Çingleton 2011 Symposium - a brief summary

Last weekend, the Çingleton 2011 Symposium was held in Montréal for the first time. This two day event was very enlightening and refreshing. It was about mobile application development and general trend in that field.

I attended this symposium and here is a brief summary of things that I've heard at the event.

First, the most striking thing is that as iOS developers with ideas and a desire to push limits of mobile applications, we are all part of something really big that is going on since 2007. Nobody knows if we are at the tipping point yet. It is clear that things we do now with our mobile devices is very different from things we will do in five or ten years from now. Nobody really knows.

Second, Apple legacy will be felt for a long time even after Steve Jobs passing away. What Apple does is provide users with great products and great user experience with them. And to achieve this, they are not afraid to take risks and try new things. We should too, as iOS developers do the same thing. Think design, think about the users, think about the experience should all be driving our development efforts.

Third, we should feel grateful just to be in the middle on all these technical advances and be able to make a difference. Even small ones.

Here is a few things that I've have heard on the floor at the event:

• Applications discovery is still a major problem for indie iOS developers. How do we get noticed in a 500 000 applications store?
• Android presence in the market is very real. Developers starts to think about the business value of porting iOS apps to the Android Market. Fragmentation is a real issue. More than 650 devices to test against. 
• The iPad potential in story telling application is way under utilized. A few good apps exists in that area but their cost of development make them rare beasts. 
• The analog world is more and more numerical. The use of natural user interaction models will help make the numeric nature of this world more approachable. 

Finally, here is a few photo sets from this event.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/gruber/sets/72157627919287660/

http://www.flickr.com/photos/cingleton/

http://www.flickr.com/photos/foobar/6252403530/in/set-72157627786395573