Couch Banana

An excellent day out of the office today; and a conference day that was a huge contrast to Tuesday's. I spent today at Mobile East, a conference for developers of mobile device applications - 'app's.

This took place at the Trinity Centre on the Cambridge Science Park - a location primarily known, locally anyway, for it's traffic congestion. As it's only a few miles from home and the weather was supposed to be sunny, I cycled. Thankfully, on several counts, this was more a T-shirt event than Tuesday's day of suits.

I'm an embedded software developer which means I design software that lives deep in the mobile phone. I wasn't the target audience for this event but had been invited to attend, and I was certainly glad I went along. In many ways I felt like a diesel engine engineer attending an event for train drivers, but it was very enlightening seeing how other parts of the software 'food chain' do design, code, and business.

It was a full and intensive day; very smoothly organised. The presentations covered a spread of topics and were refreshingly open - it's exceedingly rare people stand up and say this is where we made a big mistake that cost us a lot of time and money. It would have been more typical to be told that the Next Big Thing was a bed of roses rather than a bed of thorns.

Some speakers focussed on the 'user experience'. Be reassured there are people out there trying hard to make phone applications do what you want them to, even if they (the UX designers) get frustrated when commercial factors subsequently ride roughshod over the design.

Today was a good day for understanding the problems of others. Shifting my analogy from earlier - it was a bit like the ship's engineer having a spell up on deck and thinking "hmmm, icebergs are big..."

--
Cycling home wasn't much fun with the wind, traffic and hay-fever; but driving home would have been even less fun. Arrived home to find an array of (strangely) smartly dressed teenagers - it's the end of year ball for Hills Road tonight. Guess who was the taxi...

--
So to the photo. It seems traditional to provide some form of marketing freebie at these things. The array of squishy red things puzzled several people until one was illustrated holding a mobile phone. I suspect it might come into service as a camera bean-bag...

Hmm, I probably ought to declare it under new anti-bribery regulations...