So, I'm tapping this out whilst wending my way home in the company of Mr Hugman and Mr Hopper after another excellent OverTheAir, the mobile developer hack day and conference.

I had high hopes for the event after 2008, and I wasn't disappointed. Arriving a little bit late, I missed the first keynote and caught bits of the second two, but can't say that they really hit the right note for me - they seemed focused on selling the idea of "mobile as a business" to a room full of mobile developers who were either already comfortable with that concept, or having a couple of days away to focus on something other than direct commerciality.

Lunch followed. I found the food, coffee, snacks and accommodation (OK, bean bags on the floor) to be of a good standard throughout the event - and plentiful enough to cope with the constant grazing that accompanies an overnight hack. The wi-fi worked consistently, which in my experience is unheard of for any conference.

Immediately after lunch I was running our "Mobile Mountains" agile/UX workshop again - I've written that up in a separate post. I then dashed the the next session next door, where I was on a panel on service design with Mark Curtis of Flirtomatic and Ben Reason, chaired ably by Tory Dunn of Vodafone. I can't pretend to be too knowledgeable about the practice of service design, but anything which extends the influence of user experience folks beyond pixels-on-a-screen is alright by me: it seems more sensible to have important user experience decisions being made by advocates for the user than by lawyers or marketers, say. And without being too sycophantic, it's always fun to be in on a Curtis conversation - Mark is a mine of interesting insights and hard numbers, which he's not shy about sharing with an audience.

With the end of the panel session, my responsibilities for the weekend were fulfilled and I was able to relax a little. I wandered into a good session on fragmentation with David Bailey of DeviceAnywhere and James Parton of O2 Litmus. Of particular interest were some comments from James on the need for operators to review applications. When I asked how Google get away with not doing this (comparing in my head the publish-instantly process the Android Marketplace offers to the proud proclamation from a Vodafone gentleman earlier that they could launch apps in 10 days), the answer James gave was customer support costs: that the operator is the one fielding this particular bugbear, and who needs to cover themselves.

That sounds reasonable from an operator perspective, but I can't help thinking that it leaves them carrying the can for all those Android, Ovi, or other devices out there today, which might have all kinds of apps on them. I was left feeling slightly sorry for the poor operators, and wanting to hear some actual numbers on support calls for applications. Does anyone have any figures (perhaps with comparisons for calls received relating to other services, like MMS, to give us a sense of relative scale)?

For me, the talks ended there - and the all night hackathon began. I'm writing a separate post on our entry to the Hack Day competition, Project Bluebell. Suffice to say it kept the three of us busy til 4:30am, powered by a combination of coffee, beer, sweet snacks and fruit. For me the night ended in a blur as I crashed out on beanbags and snuggled up to a dalek...

... to wake a couple of hours later at 6:20am, to the sound of birdsong being pumped through the speakers and other folks shuffling about. A bleary morning followed, putting the finishing touches to Bluebell, doing the presentation for it, and generally putting it through its paces to try and avoid that sinking feeling you get from standing in front of a few hundred people showing them Something Terribly Clever That Happens Not To Work...

One thing I did catch that morning was Scott Weiss doing a very interesting talk on how the Symbian Foundation are approaching the very thorny problem of managing the design process for an operating system which is now Open Source. I *really* wish I'd had a couple more hours shut-eye so I could've contributed something meaningful to the debate, but it was interesting nonetheless and I'm looking forward to seeing how they get on.

The afternoon was dominated by presentations of hacks, judging and awards. A good number of teams had produced something workable - about 15-20 in total I think. Presentations were marred a little by AV difficulties - quite a few teams had trouble showing off software running on real devices, and our demo of Bluebell experienced technical difficulties. Thanks to the BBC doing a bit of coverage of our demo, we had a second chance to show off our work, but I was left feeling that this might have given us a bit of an unfair advantage over other teams who had experienced trouble and didn't get this opportunity. Not that I can think of a way of guaranteeing a series of 2 minute demos using diverse hardware runs smoothly, of course - this is as good a way as any of guaranteeing "demo hell". Of everything we saw, my favourites were Makoto Inoue's Hangman game and the "Bottle Rock It" musical instrument that the Lastminute Labs team produced. The latter suffered a little from AV troubles in demo, which was a real shame - I get the impression they'd done something a bit special...

We were extremely pleased to win the Best in Show award for Bluebell, a Nokia 5800 kindly donated by Forum Nokia. We shall put it to good use...

So overall, the weekend was fantastic. OverTheAir remains my favourite hack-day type event, and I'm waiting excitedly for the next one.