With another Mobile 2.0 conference just wrapped up I wanted to just highlight some of the topics and conversations:

As far as number of handsets out in the market go Android has been wonderfully successful. Most folks agree that all things being equal, the number of Android handsets is going to surpass the number of iPhones pretty soon. Generally that’s been taken as a sign that developers should start thinking about Android cause it’s going to be the next gold mine. I’ve started to question that a bit however.

A few days ago Bryan Rieger posted some fantastic slides about rethinking the layout of site resources for content meant to go to mobile devices from Yiibu. There’s some great stuff in there related to applying progressive enhancement principles to the layout as a whole, and the follow-on has spilled over into the mobile web discussion group about how to deal with desktop browsers that don’t do well with media queries. Great technical discussion and happy to see it happening.

With AppNation wrapping up earlier this week and Mobile 2.0 happening next week I’ve been thinking a lot more about industry level shifts in mobile. Normally I’m heads down in some bit of server code lately, so it is relatively infrequently that I pop up and genuinely take a look around. One thing I was surprised to see is that whenever I talk about mobile apps it’s assumed that that discussion applies only to natively coded platform-specific applications. Definitely not the case.

Frequently the two issues get tossed into the same basket when talking about mobile applications in particular. The most obvious reason for grouping the two together is that the main driver of both for most businesses is the app store. Getting top placement in the charts on the app store is seen as the holy grail of distribution, driving much larger numbers for most folks than any other technique. Plus the main source of income for most developers is directly selling their app to users through iTunes.

Mobile 2.0 2010 Silicon Valley is next week. We have the event divided up into two days again this year, with the developer day on Sept 20th at Microsoft in Mountain View and the business day on Sept 21st in San Francisco. You can use the code “friends” when you sign up for 20% off the normal registration price.

We had an awesome discussion about App Stores at Mobile Monday SV last night:

Diego is updating his blog again! Awesome! Check out his “the web is an app” post for a laydown of how generalized web development is shifting. Things were already tilting in the direction of “websites” being basically a static javascript loaded that pulled in resources and data as necessary. Mobile devices have really thrown a few cans of gas on the fire however. Before it was just annoying when logic crept into display code. Now with multiple distinct front-end views it’s gone from annoying to painful.

The role of browser Javascript framework on the mobile end seems to be an area of hot contention right now. With behaviors optimized for touch devices being the headline item in most of the conversations I’m seeing. The Uxebu blog and Wolfram Kriesing’s twitter feed are good places to look if you’re interested in following how it evolves. One of the most significant recent changes is the rollup of the ExtJS, JQTouch, and Raphael projects into a new company and product called Sencha. They seem to be ahead of the curve in pulling everything together to build the mobile specific web interface on top of REST services the way that Diego is talking about. And their recent large investment from Sequoia would seem to indicate that they’re in good shape to extend that lead. Check out their online KitchenSink demo to see some of the interaction styles they support. Still lots of work to be done, but I’m hearing more and more developers saying they’re at least starting to evaluate toolkits like these for doing their mobile web UI.

I have a few ebooks I’ve purchased online that came as password protected PDFs. While mildly annoying while trying to read them on a desktop system, it’s patently absurd when I try to move them over to the iPad to use. There are a bunch of hacks floating around describing how to use conversion software to remove the password. Such as convert to a postscript file and then back to a PDF. Generally you end up with a pretty crappy PDF out the other end. You always loose hyperlinks (table of content or index), and a lot of times the formatting can get screwy. Fortunately I found a few comments mentioning qpdf, which is in the default repos for Ubuntu at least:

• sudo apt-get install qpdf
• qpdf --password=******** --decrypt lame_pass_version.pdf happy_version.pdf

Yay! No more crashing iBooks trying to read stuff I paid money for. And there’s an actual preview of the cover on the bookshelf now. Amazing.

I did the update to WordPress 3.0 and added a new theme for the blog (you’ll have to actually visit the site to see, most of you read through RSS). Most of my motivation was getting something in there that looks better on mobile devices. The theme I have on now does a completely fluid layout instead of fixed width, so it looks a lot better on iPhone/iPad/Android. Also on the list of stuff to try out is the WordPress Mobile Pack that Andrea and James released.

Definitely recommend doing the upgrade and switching around themes. Especially for viewing on iPhone/Android devices. The Mystique theme is what I’m currently using by the way. On the settings page it has a toggle for fixed/fluid layout. Ahh, nice and simple.