“Mobility Today - Design Strategies for Cell Phone Software"

Presented by John Kern of Kern Computing

Date: Wednesday, 18 May 2005
Time: 6:30pm - refreshments, 7:00pm - talk
Location: Hewlett Packard (see directions), Pruneridge and Wolfe, Cupertino, Bldg. 48, Oak Room.
Cost: Free and open to all who wish to attend, but membership is only $10/year.

Topic:
Cell phones have become general purpose computers. Today mobile phones have a surprising amount of RAM, a plethora of communication options, and some interesting peripherals. Many APIs to fundamental facilities already exist including personal information management, connectivity, and multimedia. Given these resources, mobile phones are fertile ground for new application development. But how do you program it? After surveying some of the major programming languages, runtimes, and operating systems available to programmers and talking about the deployment challenges, we will discuss design decisions behind a forthcoming application called DidUKnow. This Symbian application queries the Amazon Web Services via REST calls. The results are displayed on the phone.

About the Speaker:
John Kern is a freelance consultant and software engineer at Kern Computing. He focuses on mobile computing. Reading his blog will help to keep you up to date on programming for mobile devices and events in Silicon Valley. John was a recent presenter at the SD Forum's Multimodal Interactive SIG. He holds both a BS and MS in Computer Science from Michigan State University. John was a software engineer at Numerical Technologies, which was acquired by Synopsys, where he focused on porting EDA applications and system programming. Early in his career he was involved with programming environments and languages at Lucid, Inc., and Sun Microsystems.