Java Me or JavaMe?
The next talk I attended was a bit of a black sheep. It’s a J2ME talk for one, and for another, it’s not really about technology, code, or some guy flapping about helplessly at his IDE while we all patiently wait for something vaguely noteworthy to happen.
Despite the incoherent and faintly pretentious title, the talk, I grudgingly admit, is pretty good. Grudgingly, because I don’t like Eugene as a person (at least, on irc), he’s a little too creepy/nice/full of shit for my taste. As a speaker though, he’s interesting, engaging, and able to communicate in a non ‘gosh I’m a tech dude wtf am I doing up on a stage’ kinda style.
Still, personal feelings aside, he’s a rather good speaker, certainly compared to the competition so far. The talk is in fact also awfully interesting, since it deals with higher level issues surrounding J2ME.
Eugene covers all the pitfalls in the mobile Java ecosystem. These are often not technical, but political, or the result of various parties all eager to protect their turfs. I’m not an ME guy, so the talk was a bit of an eye opener onto that world. The ME world seems awfully full of NDAs, secretive partner deals, zealous API protectionist mentalities, and often trying to screw everyone both up and downstream of your slot in the stack in the aim of forcing the users to become coupled to your slice of the pie (whether it be OS, api, vendor, app vendor, retailer, etc).
There’s also an interesting discussion of a commercial application’s lifecycle, and how vendors and partners interact (with detrimental results) with various milestones of the process.
An interesting description of people’s interaction with mobile devices is to recognise and work with the fact that users exhibit ’snacking behaviour’, in terms of their expectations, demands, and usage. Applications that follow these principles are far more likely to succeed and result in happy user noises.
