Geek Ninja Battle Night - a review of sorts

Yesterday I ventured from the cosiness of my West Country Mansion to drive the motorways and A roads of Blighty to the seaside town of Brighton. Attending The Geek Ninja Battle Night that was being run by Aral Balkan which included himself as one of the 4 speakers with Sarah Parmenter, Remy Sharp and Andy Clarke.

It was a novel (an amazingly brilliant) idea to give an evening event a discussion topic and having the two 'sides' set to 'battle' over which 'side' is best at the task in hand. For this event (hopefully the first of many) the subject matter was designing and developping for mobile. There were two teams, Team Web (blue) who were represented by Andy and Remy pitted against Team Native (red) who were aptly represented by Sarah and Aral.

I did take some notes but they were few and far between as I spent most of the time just soaking up the presentations like a sponge.

Because of this I can only discuss what I took away from the evening. Anything more and I wouldn't be sure if I dreamt bits of it or not. This 'idea' came to me as Aral was gesticulating at the front of the room with so much passion and energy.

Here goes...

We shouldn't be worrying about how we design for the devices that access the internet and what is the best technology to use first. We should be thinking first and foremost about the content and the context in which that content will be used, irregardless of it being within a native app or a 'web app' (sorry Andy).

What matters is when I'm 'in town' and I fancy a pizza for a spot of lunch I can get out my smartphone, open the browser, go to the pizza express web site which takes me to what I need to know. I want to know where the nearest chain is, I'm not bothered by company literature, big images. I want to find the nearest chain, get a telephone number and make a reservation.

Of course, this could all be done using the specific os's native coding. But what I'm getting at, and I'm probably labouring (not laboring) the point, is that it's the content I required for the context I was in.

You're on a mobile phone. You don't neccesarily want to read a ton of stuff. You are going to be very task orientated. 

The only thing I would emplore you to do in which ever way you develop for mobile when choosing native or web is always include a link to the full site.

I only managed a quick thank you to Aral at the end and didn't get to say hi to Sarah, Andy (we've chatted about books & amazon on the phone) or Rem. But thank you all. It was a great evening, I hope, had by all.

nb. the image above has been taken from Aral's Geek Ninja Battle Night, I'm awaiting an ok in using it. So it may change :)