Hey folks, Gregory asked me to fill in a quick update on the developer day lineup. We’re going to post the full schedule in a bit, but we’ve got some fantastic stuff going on and I didn’t want to wait till we had the full lineup to pass off to our web designers. One of the major areas that I pushed hard on this year was mobile web. Dan has been a champion of the cause for years, so we’ve always had some degree of mobile web discussion going on even when most of the focus was on native apps. But things seem like they’ve really come to a tipping point with the mobile web. Touch interaction support is popping up all over the place, geolocation is getting pulled into mobile web interfaces, and offline support is no longer something we can only dream about. As far as we’ve come however, we still have a long way to go. So to help make sense of the potential of developing for the mobile web we managed to pull together some folks who are best qualified to talk about the issues, folks who are actually out there doing it:

• Charles Jolley – Strobe Inc./SproutCore
• Aaron Conran – Sencha
• Giles Goodwin – Widgetbox
• Andrei Popescu – Google

I’m getting giddy just thinking about it. When we started doing Mobile 2.0 a few years ago one of the issues Dan and I kept harping on was making sure Mobile 2.0 stayed the kind of event where practitioners could come to get real useful info about how to get their jobs done. And I think we nailed it with this one. Many thanks to everyone who passed along introductions and vouched for us along the way to make stuff like this happen!

Charles has been working on the SproutCore framework for years, spent some time inside Apple working on Mobile Me, and recently decided to start a new company inspired by some iPad revelations. Sencha recently rolled up ExtJS, JQTouch, and Raphael under one tent – and then made us all do a double take when they landed $14 million in funding. Widgetbox has been quietly but steadily chipping away at the problem of mobilizing existing content. By pulling in a set of features from the latest rounds of browser advances they’ve ended up with something more than a simple shim service to reach handsets, but a genuine mobile offering. Giles is going to share some info about how they put together the solution they came up with, as well as share some numbers to help others map out one of the major issues with aiming for the mobile web – distribution. Andrei Popescu was involved with the Gears project previously, but is going to be representing Chrome this time around. He’s going to join in the browsers discussion, as well as give a technical talk on HTML5 development.

So if that’s the kind of stuff that interests you, registration is open! Hope to see you there, Mike