Welcome to part 1 of our comprehensive review of the much anticipated Update 2011 Conference at Brighton Dome on 6th September (@updateconf and #Update2011 on Twitter)

This post contains our review of the Update 2011 morning sessions, including:

• Matt Gemmell – Unusability
• Jeremy Keith – The One Web
• Chris Evans-Roberts – Ithaca Audio
• Debate – Geek Ninja Battle – Web Apps vs Native Apps

For the rest of this review – please visit:

Afternoon Session Update 2011 Part 1: with -

• Seb Lee-Delisle – Angry Birds Corona Workshop
• Sarah Parmenter – UI Design for iOS
• Relly Annett-Baker – Arse Over Tit
• Interview with Ronald Wayne – Apple Co-Founder

Afternoon Session Update 2011 Part 2: with -

• Joachim Bondo – Going Beyond Delicious
• Anna Debenham – The Digital Native
• Geek Ninja Battle Debate – Design Challenges
• Closing Keynote – Cennyd Bowles – The Things of the Future

Subtitled “The Human Touch: iOS and Beyond” the event featured a range of presentations, debates and workshops around mobile development and design, both native and web based – a subject we discussed on this blog recently.

The day was brilliantly organised and compered by iOS app developer Aral Balkan, and as the title of the conference suggests, an overriding theme of the day was keeping user experience at the forefront of all mobile design and development work.

We shot lots of video and took lots of photos, and we’ll be writing up a lot of the presentations in more detail in due course. You can also check out our Update 2011 Photos on Flickr - more will follow soon.

We are looking for Native app development trainers click here for more details.

Update 2011 Conference Review: Morning Session

Intro – Aral Balkan

After milling about the foyer of the Dome for a while and chatting to some developers (and admiring the floating balls – pictured above) – we took our seats. The lights dimmed, and the Update 2011 video played.

We couldn’t have had a livelier start –  as Aral took to the stage with his backing band and belted out a rocking rendition of Fifth Dimension’s Let the Sunshine In.

Aral’s enthusiasm is infectious, rather like Steve Jobs in his presentation style, and he set the theme for the day nicely – asserting that mobile developers and designers are ‘makers’ with the skills to influence, empower and inform.

No sooner had he finished, then on strode Matt Gemmell’s evil twin, and shot him! As Aral exited stage left, Matt took the mic – smoking pistol in hand….

Matt Gemmell – Unusability

We’ve already written up our summary of Matt’s presentation, which was a really entertaining illustration of how to achieve great usability in App design, by looking at the exact opposite – Unusability!

Matt is a freelance iOS developer, and delivered the presentation in the guise of his evil twin, who gave us a “worst practice” toolkit on how to “really piss off users” with clumsy, useless, non-user-centric apps.

This was a really entertaining way to deliver some good advice, and he flipped things round at the end with some really useful best practice takeaways, that were of course the opposite of his evil twin’s advice!

Update 2011 – Jeremy Keith – The One Web

Jeremy is a Brighton based developer who works at Clearleft, and a staunch advocate of web-apps over native apps for mobile.

He argued convincingly in his presentation that the ‘killer app’ IS the web, because it’s completely open. Its primary design principle is its universality and no-one needs permission to publish on it, or link to other parts of it.

By publishing with mobile users in mind on the web instead than creating device-specific apps, Keith argues that we are contributing to the “stock” rather the “flow” of the web, and will be creating content that will endure for ever.

He maintains that if we design for individual apps, our creations will die when they do. You can’t link to an app, they’re not as open as the web – and Keith criticised Steve Jobs’ idiom that you “don’t need permission to be awesome”, when you DO need permission to publish to the App Store – which locks users in. He compared Apps to the Encarta Encyclopedia CD ROM – they’re millions of unconnected islands.

I have a lot of time for Keith’s argument for using web apps over native – and as web standards and capabilities improve its undoubtedly something we’ll inevitably see a lot more of. However there are still apps (games for example) that simply can’t be supported by a web app – because of their size, functionality and performance requirements – and that people will naturally search app stores for this sort of content rather than the web. To be fair to Keith – I had a chat with him about this later in the day and he conceded as much himself – but maintained that a lot of native functionality will be supported by tomorrow’s web, and we should be working for the “one web” – which you can’t help but agree with (there’s more on this in the debate below).

Update 2011 Chris Evans-Roberts – Ithaca Audio

The first of a few music acts of the day. My notes on this just say “f***ing brilliant”!

Chris performed a superb VJ mash-up set mixing together an incredible range of video clips of music videos, tv shows and movies, all perfectly synced on the screen behind him – including the theme from Shaft, the Imperial March from Star Wars, Phat Planet by Leftfield, Praise You by Fatboy Slim, Apache by the Incredible Bongo Band, Stronger by Daft Punk and even “Drag Racer” (the old theme for BBC snooker coverage).

You had to be there to appreciate how cool this was – and the audio on the video we shot doesn’t really do it justice – but you can check out a similar mash-up from Chris on YouTube below:

Update 2011 Debate – Geek Ninja Battle – Web Apps vs Native Apps

The first of the day’s debates next – and one that got quite heated at points. We were especially interested in this one having posted on our own thoughts on web vs native apps last week

Aral chaired the debate, and on the panel were:

• Kevin Whinnery – from Appcelerator, makers of the Titanium app development tool
• Martin Beeby – from Microsoft and evangelist for Windows Phone
• Matt Gemmell – freelance iOS developer (see above!)
• Seb Lee-Delisle – Brighton based coder
• Jeremy Keith – from Clearleft and web app evangelist (see above!)

Aral opened by asking Microsoft’s Martin Beeby “why should develop for Windows Phone?” He was naturally keen to  highlight the easy-to-use tools Microsoft has produced. He conceded that Windows Phone lacks market share at the moment – but encouraged developers to “take a punt”.

Jeremy quickly stepped in – continuing his theme from earlier and advocating that developers design for the capabilities of devices by producing progressively enhanced web applications rather than native apps aimed just at one device. In his view, the browser is the best app on any phone – even the ‘crappy’ browsers on Windows phone – a gasp from the crowd at the first bit of controversy here! Martin quickly pointed out that the next Windows phones will have browsers that run off the IE9 engine, and will be much better!

We then heard a little from Seb Lee-Delisle, who was a Flash developer for a long time and likened Flash authoring to developing apps for specific devices, as you inevitably run in to compatibility problems. However he did not fully support Keith’s viewpoint that web-apps should be used for everything as they aren’t suitable for all types of media – for example certain versions of the Android OS don’t play audio from websites. Keith responded to this by asserting that today’s native functionality will be tomorrow’s mobile web.

Matt Gemmell continued this theme by talking about the arms race between web and native. His view was that there will always be native apps because of the functionality that’s being added for content delivery – for example newspapers being delivered straight to Kindles / iPads etc… Keith again argued that all you need is a web browser to support this functionality. However there was some doubt in this argument in terms of changing user-behaviour – if people get used to installing native apps from an app store and having content delivered to their device, how can they be tempted back to the web.

Aral then put the point to Kevin Whinnery that just because we’re writing sites with CSS and JavaScript that can be accessed from mobiles doesn’t mean that we necessarily have ‘web apps’, and asked how the Titanium development tool that Appcelerator offer can help. Kevin argued that one of the key benefits of native apps is the opportunity to build in low level system integration that takes advantage of a device’s specific features, like the accelerometer or geolocation (Keith visibly shaking his head at this point!) which play to the users expectations of what they will get from their device. Kevin pointed out that producing one web app for all devices does not drive competition in the same way that native apps do.

Keith argued again that creating web content that works on all devices is a big advantage, and that the major competitive advantage of this approach is the HTTP URL is the competitive advantage, because you can link two things together, which you can never do on a native app.

Seb responded by arguing that whilst you do lose the power of the web as a platform in native apps, you have the advantage of using one tool, with one skillset that will apply to all applications in iOS PLUS the web (which you can link to from apps, if not vice versa).

You got the feeling that this debate could have run on for a while – but Aral took the opportunity to invite questions from the floor. I didn’t get extensive notes from the Q&A session as I got up to ask one (which unfortunately I didn’t get the chance to do as the time ran out) – however we do have video, which we’ll do our best to get up here as soon as we can.

LUNCH!

That’s it for the morning session – read our review of the first presentations in the afternoon here

Similar posts you may like

1. #Update2011 Brighton Conference Review: Afternoon (Part 1)
2. #Update2011 Conference Brighton Review : Afternoon (Part 2)
3. Brighton Digital Marketing Festival (#BDMF) – Morning Keynotes Review
4. #Update2011 : Unusability – How not to design mobile apps!
5. Latest Google Algorithm Update 2011

Tags

android, Aral Balkan, Brighton, Chris Evans-Roberts, iOS, Jeremy Keith, Kevin Whinnery, Martin Beeby, Matt Gemmell, Mobile App Development, Native Apps, review, Seb Lee-Delisle, update 2011, Update 2011 Conference, Update 2011 Conference Review, Update 2011 in Brighton, update2011, updateconf, Web Apps

Share This Post