How to be a Programmer: "To be a good programmer is difficult and noble. The hardest part of making real a collective vision of a software project is dealing with one's coworkers and customers. Writing computer programs is important and takes great intelligence and skill. But it is really child's play compared to everything else that a good programmer must do to make a software system that succeeds for both the customer and myriad colleagues for whom she is partially responsible. In this essay I attempt to summarize as concisely as possible those things that I wish someone had explained to me when I was twenty-one."

Future directions for mobile: " the telecom industry will capitalize on maturing machine-generated communications to build connectivity inside machines and devices, resulting in remote process monitoring, asset tracking, traffic flow monitoring and more."

Capturing Human Rights Abuse: "a Web site that would act as a portal for images of human rights violations that may be captured by the proliferating number of video cameras and mobile phones in the hands of people around the world"

Julian and William are discussing J2ME on Ecademy - apparently the games industry have gotten fed up and are going to sort it all out for us. I'd reply there if I could, but haven't been able to post into the forums for a few months now... so here we go:

"My understanding is that this will be a NATIVE game architecture, that is compiled code not a VM. The fragmentation not only increases costs, it reduces innovation. The performance penalities of running game code in a VM is another issue that is being addressed here."

Well, if they fix it tomorrow - which they won't - we'll have 3-5 years before whatever magical pixie dust they eventually release gets out there in large enough numbers to be worth bothering with. If this is a problem for you, either get out of mobile for a few years, or learn to deal with what we've got today (that's rhetorical - I realise that you're doing the latter William ;)).

Julian writes: "Less cynically, a common development platform, and a more open environment would reap huge dividends for everyone."

Actually, I think fragmentation creates opportunities. Look at the number of independent J2ME games developers, and compare to the number of small independent Nintendo DS developers out there. Given the disparity in screen sizes, keypad layouts, and processor performance, "write once run anywhere" was always optimistic. It should be, it was a marketing slogan after all.

Personally - I think it's easy to underrate the position we're in today. It is possible to develop, test, and launch a new game across 80 handsets in about a month. That strikes me as a massive approvement on the situation 5 years ago, when you couldn't even get dev kits or write software for the vast majority of handsets, full stop.

Back in blighty... and time to write up general impressions of Casuality Europe:

1. Casual games are a much bigger business than I had them down as. MUCH bigger.
2. I liked the format and venue of the event; it reminded me of dConstruct. That's a good thing :)
3. Much of the stuff I heard seemed very US-centric. In many ways this was actually quite useful (I'm not that familiar with the US) but it meant that I didn't really get a feel for casual gaming in Europe, as such.
4. There was less of a mobile focus than I'd expected. I still don't really understand how the Xbox can be considered a platform for the casual gamer; I can see why casual games make sense on it, but the (set of casual gamers) seems so much bigger than the (set of people who will buy an Xbox) to me.
5. So... I still don't understand why mobile isn't seen as the primary platform for casual gaming; given that it's everywhere, and that it combines mechanisms for distributing, billing, and consuming casual games content.

A thousand thanks to Jessica Tams for organising the event, and to Paul Munford for capably herding together the last panel of the event...