hours. I’m going to keep this place in mind; the rate’s pretty good, and I’ve got a number of ideas – such as a Windows Phone 7 development jam session –- where a space like this could come in handy. Perhaps it could be useful for your needs as well.

As for the Coffee and Code? This one got only a handful of visitors, but that’s okay – everyone who came had never been to a Coffee and Code before, and most were people whom I’d met for the first time, and as a result, I’ve got a couple of extra items on my “to do” list. I consider that a success.

Once again I’d like to thank Rochelle and Tamera for inviting me to Cloud and letting me have free roam of their space. I enjoyed my visit, and I will be back!

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.