Last April I was sent from itnig to Krakow (Poland) to attend one of the best Ruby conferences in Europe: Railsberry. What I later discovered was that just a few days before Railsberry there was another really cool conference, organized by the same people, about mobile development. So there I went!
I’m talking of course about the Mobile Mobile Conf, or #mmconf. In short, #mmconf is a conference for mobile designers and developers to share what they think is going to be the next big thing. After the talks they use the wonderful environment of the conference/Krakow to meet with other people working on the same.
The talks covered topics such as “native vs html5”, multi-platform, the future of mobile, the relation between “mobile” and “web” and marketing of mobile apps. I guess we could sum up the whole message of the 2-day conference with the message from Brad Frost in his talk:
For a future friendly web
One thing that developers (in this case specially mobile developers) have to always keep in mind is:
We don’t know what device will be under the christmas tree two years from now.
Being an advocate of Mobile First, Content First, responsiveness, etc, Brad sums up the 5 features that a future friendly mobile app/web must have as follows:
- Ubiquity: Same content everywhere. People DO WANT to do the same things on mobile, don’t assume they’re just looking around. Mobile e-commerce growing like crazy is a good proof for this.
- Flexibility: Give the best possible experience given the constraints of the devise being used. Don’t try to always do everything, but do it the best possible way.
- Performance: 74% of the people will abandon a site if it takes more than 5 seconds to load. Performance is a feature.
- Enhancement: Mobile-first, enhance progressively to add extra features or better experience if the bigger display allows it.
- Future-friendly: Be backwards-compatible to try being forward-compatible.
Slides (from the same talk, but in a different event).
Jordi Romero
Partner at itnig