I just got back from another great trip to the US Heartland where I was speaking at the Heartland DevCon (#HDC13) in Omaha. Last year I premiered at #HDC12 my session “iOS Development Survival Guide for the .NET Guy”, which now has become my most popular talk to date. This year I premiered another mobile dev talk at HDC, this time on jQuery Mobile. I also reprised my session “The Great Mobile Debate: Native vs. Hybrid App Development”. Both sessions were extremely well attended, I had great conversations with attendees at the Infragistics booth, and overall I had a lot of fun at the show.
Omaha steaks are also awesome! I finally know where The Drover is.
Gallup Video Interview: All About Mobile
I also had the pleasure of being interviewed by Jim Collison from GALLUP for a live YouTube videocast. Jim & I discussed the world of mobility in general, the new Nokia Lumia 1020, Microsoft's Nokia acquisition, Amazon's potential Kindle Phone, BlackBerry patents, Native vs. Hybrid mobile development, Build vs. Buy in software development, 3D printing, and more.
You can watch the interview using the embedded player below:
[youtube] width="560" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/SeQRVpyeDhg" [/youtube]
Event Slides & Demos
If you attended my talks and you’re looking for the slides & demos, they are posted here below as promised.
Cross-Platform Phone Apps & Sites with jQuery Mobile
Native mobile apps have taken all the spotlight in recent years thanks to the introduction of hundreds of thousands of apps in various app stores from Apple, Google, Microsoft and BlackBerry. Apps offer a great native platform experience, but they can be expensive to build and require specific languages, SDKs and skill sets across multiple platforms. Mobile web sites offer a great way to engage with consumers and corporate workers alike without requiring the installation of any app. This session explores the benefits of web development for smartphones using the most popular HTML5 & JavaScript framework for mobile: jQuery Mobile (JQM). We’ll go over a quick primer on HTML5, CSS and JavaScript, followed by everything you need to get started with JQM. We’ll cover the most common development environment options, how to build your first jQuery Mobile page, and how to debug your mobile web code with some of the available tools. We’ll also discuss how to develop a native-like experience on each mobile platform thanks to JQM’s adaptive rendering, and how you wrap a JQM project as a deployable application using PhoneGap. Web development is a critical skill required by every mobile developer; come learn how to get started and reach hundreds of millions of users through a smart mobile web approach.
The Great Mobile Debate: Native vs. Hybrid App Development
It’s not easy being a mobile developer. iOS and Android dominate the market, Windows Phone is climbing into third place, and we’re not really sure if BlackBerry still matters. Do you focus on one platform or many? What size of the mobile population do you really want to reach? Each mobile platform comes with its own programming languages, SDKs, IDEs and application lifecycle & architecture. Are we really expected to learn all of this? Isn’t HTML5 supposed to be the Silver Bullet so we can finally write apps once and run them everywhere? This session will demystify all these questions, walking you through the modern mobile ecosystem, and explore your options as a developer. We’ll review the native story on each major platform, discuss the pros & cons of both mobile native and web development, cover some of the cross-platform solutions available to developers, and explore best practices and guidelines to insure a successful mobile strategy. Don’t just blindly pick a side or assume that “one size fits all”, this session covers one of the most hotly contested debates in modern IT. Come join us and be a part of the conversation.
Until Next Time…
With HDC, the Fall 2013 conference season has officially started. You can catch me and attend more of my talks at the following events over the next few months:
- Central NJ .NET User Group– September 12 in Cranbury, NJ
- NYC Code Camp– September 14 in Manhattan, NY
- M3 Conference– October 24-25 in Columbus, OH
- Prairie DevCon– November 4-5 in Saskatoon, SK
- Visual Studio Live! / Modern Apps Live! / Live! 360– November 18-22 in Orlando, FL
- Philly Code Camp– November 23 in Abington, PA
- DevTeach– December 2-4 in Vancouver, BC
If you have any questions about the topics discussed in these sessions, you can post them in the comments below or contact me on Twitter at @ActiveNick.