Really enjoyed UXCampEurope. I've attended a couple of the London events, and got a lot out of each one, so was quite happy to have an excuse for a weekend in Berlin... And wasn't disappointed.

From the moment we arrived, it was all very smooth. A great venue on the outskirts of Berlin (slightly awkward to get to by S-Bahn, but not so much that it derailed anything), huge and light; excellent food; and great facilities. A couple of the rooms got quite crowded and could have done with better air-con, but that's probably more a comment on the popularity of those sessions than on the venue.

There was a good selection of talks; a couple of times I was forced to skip one I really wanted to see (like Eva-Lotta's sketching workshops). Maybe one fewer room would have forced us to fill all the available time-slots instead of spreading out and leaving too much choice... Amongst the talks, there was a heavy emphasis on Agile/UX, and also on tool use: lots about Axure, and a couple referencing Balsamiq.

Highlights for me were the two sessions run by Anders Ramsay on user stories (wonderful analogy: software development is a restaurant, with the kitchen being development and front of house, UX) and the design studio workshop. Honorable mentions to Design For The Toilet, an examination of and call for data-driven design to the exclusion of our own instincts, which the speakers ably demonstrated were wrong; and an examination of a recent redesign of Doodle, one of my favourite web services.

Eric Reiss rounded off the first day with a warts-and-all show-and-tell of disastrous experiences running a design agency, and uncomfortable number of which rang bells; and I had a fascinating and intimate chat in the final session, on bringing design to the often code-emphasising world of open source projects.

I wandered up to London last night with Ellen to see War Horse, a rather interesting show based on a World War 1 story, using a variety of life-size puppets. Puppets are Ellen's thing at the moment (she did a couple of shows during Brighton Festival), and I rather enjoyed Flogging a Dead Horse when we caught it last year.

I found the script of War Horse slightly on the mawkish side, and long after having shared a house with an academic who specialised in the subject, I still find World War 1 material challenging in general. But that didn't matter one jot - I was absolutely blown away by the technical mastery of the puppets, the unnervingly lifelike movement ascribed to them, and the playfulness with which they were employed. You haven't lived until you've seen a wheeled mechanical duck get pushed around the stage in a waddling motion, it's eerily articulated neck pecking at the floor.

Over and above the relentless detail of the animal movements, a few moments really hit home: watching a trio of puppeteers slowly withdraw from the corpse of a fallen horse, driving home the finality of its death; one of the cast casually slapping one of the "horses" on the rump during the final applause, to persuade the artificial beast to leave the stage; and the insistent pestering of a young French girl for chocolate. By the end, the animals may as well have been real; their suffering certainly was. And yet they're strange things constructed from wood, wire and leather - not by any means real, they ought to sit snugly in the uncanny valley.

I couldn't help but relate my own empathy with War Horse to some of what I saw Sherry Turkle talk about last week: I *must* hurry up and read the first half of Alone Together, which deals with social robotics.

And Ellen talked about a modern renaissance in puppetry. I idly wondered if something about our relations with software and machines might have trained us, or at least acclimatised us, towards relating better with this particular art form...

We're having an interesting experience at the moment with "operator app stores". We've submitted our Guardian Anywhere app to a couple of them. It's a fairly popular app: 60,000+ downloads, 4.5 star rating, 27,280 active installs and well over 2 million copies of the Guardian delivered through it.

I won't name names. Let's call the operators concerned A and B.

Initial reaction from A when we submitted the app was to reject it, because A can (I quote) "already supply news feeds through its own and third-party services and there is no additional requirement for these type of products".

We've since resubmitted it to A, through their portal which they're using to liaise with folks like ourselves. We submitted it on 30th March, and their site says it should go through in 10 working days. As of the end of May, it wasn't live and the folks at A weren't able to say when it might be (the connection their UK application shop wasn't "live").

Operator B, on the other hand, rejected our submission "due to your app containing ads or links of any sort, which is currently prohibited for applications held within B's app store". I'm still picking pieces of my jaw off my desk.

We have no advertising or other revenue tied to this product - I'm not moaning because we're out of pocket, and my interest in getting this sort of distribution is purely to compare operator app stores to the Android Marketplace.

But it feels like operators are repeating mistakes they should've learned from 5 years ago, and aren't learning from the success of app stores. Launching through them is a cumbersome process with hefty manual reviews and curation. Even a manual review process from Apple doesn't take 3 months, reject your app for containing links, or say "no thanks" because they already have an app in your category.

Update: I've been working on mobile so long that I'm quite bored of operator-bashing. After seeing quite a few folks pick up on this and get busy kicking the operators, I thought I'd try and be a bit more constructive.

I think it all comes down to clear communication: anyone distributing apps should say, clearly and concisely, in a single place, what their standards for accepting and rejecting apps are; what apps they are and aren't interested in; and what their timescales for launch will really be. And then stick to them.

I was feeling a bit twitchy about not having written any code for a while, and I wanted to fiddle with the Songkick API. On discovering that there didn't seem to be any Java libraries for it, I thought I'd write one. Here it is; it's quite limited at the moment (only does Event, Artist and Location searches), but I'm adding to it every now and then and maybe you'll find it useful.

I had the good fortune to imbibe a double-dose of Sherry Turkle this week; Kate and I saw her present at the LSE on Thursday evening, then crept to the British Library on Friday to see her in a panel discussion with John Naughton, Aleks Krotoski and Nick Tyler.

As usual, I was late to the party - never having heard of Sherry until Roman Verostko quoted her in a chat about algorithmic art earlier this year: "We think with the objects we love; we love the objects we think with". That quote led me, via a few other conversations, to the copy of Evocative Objects which sits, sadly unread, on my bedside table; and to her recent book Alone Together - which she billed on Friday as a Bowling Alone for digital natives.

I took some reasonable notes on the Thursday evening; unfortunately everything I was carrying with me ran out of power towards the end of Friday, forcing me to rely on my memory to deliver impressions of the event. Some scattered scribblings:

• Back at MIT, Sherry and many others went on a 3 day retreat to consider what home computers would mean. Aside from the gaming possibilities (which everyone agreed were clear), few applications were proposed. Calendaring and address books were brought up and rejected as stupid; no-one thought that anyone other than academics would use them for writing; tax preparation was floated as another possible application: "People stayed for 2 days and 5 meals, but there weren't many ideas".
• Once they're networked, computers keep us busy: "We are their killer app;
• Whilst her book Life on the Screen was optimistic, seeing online as a useful playground for identity, she failed to see that we would want to live simultaneously on and offline, and want to "bail out of reality" to visit virtual places. Aleks picked up on this concern about bailing out of reality; during the panel discussion when Sherry brought it up in the context of 15-year olds avoiding awkward encounters with the opposite sex, Aleks pointed out that they were having analogous experiences of awkwardness online and that they weren't therefore missing out on the experience completely;
• "Technology is seductive when its affordances meet our vulnerabilities", "social robots deceive us into loving them: it turns out we are cheap dates", "connectivity offers the illusion of companionship without the demands of intimacy", and "we can't get enough of each other if we can keep each other at a distance we control";
• It's not just about the young: 30-50somethings exhibit the same behaviour of avoiding perceived risks of real-time contact in favour of asynchronous communication like SMS or email;
• Sherry finds the addiction metaphor applied to technology unhelpful: we can't lose technology in the way you might cure an addiction by avoiding a drug. Instead she advocated a dieting metaphor, and later referenced some of the debates we are having (societally) about fast food as a useful example of the kind of debate we should have around online privacy. "Just because we grew up with the Internet, we assume the Internet has grown up", she says, optimistic about our ability to have such a debate at what is still an early stage of online communications,;
• She was emphatic about the need for online privacy and deplored the attitudes of some technologists towards its unimportance: "Everyone should have something to hide";
• When applied to computer technology, transparency used to mean "having a full understanding of how the system works"; where computer literacy once meant knowing the engine, now it means understanding applications and explicitly avoiding the internals, "and that's a travesty";

One refrain from Sherry which I had trouble finding evidence for was the notion that solitude is, in and of itself, energising and nourishing. It seemed to be a belief she held strongly, but unlike much of her other (plainly well-researched) material she didn't provide much backing for this point. Whilst instinctively I'm inclined to agree with her, I'd like to see some evidence for the psychological value of solitude; or is it just something which a generation pre-Internet naturally acclimatised to, that digital natives have never needed?

During the panel discussion, I think it was Sherry who brought up the example of people texting one another at funerals (as a demonstration of the sinister reach of technology into inappropriate places). An interesting little back-chat on Twitter kicked off, with one poster pointing out that 30 years ago the idea of playing pop music at funerals would have been anathema, where now it's reasonable (to some, at least). "Is this not standard generational moral panic?", someone in the audience asked... and whilst I'd left the talk on Thursday generally agreeing with Sherry, I left Friday less sure. How can we possibly be objective about technology, or is it not, as someone else in the audience pointed out, "a failure of perspective to consider humans and technology as separate"?