LiMo Foundation Blog

Last week, I went to Berlin for the annual LinuxTag event and to participate in the WIPJam running on the first day.

This was my first visit to LinuxTag, and it was interesting to compare it to FOSDEM, which I visited for the second time earlier this year. For those that haven't been, LinuxTag is an interesting combination of trade show, commercial exhibition, conference and community get-together.  Apparently, some 11,000 individuals were in attendance, which would make it almost three times the size of FOSDEM. But a combination of the much larger exhibition centre in place of FOSDEM's university campus, and being a 4 day event compared to FOSDEM's weekend, meant that it never really felt that busy. This is borne out by the speaking events - FOSDEM had almost 300 talks over two days, while LinuxTag only managed 231 across four. Much more leisurely! This turned out to be a good thing - it was handy to have some time to look around the show floor, hold conversations in the corridors, and generally soak up the atmosphere. On the whole, the LinuxTag talks seemed to be pitched more at introductory level, while FOSDEM felt more bleeding-edge and intensively technical. This seemed to suit the audience, which was much more mixed at LinuxTag.

The WIPJam on Wednesday turned out to be lively, with lots of good discussions. I really like the WIP format for these sessions - relaxed and informal with just the right amount of nudging from the organisers to keep things moving. Carlo and Thibaut did a great job of running the event, despite the blistering heat. I'd been asked to help facilitate discussion on "Cross Platform development - platform choices and mobile dev tools". We ran two sessions, both with more than a dozen participants, from a range of backgrounds including developers, researchers, industry luminaries and business owners.

One of the key messages that came out of the discussion was that these developers are very much focussing on HTML5 to help solve their cross-platform problems. The message was "as much HTML as possible, only use native when absolutely necessary". It was suggested that a significant number of apps in app stores only use native to embed browser engines and provide a wrapper around HTML, combining the benefits of cross-platform standards-based development with the benefits of the app store delivery model. It would certainly be interesting to see some hard statistics that back up this perception.

We looked a bit at priorities for picking a platform, and the consensus was that reach, monetisation, tooling, openness and the availability of a vibrant support community ("fan boys") were key.  A corollary of that was that no amount of openness or reach can make up for a platform that is simply too difficult to write for. There was also significant enthusiasm for multiple app stores to be available on each phone platform (a view I'm not altogether in agreement with as I think it will frustrate and confuse consumers). Developers also wanted "Babelfish for Apps" to help them with cross-platform development: a guide to how things work on each platform. For example, on Palm you have a swipe gesture to go back in apps, on Android you have a back button, on iPhone it's typically a UI element on screen.

Finally, the discussion group members were all conscious that we're entering a new era where we don't just need to worry about cross platform development, but also cross form-factor and cross-category development. With the proliferation of mobile devices, netbooks, and the oncoming tsunami of tablet computers, good design and an MVC approach to app construction will only become more important. Cross-platform UI toolkits and frameworks will help, but design and testing will become increasingly challenging.

Elsewhere in LinuxTag, some of the highlights included:

* Paul Adams' talk on  Kolab (it's great to see effort being put into a truly secure, open source cross-platform PIM solution).

* Chatting to the Cream Desktop Environment guys who had a slick demo, some neat ideas and tons of enthusiasm - I hope to see them get involved with upstream GNOME and getting their ideas more widely accepted.

* Most of the mobile sessions were packed with standing room only. Several talks included lots of interesting Q&A at the end (for example "Mobile Development with Qt and Qt Creator") so the audience were not just interested but also very clearly engaged in the topics.

* Dirk's talk on MeeGo, which was interesting, informative, entertaining and included a risky live demo. Dirk was a great advocate for the platform, and spoke at just the right level for the audience.

Next year's LinuxTag is 11-14 May in Berlin, and there's a load more WIP Jams coming up in the future - catch one if you can!