simonfiction

I’m fresh out of my first @media ‘08 conference sat with a cup-o-cha waiting for my train at Paddington and feeling decidedly inspired enough to write about it. I have to confess, before today I was a complete conference virgin. Well, web conference anyway. Quite shocking considering I’ve been in the industry for the best part of decade but working as the only web developer in a software house, I struggle to get the justification to be sent on anything remotely interesting. Having just popped my web – slash - “geek chic” conference cherry, I realised this must be a rare point of view in the industry and thought I’d let all the other conference virgins out there know how it went.

Needless to say, I saw enough macbooks and Linux based Asus eee pc’s to make Bill Gates weep tears of blood. The whole event felt ridiculously comfortable. I put it down to all the tech blogs and mailing lists I read, I knew exactly what to expect. Anyone coming from a more MS conference background will be as refreshingly surprised as I was at the equal ratio of male to female geeks. Not to stereotype but this could be down to the design types there.

I was prepared for the culture of people using laptops during the sessions, but quite annoyed by the constant tip tapping in my ear. I mean, what are they doing? Work? Are they actually blogging as they listen? The sessions aren’t that hands on or involved enough to try things out as you listen.

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I’ve recently been playing around with a new idea for a mobile web application and was looking forward to pushing the OpenID cause with it. This is my first attempt at using OpenID for sign on and probably my last for a while. In principle, I’m all for it. Even with the potential flaw of someone getting access to several of your accounts with just one set of credentials, it’s always felt like an obvious missing technology on the web and I’m glad to see it get some momentum.

I’m a big mobile application fan and it feels as though there’s a lot of buzz around them this year. As mobile devices get better and location aware platforms such as Yahoo’s FireEagle begin to emerge, I think everyone has a head full of cool ideas. However, I found out that OpenID and mobile applications aren’t the best match. If you’ve played with OpenID already you’re probably familiar with some of potential pitfalls. Here are some of the biggies I found while using it in with my mobile app.

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