02/06/2008 by nicola.

Decided to see if could happily write web pages using text messaging for initially three reasons:
a) If could put tags used regularly in predictive text it would mimic web editors already in existence on pcs
b) Templates - can easily save templates of familiar tags to save retyping each time and just delete any not needed. If a phone doesn’t have templates then can save in drafts each time and make a new message from it.
c) Ease of use on multiple handsets - different manufacturers

Why?
Still looking into options for writing web pages on the go - such as a notes editor but this will be better possibly. Some considerations of mobile web editing vs pc web editing that I discovered, below. Should also mention that had absolutely no knowledge of predictive text before this weekend, other than its existence.

Mobile
Tend to have creative thoughts on the go, do not always have laptop or pc near to hand so useful to record when thinking about them

Predictive text - entered loads of tags (can include up to approx 20 characters), don’t know if it can’t recognise words which start with symbols or its my own incompetence - but it would only pick up the words / letters inside tags so didn’t actually work. Am asking around various places to see if this is possible or not. It would be so useful to use predictive text in this way and I guess it can’t be too hard ?

Using a template and without predictive text was able to type around half a page of code before either pc or laptop had booted up

Some character limits for SMS messaging (depends on who SMS with etc) might mean paying for more than one SMS for a whole page.

When needed a bigger screen, was able to take advantage of a bigger screen than my monitor. Have looked into mobile projectors, found 3 companies but so far no definite news on release dates/pricing into models or as separate items for this year. So used TV out cable for phone and voila!

What I especially liked too, is that could mess around with colours / themes on phone to find ones that were more comfortable on my eyes, although the attached was fine too.

You can use on a digital tv if you have a DV IN socket or if like me you’ve got older tv with no DV IN; have DVD player/recorder/set top boxes all hooked up to a scart unit, can connect through the DVD player:

You may be able to do with other similar AV connection cables / stereo jacks too. TV out is a fairly new feature on phones - available on a few Nokias and have heard rumour that Sony Ericsson are putting as standard in all their new phones - don’t know for others. If anyone out there spending time right now, in hotel/BB rooms with tvs, would be interested to know if they have DV in ?

PC
There is a keyboard so fingers may be able to move more flexibly and enter coding more efficiently - also a range of sophisticated editors (e.g. highlighting rows and tags so can pinpoint errors etc) out there already.

Better for scrolling long rows of text if not using a tv screen or projector.

Getting it out there - SMS to web
Still trying to work out best way of sending SMS to web - at the moment, doesn’t appear to be an easy way of sending directly to my own webspace - many apps exist for sending from web to phone but not other way round.

SMS blogging is option because less likely to have character limits but then would have to cut and paste code into separate web page and upload into your own webspace - which is a pain. If you have set up your own SMS gateway there may be a way of avoiding this but I don’t know enough about the how, yet, to understand if it can be done.

Templates created so far (approx 15 mins to create)
XHTML transitional
CSS
RSS
These three include the most common tags that I have used when writing stuff.

Have done a PHP mini one but seeing that all I know is how to write Hello World - that is all there is in it.

Please let me know if you would like a copy of templates & provide cell/mob no - happy to SMS through if of use. Going to stick with this for now, could be very useful for snippets at least.

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29/04/2008 by nicola.

Anol Bhattacharya who writes the brilliant SoulSoup blog has shared a link to this Social Networking Wars video

On a related note, am unplugged at home from this Friday for at least a month (or so) going to rediscover the offline world - so have a fantastic month (or so) !

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07/04/2008 by nicola.

Removing the need to scream your way through designing something that can be used / viewed on a mobile device, Little Springs have put together a brilliant resource wiki
The Little Springs page on producing multimedia content for mobile distribution on their main website, provides a great overview of considerations for anyone thinking of incorporating it into mLearning.

Also some interesting thoughts on mobile multimedia twitter on the Open Gardens blog

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

21/03/2008 by nicola.

Weird that the week I decide to go twitter free, I start blogging about it - anyway having put an out of office on my work email to say I would have infrequent access, it appears to be none - will still be available via blog or other aydindesign contact, but doing some small tweaks to website so apologies to anyone if they see weird things appearing and disappearing.

Back to twitter (probably) and work email (definitely) on 31st

Bir hafta sonra gurusuruz

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15/02/2008 by nicola.

Malinka Ivanova who is a lecturer at the Technical University of Sofia, has written a great post about social software and its presentation. She mentions different tools for representing data found in social sites such as del.icio.us with a tool from Joris Klerkx at Katholieke Universiteit Leuven. This is the result of using the Java applet tool, when I added myself and it auto added my network, using a search on the tags 3D and virtual worlds:

There is also a Social Circles tool from Maramushi to reveal some of the social networks emerging from mailing lists; this can be very useful if you subscribe to a number of mailing lists and want an overview. I didn’t get my own list at the first attempt but going to try again later.

If there is a way that you can create a dynamic ‘mashup’ as a visual representation of relationships from a variety of social networks that you use, that would be great to have, provided you can amend it on the front end, e.g. if one of your relationships changes such as following or stopping following someone on Twitter, it would be useful to click on it and delete/add relationship - and the data is then transferred back to Twitter, without you needing to log into Twitter separately. Tony Karrer has a post about relationships in social networking and the development of the Social Graph API

It also needs relevant coding to filter out irrelevant results so that your graph is not unmanageable to look at (without 3D glasses !)

SearchCrystal has started to look at ways of visualising data but has separate tabs for images or mashups, so you can’t see text and images on the same visual ‘graph’ but the tabs are quick and easy to use. I do not have the ability to be able to code an application to do this, but I do have ideas about what I would like to see on it. I am probably starting a project around April to look at this for one of Unis student websites. If anyone knows anyone who is interested in this or has other research in this area, I would love to hear from them.

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07/02/2008 by nicola.

Stewart Mader of Wikipatterns, Wikis in Education and other great feats of wikitivity has started a 21 days series explaining wikis and how they can be used. So far:
Day 1 Growing wiki support from grassroots
Day 2 Explaining differences between wikis and email
Day 3 Conditions for successful wikis, wikipedia isn’t only way

When I was creating a variety of wikis last year and advising others on getting going, we used the wikipatterns to help promote discussion beyond ok - we’ve got started, now what happens. Its easy to fall into anti-patterns even unintentionally whilst you are getting familiar with contributing in a public editable space and the patterns provide great examples to assist with wiki community building.

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18/01/2008 by nicola.

webstats.doc

Tony Karrer has a post on web stats for 2007. Here are mine.

This blog has been live since end of September 2007, I’ve removed stats which relate to other areas of the website - the stats package I’m using is built in - so there are a lot of ‘other’ or unknown or ‘could not be categorised’ type stats which leaves me guessing If I was using this blog for other purposes then I would definitely invest more time in stats and following up (I used to complete web stats for Borough of Poole when I worked there) but its interesting to see that regularly I seem to achieve around 30-40 at most.

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04/10/2007 by nicola.

Yeyyyy - alistapart.com have featured a very interesting article and the following discussion. This is definitely one to keep an eye on - alistapart.com was “the” resource for me when I was starting to learn web design with a lot of common sense articles, tips and best practices to be shared.

Its great that there is now a discussion going on regarding designing for mobile browsers and questioning whether designing for a device is good or not. For me designing for a mobile device appears to be the same thing as designing for a particular computer - you don’t just design for one web browser because those who follow standard web browser usage know - Firefox, Opera, Safari and others also have their fair share of users.

As with this, the iPhone is still new in terms of international usage, but as meaningful stats appear on mobile browser usage, then it will be clearer how and where design standards should be applied. Yet again development and .mobi, Cameron Moll and others are helping to bring mobile web design mainstream so that we can have constructive discussion around these issues.

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19/09/2007 by nicola.

http://www.alistapart.com/articles/revivinganorexicwebwriting

Anorexic web writing - content is the heart of a brilliant user experience. The article describes trends in web writing as favouring short or nearly non-existent copy , written by non-specialists, which produced impatient, lazy readers. Even though this has improved in recent years there is still tendency to try and keep as short as possible which may not always work.The article also revists the use of alt text - how to describe the full impact of a graphic for those who are unable to see it e.g. “University Tower” might not be useful to someone who has never seen the tower but “Evening view of UT tower aglow after a big Texas win” is more meaningful to anyone sighted or not because of what the words convey. Footer content also mentioned as the area to ’stuff’ copyright info etc and how it could be improved using a couple of examples.
The overall conclusion is that all writing on the web does not need to adhere to standards of copy only and for writers to write as though they are users experiencing the website.

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