The Mobile Web Best Practices Working Group, which I form a tiny cog of, has released a couple of Last Call documents:

• Guidelines for Web Content Transformation Proxies as to whether and how they should transform web content;
• Mobile Web Application Best Practices, guidelines for how to develop and deliver web applications to mobiles;

These are both open to public review; please do send comments through to the public-bpwg-comments@w3.org public mailing-list

"All the world's a stage, and all the men and women merely players..."

...so this year, I had strong urges for us to produce something not just clever, but beautiful. I wanted to do something huge and participative - mainly because I've been thinking a lot recently about helping people feel they're a meaningful part of something bigger. Smule do this, I think our Ghost Detector did it, Burning Man does it... it's a bit of a theme for me right now. And I read recently about David Byrne's audio installation at the RoundHouse, which filled me with wow.

So in the week before the event I was chatting to Thom and James (FPers who also attended OTA) and we got some ideas together. We work with applications every day at work and we know how tricky it can be to get a large number of people to install and run any piece of software on their phones in a short period of time, so we wanted to avoid that... which led us back to the fundamentals of radio. Could we do something along the lines of detecting radio signals (GSM, Wi-Fi or Bluetooth) and perhaps turn them into something interesting? Yes, it turns out we could. In the end we settled on Bluetooth, because every phone has it and we can access it from software we write for phones - and Project Bluebell took form.

The idea was to turn the whole audience of the event into unwitting musicians, and have them create a Son et Lumiere with their very presence.

To do this, we wrote a piece of custom J2ME software which we installed onto 4 commodity phones (cheapo Sony Ericsson devices with PAYG SIMs and a fiver of credit apiece). We hid these phones in the corners of the auditorium. This software scanned for Bluetooth devices nearby, and recorded their names, as well as whether they were mobile phones or something else (e.g. laptops, which were quite common at the event, and which we wanted to ignore).

These four receivers then reported the phones near them to a server, every 10 seconds or so. The server, a web application run inside Google App Engine, received all these reports and stored them in a database. It then exposed a list of the most recently seen phones, together with their location (which receiver had picked them up), and exposed this through a simple API over HTTP.

Two pieces of software consumed data through this API: firstly, an audio processor which turned the Bluetooth names of phones into simple tunes (simply by analysing characters in the names and decomposing them into notes, note lengths and delays) and mixed the tunes together, using a library called JFugue.

And secondly, a visualiser written in Processing which took the same data and used it as the input for several games of Conway's Life, which each run simultaneously in slightly different shades of blue atop one another. Periodically this visualiser would refresh and dump some new cells into each game, depending on phones found since the last check - ensuring that the animation was continually running but seeded with real data coming from the room. We'd also occasionally show some of the device names we'd found, which we felt might help build more of a connection between folks on the floor and the light-show.

"...Full of strange oaths and bearded like the pard,
Jealous in honour, sudden and quick in quarrel..."

All the above was produced between 11am on the Friday and around 4:30am Saturday morning: you can do a lot with a small number of smart caffeinated geeks, particularly if you're comfortable with their becoming vaguely hysterical in the process. Who convinced us that the glowsticks were a hotline to Google? Why did we start extracting new software development methodologies from Deal or No Deal? What exactly *did* we do to that bear?

How would we improve the product? I'd personally like to see a stronger link between individuals and output - so that as a participant I can see myself and the difference I'm making. I think it's possible to work this out right now by looking and listening carefully, but it could be made more obvious.

I was surprised at how well the music side of it worked (generating anything that sounds like music from what is effectively random and varying data was one of the tougher challenges). I'd like to see if we could vary the music further and perhaps add samples. I'd also like to set this up and run it again somewhere, to see how it works over a long period of time with a smaller, faster-moving audience.

Adam Cohen-Rose has kindly put some video of the second demonstration online, where you can see the Life and hear a little of the music. I'm going to try and get a better quality video of the two together over the next few days, I'll post this up when I have it, perhaps with some audio for iTunes :)

We also had a team who were covering the event for the BBC get quite interested, and I understand we may get a mention in an upcoming episode of Click.

"Last scene of all,
That ends this strange eventful history,
Is second childishness and mere oblivion..."

We were absolutely maxi-chuffed when Project Bluebell was awarded Best of Show by the panel of judges. Thank you :) Only a year to prepare for the next one, now...

Update: Project Bluebell was covered by BBC news; we also appear in the video clip bundled into this article.

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.

The organisers of Over The Air very kindly gave us the opportunity to run our Mobile Mountains workshop again, extended to 2 hours from its normal 90 minute slot.

If you've missed the previous write-ups, it's a format that Joh and I came up with over the Summer, to help attendees experience, examine and learn from an iterative design process. We get groups of developers and designers working at a furious pace to prototype and user-test a product for a specific persona from scratch. After an initial round of design-and-test we then introduce a significant change and let them evolve their product in a second design iteration. We then help them examine the impact of this change and establish what they learn from dealing with it. This description is deliberately vague - I don't want to give away too many details, given that part of the point is that attendees deal with the unexpected.

This was the largest group of participants we've had for a session; at peak I think we had about 40 or so, divided into 7 groups. Despite this it seemed to go fairly well: every single group had a product to show off by the end of the first 15-minute design session and they were all able to demonstrate they'd learned from the 5-minute user tests.

A 2 hour slot meant that the whole thing felt a little less rushed, but the last few minutes were still a little frantic, as we looked at what lessons groups had learned. A few of the more consistent ones were:

• Working within constraints boosts creativity (this one seems to pop up every time);
• User testing improves the product;
• Basic ideas translate better across a range of form factors than more complicated or "showy" stuff;
• Just getting started on the product was highlighted as difficult by a couple of groups;

There were a few other insights I found particularly interesting:

• Having more voices on a team helped (though it was noted that this probably didn't scale linearly indefinitely);
• Radical changes to the product meant completely scrapping the old version;
• Working with basic devices could lead to better products; one group noted that they had the temptation to over-egg their product when working on technically capable devices;
• One team noted that they spent 80% of their effort on thinking through UI chrome, rather than the product itself;
• Working within constraints let to more passion in the product development - perhaps a sort of "blitz spirit" for design;

Behind the scenes, I had another agenda: this is a great way of introducing developers to a design process and showing the value of paper prototyping or even literally 5 minutes of user testing. It gets even better when there's enough design expertise in the room to embed designers across the teams and get everyone working - and thinking - across disciplines.

Thanks to everyone who attended! Update: one of the attendees has written up their experiences with the workshop here. I'm particularly chuffed with his quote: "being still more of a developer, it was a great session to understand the basic principles of UX and common mistakes made in teams where designers are either neglected, not understood, or even worse, non existent"

Update: slides from the workshop are now online here.