Last week marked the inaugural Frontend 2010 conference in Oslo and I was honored to present the opening keynote alongside such a stellar lineup of speakers. The conference was – a miscast MC and a poor sponsor choice aside – a resounding success (the lovely folks at IXD, which organized the conference, were very receptive to feedback on those issues and assured me that they'd be taking greater care on those points for next year.)

Day 1

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3mobilebuzz.com contacted me before my talk at WebDirections @media to see if I wanted to try out the Three MiFi unit and blog about my experiences (don't confuse this with the MiFi that's sold outside the UK, which is known as the Novatel Wireless Hotspot and is notoriously difficult to find here.) Having just lost the T-Mobile USB dongle that had served me well for the last two years or so, I decided to take them up on the offer.

If you haven't had the chance to see or play with a MiFi, it's a portable WiFi hotspot that takes a SIM card and shares your mobile connection with up to 5 devices. It has a brushed-aluminium-and-white-plastic case that resembles a metallic version of Eva from Wall-E. The user interface consists of three little buttons on the side and a screen with five colored icons.

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The iPhone Simulator is a handy development tool for debugging your iPhone and iPad apps as you develop them. It is not, however, in any way an alternative to testing on an actual device. One of the reasons that the iPhone Simulator doesn't give you the actual device experience is because your Mac's screen is not a touch screen. Until now, if you wanted that, you would have to either test on your actual device or use an app like iSimulate to send touches (and other device data) to your app. While iSimulate and its ilk are still a good alternative, I've found a setup that serves me well for 90% of my debug-time testing: an iPad, coupled with the Air Display app.

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I just stumbled on the best "forgot password" implementation I've seen on event registration site Amiando.

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Aral Balkan, who gave what I thought was the best talk of the two days, used his Feathers iPhone App for Twitter as an example of making a useful application that is also fun to interact with.

Read the full article over at The Guardian.