Mobile

<p class="p1">Drupal has a plethora of ways to power your mobile apps and websites, including:<ol class="ol1"><li class="li1">Responsive design</li><li class="li1">Offline storage</li><li class="li1">Integration with frameworks such as PhoneGap and Titanium Appcelerator</li><li class="li1">Utilising services to feed apps data</li><li class="li1">And much more</li></ol><p class="p1">This session will touch upon these various options, looking at when they are relevant, their complexity, their advantages and disadvantages, arming you with a toolbox for the next time a client asks for a mobile site or app.

<a href="https://www.facebook.com/MobileMondayMelbourne" target="_blank">Mobile Mondays Melbourne</a> has been running for 8 years, which in the tech event space makes it something of an elderly character and with the plethora of new events happening around town all the time, I have had the increasing feeling that some of these older events are wondering how to keep themselves relevant.

<p class="p1"><span style="line-height: 1.538em;">A strange session tonight as we had a last minute cancellation, this coupled with the typical business session audience, i.e. High RSVP, high no-show, meant it was a quiet and quick evening.<p class="p1"><span style="line-height: 1.538em;">Andrew Skinner confessed to not being a confident public speaker, however this didn&#39;t detract from his high quality, high content presentation. The presentation covered getting client / internal team buy in for developing apps and Andrew drew from his years of experience working with some high profile clients and projects. His practical take homes was an explanation of Business canvases for developing business models and how to use them.<br /><em><span style="line-height: 1.538em;">Connect with Andrew via LinkedIn - <span class="s2" style="line-height: 1.538em;"><a href="https://au.linkedin.com/in/andy2307" style="line-height: 1.538em;">https://au.linkedin.com/in/andy2307</a></em><p class="p1"><span style="line-height: 1.538em;">Cameron Burns took a very different approach, being from a marketing background, throwing away his planned talk and just seeing what the audience were interested in. He covered sources of funding, choices of development stacks, using remote development teams, marketing plans for your apps and much much more in a quick fire sequence of tips and advice.<br /><em><span style="line-height: 1.538em;">Connect with Cameron via LinkedIn - https://au.linkedin.com/pub/cameron-burns/21/71/629</em>

We had two local and two international speakers this month&hellip;

With an average global combined market share of 85-95%, iOS and Android are by far the dominant players in the mobile operating system space. So why bother looking into or developing on any other platforms?

<p class="p1"><span style="line-height: 1.538em;">It&rsquo;s been a busy week and I haven&rsquo;t quite found the time for a daily blog, so instead, lets have a quick weekly round up&hellip;<p class="p1"><span style="line-height: 1.538em;">On Monday I went to Mobile Mondays, <a href="https://www.eventbrite.com.au/e/momomay-mobile-entrepreneur-and-startup-success-secrets-may-12-6pm-tickets-11398538335" target="_blank">a session on entrepreneurs and startups</a><span style="line-height: 1.538em;">. It was the usual slightly random feel that MoMoMelb often has. I found most of the speakers a little too forthright, telling you how good they all were rather than what they offered. Most interesting of the night was Brad Birchall of <a href="https://www.google.com.au/url?sa=t&amp;rct=j&amp;q=&amp;esrc=s&amp;source=web&amp;cd=1&amp;cad=rja&amp;uact=8&amp;ved=0CCwQFjAA&amp;url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.seeracloud.com%2F&amp;ei=V_Z3U-_fJMLplAW-koCYBA&amp;usg=AFQjCNE2Y4i0sHPjfUFMf_8Z6358MTtGgw&amp;sig2=8L3j4nDBYSMJTkLYMUthcQ&amp;bvm=bv.66917471,d.dGI" target="_blank">Seera</a> (a competency framework for recruitment), but generally I couldn&rsquo;t quite figure what a lot of them actually did and why mobile was relevant.<p class="p1"><span style="line-height: 1.538em;">Tuesday was Drupal Melbourne. Stuart Clarke gave a talk on <a href="https://www.slideshare.net/deciphered/building-on-a-commons-base-sustainable-distro-based-development" target="_blank">maintaining a Drupal distribution</a> which is worth a read if you do that sort of thing. Our main speaker of the night was a visitor from India, Anoop John, who I also met up with later in the week. His presentation on <a href="https://www.slideshare.net/zyxware/drupal-in-india" target="_blank">Drupal in India</a><span style="line-height: 1.538em;">&nbsp;was a fascinating insight into an emerging country in the Drupal ecosystem as well as the world generally. I was also given a present for my help with the meet ups over the past years, which was very nice. :)<p class="p1"><span style="line-height: 1.538em;">Wednesday was a <a href="https://www.eventbrite.com/e/product-anonymous-may-14-mvp-tickets-10598537511" target="_blank">special session for the typically intimate Product Anonymous</a>, with a very large turnout, different venue and sponsorship. The subject was &lsquo;Minimum Viable Product&rsquo; (MVP) with speakers from Adioso, Seek, 99 Designs, Geoplex and hosted (admirably) by Jock Busuttil, Founder of Product People. It was a great session and I picked up some great advice that I will be applying to the Lean and Agile nonprofit project.<p class="p1"><span style="line-height: 1.538em;">At a slight tangent, on Saturday I went to the <a href="https://prov.vic.gov.au/" target="_blank">Public Records of Victoria</a> (PROV) open day and feel it&rsquo;s worth mentioning here. I found it fascinating that we still have so many paper records, in fact just 1% of Victoria&rsquo;s records have been digitised. So my fears of losing all of our records and output due to a lack of a compatible reading device in the distant future are far from being realised. Amongst many other things, I also learnt that PROV is a world leader in electronic record management and has advised the world through the <a href="https://prov.vic.gov.au/government/vers" target="_blank">VERS</a><span style="line-height: 1.538em;">&nbsp;standard. Finally I learnt about the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genealogical_Society_of_Utah" target="_blank">Genealogical Society of Utah</a><span style="line-height: 1.538em;">&nbsp;who are a branch of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and perform a massive amount of support&nbsp; for records offices all around the world through their FamilySearch brand.

The mobile monolith that is Mobile World Congress is over for another year. I was lucky enough to get hold of a press pass and decided to spend the week in Barcelona. Soaking up the warmer weather, joining the 90,000 other attendees and preparing for the bombardment of marketing mumbo jumbo to unearth some gems for developers.

Whilst not a new language, Go has gained a lot of interest over the past two years and the number of bigger name projects utilizing the language is growing rapidly. I wrote an introductory article on the language for SitePoint and came across mentions of mobile support, so thought I’d take a look at the possibilities.

Across the mobile channel in 2015 we had over 3 million views and published just over 160 posts.

2016 was quite a year for technology and its impact on the world. Subconsciously or not, nestled amongst the booths of generic Chinese handsets and app marketing companies were many projects and people at MWC that sought to accomplish something more meaningful. Here are some of the themes and concepts I feel will shape 2017 and 2018.

There is a lot to see, hear, and discover at Mobile World Congress (MWC) and its many side events. From helping the developing world, to brain imaging, and sensors on seals, these are some of my highlights.

I remember the first time I tried the image recognition technology in the Google translate app, snapping a poster to instantly translate what it said into a language I understood. It was far from perfect, but it was cool, and it showed the potential of what more traditional optical character recognition could be used for.

Chris Ward's interview with Sauce Labs takes a look at the acquisition of TestObject automated app testing service, SauceCon, and how to test the Internet of Things.

Learn about Sencha's ExtReact, making cross-platform desktop and mobile components available for the React framework, in this interview.

This interview with Mark Lorion, President and General Manager at Apperian, discusses the company's offerings for business app management.

Read about the most exciting developments from this year's Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, like IoT, Google assistant, augmented reality, and artificial intelligence.

I am one of those rare and crazy people that owned the one and only