Discussions

The irony to you actually commenting on this post is that today I noticed that there is now a Ten Reasons Not to Date a Geek facebook group... Now I did write the original on that one... but who on earth thought it deserved a facebook group of it's very own I have no idea!  It's just crazy...

I don't think the people who set up the group even knew where the original came from... viral marketing...

Registered and will be happy to give Sabot and Ian a big hug... Not seen either of them for aaages! Will be good to catch up! 

Let me know if there's any talk of an evening geek dinner after this one.. I'd be happy to come along but won't be organising it this time. (too much on right now to do that too... last time Zi did a good job with it...)

Fantastic!  Thanks!

The irony... Free tickets and offer to find a way of funding travel expenses and not one student has dared to put in an entry!

Well if the student girls don't want it then someone else will get it!

I've not decided how I'll give the tickets away if they don't enter... any suggestions?

Of sugar and spice and all things nice!  

Pass the details along to any of the girls on your course! (you never know they may donate the prize to you if they win!)

Hi Everyone,

Firstly I'm going to apologise in advance as I'm pretty sure the guys on here are going to go mad at me... but the comp is only open to the girls! 

Secondly... I'm going to say I also have a discount code for 100 Euro off of the list price to the Expo Conference... so if you are interested in going and want the discount then contact me via the girlygeekdom blog

And finally!  Girls if you are interested in the competition then please go to the website and read all the details!

Best of luck!

Sarah

ps I'm hoping you don't all shout at this and call it spam, I saw it as an opportunity to get more of the C9 guys getting the girls involved with the scene as well as getting the girl students involved a bit... I'm also hoping that this will get passed along to the other relevant MS groups to pass the details out to the students.  (I can but live in hope!)

Nice idea but please use it properly... you have a team of people who work on C9 let them tweet their geeky thoughts through the C9 twitter channel.  It's about conversation not one way communication.

Sending out url's when the site changes is all well and good but the site's not mobile enabled so the links in Twitter to mobile phones are basically useless until you are back at a machine. (after all that seems to be one of the primary use scenarios for this comms channel.)

I'm glad to see you all using new media tech though!  It's definitely a good start.

OK I'm probably going to end up putting a different angle into the mix here and it won't necessarily answer your question about which language but it will give you a bit more of an idea of what areas to concentrate on.

Firstly, anything written in C# for a mobile requires the .net Compact Framework.  There are a lot of windows mobile devices out there but they are mainly used by business people and mobile enthusiasts.  They are great devices but they do have their limitations, you will also need C++ to be able to do any lower level stuff for this.

So where to next... you mentionned Java... (J2ME) it's a powerful technology and requires the right version fo the JVM on the device for on device apps to run.  Most phone providers lock their devices down and require third parties who want apps running on them to jump through hoops to do so...  The OS's that I know of that work with Java... Windows Mobile (to some degree but by no means perfectly!), Symbian (beware of version issues) and Linux... yes I did say linux on a mobile...

All the OS's will run C++ apps too... although this is a much slower and clumsier process.

The big mobile growth area at the moment is mobile web.  Now that is something you can get into without having to be constrained by a specific language, however it does mean that you need to be up on the latest mobile web best practice guidelines and ideally conform to the .mobi standards but that's not so bad as all that.

You then get to play with all sorts of technologies including mobile tv, video, payments etc.  Something that you need to be aware of in this environment however is the sometimes connectedness of mobile web... you also have to contend with the ideosyncracies of the different browsers and capabilities of devices.  What works for one may not work for all!

So where would I suggest you start... Start off with a web service that does something fun and do this in any language you like... (think about a mashup of some sort) Then create a fun UI for it that is designed to the .mobi standards and finally look into the issues of sometimes connectedness and work it from there. 

You may find that you need to learn some new skills and you will learn for yourself over time what languages work best where... one thing I will say is try not to use anything too bandwidth heavy in the UI or data transfer... as your user will get charged. 

And most importantly of course, have fun and experiment.  Figure out the areas of mobile that you are most interested in.  Saying you are fascinated by mobile is one thing.  Figuring out that it's UI, context, web services or something else is another entirely.  There are almost as many areas of mobile as there are pc software development.

I hope the above is a little helpful... also consider going along to a local mobile dev usergroup at some point, they are around here in the UK... I'm sure there will be a Mobile Monday or something similar around.

The silence from the women on this subject speaks volumes. I would have thought by now that Microsoft amongst others would have learnt their lessons about using "model girls" to sell technology and tech concepts. 

I guess if they are going to do such things (in the light of sexual equality) we should have the guy in his tight little swim shorts selling the software too if they want to sell to a women's market then   What do you think boyz? Anyone want to put themselves forward for the Male body of tech...

In case you haven't yet heard BarCamp for Mobile developers is now up and ready for sign up's!  Yep you heard it here!  (and I heard it from BlogNation UK Mobile and now we all know!)

You can sign up for the event here!

I look forward to seeing some of you at the event!