MobileMonday Boston: Yiibu and mobile snacks

I’m Oren Levine; I’m based in Boston, and work in the same S60 Multimedia team as Jukka. Since Jukka is away for the Finnish summer holidays, I took the opportunity to contribute a guest post (or two) to the blog.

This month’s MobileMonday Boston event featured Stephanie Rieger of Yiibu, speaking about “Creating Casual Handset Apps for the Long Tail”. Yiibu uses Flash Lite to create, in their words, “small lifestyle and learning applications for those ‘in-between-moments’ you spend with your mobile devices”.

Her key message was that mobile content and applications should be “snacks”: simple, fun (and even educational) ways to spend a short time when you take a break or have a spare moment.

In the spirit of the Long Tail, this suggests that the real “killer app” for mobile may turn out to be hundreds (thousands?) of little apps that, by themselves, don’t even cause a scratch.

Yiibu develops its applications in Flash Lite, because they found it to be the easiest way to prototype and test their applications. In their opinion, Flash was preferred to mobile Java (harder to program and test) and the mobile Web (still in flux).

What do you think? Could mobile Python (which Jukka mentioned in a previous post) also be a good way to create mobile “snacks”?

Update (July 18): On the subject of Python, Paul Coulton reports on the Forum Nokia blogs about his experience teaching mobile Python to pre-university students.

Update (July 19): Here’s Stephanie Rieger’s view on the subject in her own words.

-Oren