22/11/2007 by nicola.

iPhone mobile web / browser considerations, as a new/to-be mobile web designer.
There are many people out there who have been working with the mobile web and understand a lot more than me including Barbara Ballard, Brian Fling, Luca Passani, Andrea Trassati, Cameron Moll So my points below are probably flawed by my limited understanding.

iPhone users experiencing some frustration with a mobile web page / application that is not being displayed in the iPhone browser as they would like. (probably been designed to try and support as many mobile browser/web design standards as possible). The iPhone is a new device but there have already been requests for separate iphone web pages etc

So what to do ?

Separate design for the iPhone - a separate iPhone web:
The iPhone is an attractive design, is aimed at the higher end of the market as a smartphone (world mobile using population is around 3 billion and growing and still only small% of those are smartphone owners). This is not likely to change drastically in the next year or so. If you pay a lot of money for your smartphone you want the best usability and the best browsing experience to justify your purchase. However the iPhone sales so far do not indicate that a large % of the world’s population are going to be using them (unless Steve Jobs is about to launch a 1 iphone per child initiative).

So can businesses justify the extra time and expense of web development, every time something is updated on their websites, to be redesigned for an iPhone and/or even to have a separate design for iPhone in the first place when other phones and PDAs (which sometimes have keyboards available on the screen for stylus etc) can display web pages without the need. Is it commercially viable ? I’m not sure at the moment.

For web designers and developers it is wrong in principle. CSS exists because it was recognised once you could start displaying colour, pictures, multimedia on websites, you could take all the formatting and display out of the html and put it in a separate web page known as a CSS stylesheet.The pages load faster as a result because the browser is not having to read and reload all the formatting when it receives the html page and when the user goes to different pages on a web site. So its better for both designers and users.

The web design/development work performed by W3C in creating standards for CSS and Xhtml has helped designers to design more consistently, therefore cutting down on the amount of design time required. However just simply writing web pages in Xhtml and using a CSS stylesheet will not ensure that it will display in all the main browsers - IE, Firefox, Opera, Safari etc

For mobile web this is even more complex because the different devices do not have the same browsers, the built in ones can vary across ranges and manufacturers. Opera Mini is one browser where web developers have tried to provide a browser that can display across more than one manufacturer or range.

Hacks
In pc web design, when formatting was removed from the html and put in the CSS, talented web developers and designers managed to find ‘hacks’ when different versions of browsers appeared such as the IE6 hack or Safari hack. This was a small piece of code added into a stylesheet to allow the browser to display something in a way it had not been originally designed to do. Its a workaround - a bit like a plaster to provide first aid solution but longer term, web design and development standards will need to specify a better answer.

In mobile web design, this is even more complex, as highlighted by many presentations at Future of Mobile last week. You can’t just put in an iPhone hack. In the meantime the iPhone users are disgruntled with what they perceive as an inferior browsing experience and web developers are equally disgruntled with yet another device browser to try and figure out.

Does than mean that iPhone users will stop using mobile web apps, widgets and therefore drive web audience numbers down, making those apps no longer commercially viable, or will iPhone users abandon their iPhones for web browsing and opt for a different device; and what is Apple doing about their lack of vision of this ?

This also has implications for mobile learning because even if mobile learning gets authored as compiled code it will need to run in a mobile web browser so does this mean every time create mobile learning, will have to create an iPhone friendly version or will iPhone learning just become completely separate, maybe then becoming only available to a limited audience.

Its depressing. Or maybe I’m missing something. Hopefully work into mobile web design standards will help resolve this, hopefully those manufacturers of unique devices can help fund the research required for this too.

Posted in Mobile phones, mobile learning, mobile web design | Print | 2 Comments »

20/11/2007 by nicola.

1)Apologies, but didn’t realise until yesterday when someone kindly pointed out that I had not set up the options properly so it is now working.

2)George Siemens is running Corporate Learning conference online this week - last day today - please check the conference center for more information.

3)Listening to mLearn2007 audio podcasts at the moment, this one from Charlie Schick at Nokia is 58 mins and very interesting.

Posted in Mobile phones, Technology, mobile learning | Print | No Comments »

17/11/2007 by nicola.

I was thrilled to have the opportunity to meet Inge/Ignatia in person at Future of Mobile. I have found her thoughts on mobile learning a true inspiration. If you haven’t had a chance to look at IgnatiaWebs before here are five reasons:

1.The design and font choice on the blogs allow for very quick and easy reading.

2.Videoblogging examples - if you are new to using videoblogging, you can look through posts labelled vlog and there are heaps of ideas.

3.She is blogging about her blogging journey itself too, finding the good, bad and ugly which as a fairly new blogger myself, is extremely interesting.

4.Practical informal learning in low resource settings - as mentioned in the blog’s header, sharing of ideas about learning in low resource settings is invaluable. If you are being plagued by concerns about budget, time and ‘deployment’ of learning or if you are thinking about starting up a social project, Techsoup is my first choice starting place, but I particularly like the posts relating use of mobile video, its a great example of how not to ‘overthink’ and come up with a complex learning solution that would probably be out of date by the time you got round to implementing it.

As in increasing areas of the world, mobile learning is being used without having to go through lots of pc learning too - where bandwidth has been an issue for large scale computer use - mobile phones are providing a quicker and more reliable (in terms of not losing a connection halfway through a conversation, or other weird and wonderful traditional landline ‘delights’) way to communicate

5.Sharing presentations through Slideshare - lots of bloggers doing this too, its such a nice, quick way to share presentations, now you can slidecast too

Some other ‘low resource’ mobile solutions/ideas are linked from this blog but thought I’d stick in a list here too:
Share Ideas
Mobile Active
Mobile Metrix
David Lehr’s blog

If anyone knows of any others, would love to hear from you

Posted in mobsessed, Mobile phones, Technology, mobile learning | Print | 1 Comment »

14/11/2007 by nicola.

Different opinions on designing and developing for devices - at the moment, for developers / designers it is very fragmented - lots of different devices with different browsers, from usability point, someone from Sony Ericsson saying fragmentation is great, your mobile is your personal device, so better related to what you want - but this is again completely opposite to developers trying to get applications working on all types of devices and browsers. So standards are important and now from W3C, dev.mobi and others, some concrete results.
Andrea Trasatti stressed the need for testing on devices as well as emulators.
Some key design requirements:
Consistent navigation mechanisms
No pop-ups
Do not change current window without informing users
Keep number of externally linked resources to a minimum
Design for mobile content – speed – users don’t have a lot of time
clutter free – remove obstacles, its about content, not the page
fresh – show the latest content, sexy, simple can look good
Don’t design to lowest common denominator,
remove tables,
Use JavaScript but be aware that JavaScript kills battery life. Chaals, presenting from Opera made the very important point along the lines of - a phone’s key use is to make calls, to talk and listen to people and if your battery dies because you are using an interactive, dynamic web page, how are you going to communicate for the rest of the day.

Devices too different – design to the advantages of the devices. This, like lowest common denominator is not straightforward, it makes sense to design to lowest common denominator when the world’s mobile using population has a wide variety of devices and smartphones are still at the very top end of user population. Lots of discussion around the good, bad (not much on ugly, most people seem to like the look of it :-)of the iPhone. which according to Brian Fling is the smartphone for the masses. Personally, I don’t agree that there is a phone for the masses, nor will there ever be a need for one.

Core properties:
Screen size – width & height in pixel
Markup – xhtml basic 1.0, xhtml-mp
Image formats – png, peg, gif
Stylesheets – CSS1.0, WCSS 1.0, CSS 2.1

You can test mobile web and apps, using the following
W3C Mobile OK Tests
W3C Mobile Web Best Practices checker (beta) what to test, outcome and advice
T.A.W
Ready.mobi

Context - lots of discussion throughout day on this – don’t think there is a standard approach, personal preferences the way forward. But people move around from device to device and their data needs to be accessible or move around with them. Context is not just about your GPS location finding out what is available where you are, its about what you want to be able to do or what you are looking for.

Open source is good, but if different organisations all going open source, doesn’t achieve consistent information in one source area. Again need for standards is important current issue. On open source though - great presentation from Dave, Google about Android and he managed to develop something using the Android SDK in 7 minutes and 58 seconds using Eclipse, making it look incredibly easy.More info on code.google Android is
An open source mobile phone platform that encompasses every layer of the phone stack Fully open freely available, features Linux 2.6 kernel and drivers, Java language and framework apps
Multiple processes, enable task switching – multiple apps while e.g. in a call can use other apps, applications don’t lose state. Powerful, framework in Java, software designed to work in diff hardware – 12 key, QWERTY, touch screen, accelerometer. Rich media, graphics. Modular, component design, open architecture – use gmail, mmms, flickr at same time. All apps, swapped out and customised, possible to support JVM.

Some useful links:
Mobile Monday
Mobile Ajax at W3C
Opera Labs
Betavine
New mobile stuff at W3C
Soonr

So in summary, my takeaways are - standards, I know how to code, I know I need to test it on emulators and devices and I know that I can get lots of assistance and reference from .mobi and others. I need to consider design of content but before any of these, need to think about the context of the users I am designing for. There is exciting new stuff in development - Web APIs –Drag/drop XHR, ECMAScript4 (next generation of JavaScript), SVG , Video, Widgets, Device APIs – keep users secure, users will want to use their phones to pay for stuff (didn’t hear any mention of RFID today but users are also going to want to start pointing their phones at stuff too - don’t want their connections of any kind intercepted).

Simple but attractive design, doesn’t have to be limited to colour, small icons, rich media is becoming more widely used e.g. Flashlite, and the mobile web experience can be more exciting and personal e.g mobile Ajax, but don’t forget the hardware (think Nokia and N95 - bringing out a device with amazing video capability but initially not the battery to support it).

What does this mean for mlearning - context, good design, interesting content, increased capability of applications, multi -functions and increasing mobile web use - this is an exciting time for mobile learning experimenting with both web and multimedia. Context, location, environment will influence learning objectives as well as the design. Will there be mobile PLEs where users can build their learning environment and network (think mobile social networking - currently a hot topic, an example is Nokia’s Mosh

My other takeaway is that I need more than ever to start really experimenting with mobile xhtml, mobile / wireless CSS and if possible mobie Ajax at same time in order to understand better of the conference discussion where I wasn’t fully getting the rationale behind people’s comments. Plan = Go away, experiment, share and hopefully collaborate if others interested. and get some of this done before the end of 2007 !

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02/11/2007 by nicola.

Mustafa and I are in the reserve cohort for the Cityware project - ongoing but they do some interesting projects - which can be found from this overview page and their publications page, researching various ways in which humans interact within an urban environment and their ‘technology’ devices including GPS, RFID, barcodes etc.

They are using their research to design context-aware environments and spaces around humans as they move around the city.(such as Bath). For example in the Radio City project, there was a focus on wireless mobile communication and how users behaved with their mobile devices.

Fascinating stuff !

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