November 21, 2011 Conferences
Passed weekend I’ve been at Mobile Professional Days conference in Kharkiv (again).
Shortly conference worth time I spent for it, but not that much because of the information I got there, but rather more because spending lot of time with my friends. We had to travel overall about 40 hours. We had two laptops (one air), two kindles two iPads, one iPhone and one HTC wp7 to play with. True geeks in occasionally-connected environment, called train, and then not so starry hotel as it should have been. Reading books while travelling and tweeting much during conference itself brought feeling of not wasting time. Ah, and of course tasty coffee-breaks were awesome.
Really nice and modern monument at the entrance of Kharkiv university hosting conference. Cool!
Some other photos from conference itself can be seen here.
My thoughts on each presentation
Now, let’s be more serious. I will be critical in this post, so don’t share this with speakers :).
I will list only those presentations I’ve attended. (Also as conference was in Russian, I’m translating titles of presentations so sorry if I translated not as you like.)
1. Flexible methodologies for Mobile projects
Honestly it was completely not I wanted to hear here. It was simply well organized presentation about usual methodologies used in every day that can be applied to any project. Distributed teams, scrum, team work and people motivation are general topics not specific to Mobile. Only one thing I liked was about having phones for each developer.
2. iOS development, first steps
Ok, this one was about its topic and overall very interesting despite I didn’t know a lot of things about iOS.
3. Mobile games – development is just half of the deal
Great presentation and great presenter. Real game publisher talked around pitfalls and other stuff you have to overcome to make your game successful in your marketplace. There were some real examples, statistics. Was really very interesting to listen to this man.
4. Game “Stay alive in mobile”
Blonde (Olga, sorry) went though good and bad examples of design for applications. She let everyone know that you have to take into account dozen of variables to create really usable application. You should even think about length of users nails. I think this presentation was great and easy for consumption.
5. Best of the XCode 4.2 and iOS 5.0 from the developers view
I didn’t get this presentation. Definitely because I know nothing about iOS and XCode. Anyway, at least it is useful to feel myself a stupid idiot time to time.
6. How to make good and mobile in one bottle
Guy from JetBrains, discussed different design approaches for the iOS and Android phones. He touched many interesting aspects of designing good applications. I was bit disappointed that he didn’t say much about new metro style in wp7. I think it is great and not everyone caught it yet.
7. RESTfull iOS with RestKit
This sucked! No, really. I understand that another person had to substitute original presenter, but why wasn’t he ready and why slides had tons of code. Crap, not presentation. Message to presenter: don’t be disappointed by what I said, you had hard time so you know next time you have to perform 100 times better. I’ve been in similar situation and it sucked as well, but I had auditory 10-20 times smaller.
8. Evolution of mobile apps. Though Could and Social into Mobile 2.0
This presentation was as manna from the heaven after REST-laugh. I got a lot of interesting information on social integration. Auditory had some fun when on slide appeared app for gays.
9. Guidelines isn’t limitation
How getting slightly away from official UI guidelines can take you out of the crowd of the other apps. Presenter showed great examples when new awesome design was born because of this. Also he gave good feedback about metro design for wp7 and well-documented guidelines.
10. How to speed up and reduce the cost of developing mobile apps
Maybe the best presentation and delivery. It was smooth and easy to listening to. At this presentation I got some feeling of HTML 5 as the future for the mobile development.
Fun with tweets
Great that there was twitter board. It kept good mood even when it started to be boring. To help you feel general atmosphere during the #mpdays2011 below are my tweets chronologically (you have to be able to read Ukrainian):
At #mpdays2011 in Kharkiv. Hope it worth trip over 1000 km.
#mpdays2011 Перекличка. Я #wp7! Хто ще?
#mpdays2011 Не хочу бути занудою але всі ці речі загальні для будь якого типу розробки. Де спицифіка розробки під мобільні платформи. #q
@caxarock #mpdays2011 Scrum це гнучка методологія. :)
#mpdays2011 О! Останній слайд із пляжем мені сподобався.
@UkrDaddy А не по кількості людей? Там цікаво про #wp7? #mpdays2011
Ситуація із кнопкою не того розміру або не там дуже знайома. #mpdays2011
За якоюсь історією мало бути 42 а не 7. #mpdays2011
А нашим клієнтам радять тримати телефон на зарядці в автомобілі поки вони виконують роботу. :) #mpdays2011
Таке враження що на #mpdays2011 одні студенти. А де бородаті дядіньки?
@eGoOki ти мене заплутав. Я #wp7 прийнов на #ios і був певен, що там цікавіше. #mpdays2011 хм…
Хочу побакланити презентацію по restkit. Що за слайди із тууучою коду? І що він там говорить… КАПУТ!#mpdays2011
#mpdays2011 Презентеру влаштували інтерв’ю. Таке враження, що ті хто запитують знають відповіді. Тупо фейл…
Музику врубали, щоб блондинка із першого ряду станцювала. Єуех… Давай! #mpdays2011
Про #cloud і #social цікаво. Принаймні Тарас доповідає впевнено! #mpdays2011
@Alokard #mpdays2011 Якщо доповідач толковий, то твітеряни це помічають. Не було б сміття в ленті.
At #mpdays#2011 I understood that the coolest platform is #wp7 not because of presentations, but because of using actual phone here!
Listening to #iOS UI guidelines. I think #metro in #wp7 is much better. #mpdays2011 (I know ’cause I’m using it & it rocks.)
Нас зомбують 25тим кадром із сіськами :) #mpdays2011
Man called C# a bubble! O_o Java isn’t bubble than? #mpdays2011 Crap is it going to be HTML and JS?
codemore code
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