My first Mobile Monday for a while — I’ve been kind of busy with my second child, Oren, born on 7th April.
I arrived late for the presentation by Hugh Griffiths, though what I caught was a bit slow and plodding. However, Helen Keegan did a good job getting an interesting panel of content providers and advertising services together.
Nothing much new was discussed, but it was interesting to hear how the media producers are dealing with the massive skew in the market of the iPhone. Variouspeople are quite rightly saying that targeting the iPhone leaves 90% of your audience feeling left out, but then the percentage of traffic from only those devices indicates that the rest of the market are just so much harder to reach. The iPhone (and hopefully Android too!) makes it easy to interact with digital media when you’re out and about. You didn’t necessarily know you wanted to beforehand, but once you start using it you get hooked.
Panel discussion
Here’s my notes on the panel discussion. I definitely missed various comments from some people, so if you want something corrected or added please leave a comment or @me on twitter.
55% of people in UK don’t care if it’s an app or a website
44% of people now blame brand if the experience is bad — no longer the operator!
“stop building vanity apps and having a one-night stand with your customers”
M&S going for mobile web, but with microsites and micro-apps to support
e.g. app to create labels for your kid’s school clothes
the touch revolution is coming — web site needs to be touch-enabled (and you might as well make it mobile friendly while you’re at it)
Why build an app when you can build it with a web app?
NJ: discovery — it’s more difficult to find a mobile web site
DGi: easiest way to market is an app store
This seems bizarre to me — surely it’s just as easy to search the web as it is to search the app store? I think it’s more awareness than discovery that’s the issue: iPhone users don’t search Google for a new icon on their device, even though lots of websites will make nice home screen bookmarks
What can happen to move us more towards 3 or 4 screen model (continuing access onto multiple devices)?
JD: have to relate to customer on the terms that they understand you, but move them into the digital world
NJ: some usage is substitutional to PC and some supplemental
e.g. “I saw this great house today — here, what do you think?”
DGi: with iPhone, finally have a direct channel to the customer without the operator getting in the way
previously, this has been hard
HK: phone usage survey
do you use the mobile web? No
but use facebook & email…
What’s the future of newspapers?
DGz: it’ll be here forever
HK: will decline, but not completely
if media owners can reduce their cost of producing
another 50 years
NJ: if it does die, the last paper sold will be a copy of the Daily Mail…
JD: will reduce to one or two titles
the ones to survive will be the ones that innovate and invest in journalism
Lots of people stayed up overnight to hack mobile applications and there were some very cool results.
I tried out building a mobile widget using the Nokia Web Runtime. This is an application environment on recent Nokia Series 60 devices that uses the WebKit browser with various extensions. You write widgets for it using JavaScript, XHTML and CSS (just like any other widget, but, as always, slightly different to the other formats). In fact, I started off building the widget using Apple’s DashCode — a web application builder for the iPhone. This comes with an interface builder that allows you to drag and drop controls onto the screen and wire them together.
Getting the control logic to work took a bit of getting used to — as with all interface frameworks, there’s a learning curve where you build up understanding of how the pieces are supposed to fit together. In the DashCode case, this isn’t helped by the lack of any documentation for the interface controls. However, the development environment more than made up for this — there’s a very capable Javascript debugger, complete with an interactive console, and it’s very easy to start and stop your widget in the iPhone emulator.
I used prototype to power up the Javascript side — making the Ajax calls to our server much easier and enabling some mucking around with the results to provide some pretty formatting.
Once I’d got the basic application working in DashCode, I took it across to the Nokia Web Runtime environment. This provided some extra features such as storing preferences between invocations so that the widget could start up straight into showing you the departures that you’d chosen previously.
I found the Web Runtime very effective, and it fills a very useful niche for simple, web-connected apps on recent S60 phones. Development time is fast and you have access to a reasonable amount of the phone features, though nothing quite as useful as location or the address book (as yet).
My hack won special mention in the “Most practical / ready for market” category — runner-up to the SNOB address book picture enricher. I’ve included a movie of the widget in action (within an iPhone environment) below.
Some other hacks were:
PimPam — social BBC programmes
21st Century Fridge Door — text & MMS to a shared web space
Location-based games w/J2ME — e.g. capture the flag
Social Tracker — basically just captures where you are to a database…
seems to use Google Maps in a browser to capture the current location
Flat Music Player UX design — zoomed out user experience — see the album art very small and in specific places on the screen
uses sense of physical location rather than words
Twitter client for Windows Mobile today screen
Browser Sync while ActiveSync’d — nice!
YourLocal - displays the local transport stops around Imperial College
FuturePlatforms — Octobastard robot — you have to see it to believe it :-)
SNOB: Social Network Open Butler — add pictures to your address book from social network avatars (web service outputs XML independent from social network)
Autowigificationizor (Owen Griffin) — click a firefox button and get a web runtime widget generated for you based on the RSS feeds for that web page
MixItUp — cocktails in Flash
Bluetooth + FOAF — unique ID from hash of bluetooth ID & device bluetooth name; can revoke it by changing your device bluetooth name; get a list of all the people you came into contact with at a conference
Update FireEagle location from command line, then display it on blog
LastMinute Labs — PhonePhight with motion detection & bluetooth — very cool!
Torchwood Sweded — again, I think you just had to be there…
This hasn’t been released yet, but was shown to us in beta form. It looks good — most people liked it — and it’s a portal style page with drag & drop customisable widgets. Here’s some of the discussion points that were raised…
People pay license fee — feel that they have a bit of ownership
Traditional media — people want reassurance of seeing some news and editorial content on the front page
Simon Willison: have you tried using Flash cookies? — doesn’t go away when clear browser cookies, also cross-browser
BBC have to support all browsers with all capabilities
Currently fixed width to 960px and centered — bbc stats show very few using 800x600 (having a JS bug that records screen size + browser width)
various people commenting that liquid layouts are possible (even with drag & drop widgets) but harder
Richard Hodgson revealed that the BBC had tried out a liquid layout (complete with the widgets) but had settled on the fixed width for the moment
Has drag and drop widgets between columns — can turn widgets on and off
Doing an iterative process — rather than usual BBC all-at-once
Part of a larger BBC initiative to get faster at designing web sites, e.g. design pattern layout
full grid layouts, shared by the designers
Aiming for a streaming iPlayer widget on home page, probably by July
Getting rid of grey bar across the top of all BBC pages (yey!)
The page changes the background colours of all widgets when you change to a different tab for the main content — controversial — no real point
I make things for mobile, web, voice and LEGO; create all sorts of stuff at Tesco Labs using agile development in any language that fits; run a CodeClub for kids in St Albans.
I blog about mobile stuff, Mac stuff (especially Time Machine), agile stuff and the events I attend.
I post at @adamcohenrose@mastodon.social — follow me!
