Over The Air 2013

Building an Internet of Things for Everyone

Alexandra Deschamps-Sonsino https://twitter.com/iotwatch

• get the work you want
• if you get work just for money, you’ll get more of it
• won’t get you the work you want…

good night lamp

• originally in 2007 people were unsure about it
  • it uses Wi-Fi: isn’t that a health risk?
• restarted in 2010 — no longer a problem

IoT is now accessible

• hardware & software is easily available, documented + supported with lots of forums
• lots of hackspaces around to make thing
• idea to making something that looks pretty and works: “I give you 2 weeks — and 1 of those is waiting for things to be delivered”
• still hard to get something to production scaling, but getting support for that:
  • Fritzing, DesignSpark, etc

IoT vs big business

• wanting to bridge concerns of small business and large corporations
• both want the same reach of
• standards & security
• british gas https://twitter.com/connectinghomes & #connectinghomes 26/09/13
  • 25 startups in energy sector
  • bobo the polar bear: changes colour depending on how you manage your home energy
• need to get corporates who are interested to actually meet the people who are doing stuff

Telling the right story

• journalists will make stuff up…
• make sure you tell a good story
• e.g. onesie for a child with sensors
  • great for children with health conditions
  • but could be creepy for parents
• you have to be completely clear about why a customer would want to buy what you’ve made
  • create a press release and a dropbox full of well-lit, decent pictures

Investment

• investors < 60 years old will probably have never invested in anything other than the web…
• they need to see more hardware things
• new https://twitter.com/bg_ventures incubator

Retail is interested…

• Staples want to be an #iot retailer
• https://twitter.com/Works_Shop — Alex’s office is a pop-up shop in the evenings

Building Complex Web Apps with Dart & Web Components

Chris Buckett https://twitter.com/chrisbuckett

• V8 is as fast as they can get for javascript
• dart is faster for some benchmarks already

dart language

• optionally typed
  • when Dart runs, it pays no attention to the type information
  • use types for annotations
  • used for communication and validation
• classes are also interfaces…
  • like duck typing
• has privacy: just prefix with underscore
  • also has package shared equivalent
• concurrency & async support
  • works with web workers in the browser
• supports libraries by default
  • a single repository of libraries
• built-in support for DOM
• DartDoc is markdown based :-)
• Dart VM not in any browser other than Dartium (special Chrome build)
  • but has been designed to compile to javascript
• the language is still a beta, some restrictions
  • e.g. can’t modify variables on the fly

web components

• Polymer is Google’s implementation of web components
• polymer.dart is the dart version
• polymer elements consist of a template & a script
• elements get created and added to the shadow DOM
• polymer elements have double-barrelled names
  • first part is namespace
  • hyphen is mandatory

Designing for diversity

or How to stop worrying and deal with Android fragmentation

Stephanie Rieger

a bit of history

• port of leith, edinburgh: cruise ships stop
  • crew come out and use the internet
  • mostly filipino (25% of crew are filipino)
• massive change in devices in a short time:
  • 2010: massive laptops
  • 2011: netbooks
  • 2012/13: tablets/phablets
• and this is a change for people who send most of their income home
• mobile phones were getting smaller, but needed large teams
• started to change in 2005:
  • mediatek started offering reference design chipsets
• went from giant companies to tiny ones
• lots competed on price, but others went with regional specializations
• by 2007, these had captured c.10% of global device sales
• started experimenting wildly
  • e.g. 4 SIM phone with a project
  • could try out with tiny production runs
• then Android changed things again in 2008
• these companies could now switch from low-end feature phones to mid & high range
  • e.g. Lumia lookalike, running skinned Android, sells for £56!
• other chipset vendors have emulated MediaTek reference designs
  • e.g. Rockchip, even Qualcomm
• all the components are now tuned to work with Android by default

hardware diversity

• variations at different levels
• low-end: all off-the-shelf — around £56
• slightly more customized: nice case, slightly customised Android, off-the-shelf chip
  • e.g. Xiaomi Hongmi
  • dual SIM, gorilla glass, highly customised Android (MIUI)
  • just £83
  • sold out first batch of 100,000 in 90 seconds…
• we’re used to having customisation all the way down
• but even larger companies are experimenting
• Japan - KDDI Infobar: highly customised design & Android
  • fashion product
• Oppo: Bluetooth LE camera trigger, touch panel on rear of phone
• Yota e-paper rear display: can retain image for weeks without power
  • also has a capacitative touch strip
• India: Aakash 2 is now c.£30
  • govt aiming to subsidise & distribute to 20 million students
• it’s increasingly likely that devices will be made by “other manufacturers”

platform diversity

• Android lets you change the keyboard
• as a developer you can’t rely on the user having a standard keyboard
• also lets you change the default app for intents
• Paranoid Android lets you change the resolution of the device at the app level
  • as apps adjust to resolution & screen size, this lets you choose the way the app behaves on your device
• MIUI is particular popular as it’s actively crowd-sourced
  • also because there are thousands of community build themes
  • including metaphor-based themes with virtual navigation
• Oppo now lets you choose your ROM when you order your phone: Oppo’s Color or CyanogenMod
• Cyanogen aiming to create a one-click installer
• manufacturers are supposed to include the default Holo theme
  • but some small manufacturers don’t
• manufacturers will also select OS versions and not update for a while
  • we will always see multiple versions live at any time
• also multiple app stores especially in different countries
• unofficial app store booths (e.g. in a Bangkok mall)
  • owner will recommend and install apps for you

how do we design for this?

• design strategies will apply to Android IoT devices as well
• basic principles:
  1. be flexible
  2. provide assets for all
  3. optimize layouts
  4. enable diverse experiences
• can use weighting to scale cleverly
• use asset grouping to enable variation
• google publish screen density stats every 2-4 weeks
• as screen gets bigger, letting the UI stretch doesn’t work so well
• very similar to responsive design
• set breakpoints in your layout where you change layout
• want to avoid have three versions that you swap
• instead aim for a continuum where content adjusts itself
• Evernote is a good example
  • list view switches to grid view on larger screens
• see also Google IO & Wordpress apps
  • Wordpress portrait tablet has list and detail side by side
• lots of qualifiers
  • touch screen type: capacitative/trackball/finger
  • UI mode: car/desk/television/appliance!
• not necessary to account for all combinations!
• enabling intents allows future-friendly behaviour
  • don’t have to worry about new social networks in different countries
• official android devices reached 1 billion last week
  • doesn’t include non-Google devices
  • probably doesn’t include cars, etc
  • doesn’t include experimental Android IoT devices

“diversity is not a bug, it’s a feature”

Arduino: Robots, WiFi and extreme hacks

David Cuartielles https://twitter.com/dcuartielles

• based in Malmö Uni
• all got into Arduino because wanted something for students
• “as technology grows in our hearts, it gets smaller in size”
• David’s background: worked at Infineon designing chips, then went to teach technology to arts students in Sweden
• had six months to teach people to program
  • had to relearn how to learn
• arduino not just boards:
  • boards
  • dev tools
  • documentation & community
• not teaching about transistors: teaching how to make a light blink
• arduino ide doesn’t have lots of features
  • but gives you feeling that you’re in a slimmed down version of Eclipse
• short run manufacturing (c.10K) so can always change the design
• hacked a full-sized car to be remote controlled
  • will see self-driving car on youtube soon…
• in mexico city only room for 30% of students in university
• instead they have arts centres for students who don’t get it
• David taught electronics there:
  • sorted out electronics sourced from mexico as components not available
  • vimeo: ohoh robochock
  • vimeo: ohoh competition
    • trying to remote control their robotos
    • all interfering with same channel, but they don’t know!
• arduino robot
  • designed with help from kids from mexico
  • 4 times winners of robocup
  • invested a lot of time in the AC/DC converter
  • so that performance is consistent across battery
• educational experiment in Spain
  • 24 schools, over 500 kids (15 year-olds)
  • every week had three sessions: introduction, hacking, sharing
  • each week was thematic: e.g. sports
  • 25 kids, 5 projects: olympic games on Friday
  • 24 different experiments, but kids didn’t do everything
  • instead saw what other kids were doing
  • all details http://cuartielles.com/verkstad/en
• hacked Sony SmartWatch to run Arduino
  • all published on github: underverg?
  • only thing couldn’t get hold of was bluetooth chip
• natural fuse
  • plant lives or dies based on your carbon footprint
  • if it dies your electricity stops
  • can switch between selfish (grab from neighbours) and selfless (offer spare to neighbours) modes
• fukushima
  • pachube/cosm was used for people to map the radiation themselves
  • using arduinos with geiger counters
• open source white goods controller
  • modular: only need four abilities
  • mosfet, relay, pwr, ??
  • added UI module to provide output
• everything is open source
  • pay me to make it: once it’s made, the work is done
  • you can pay me to maintain it

Whitespace Networks: Connect All The Things

Ben Ward https://twitter.com/crouchingbadger - http://love-hz.com

• TV whitespace becoming available as moves from analogue to digital
• however, will still be used for analogue radio mics etc
  • if we cock up they’ve got lots of famous people to complain!
• weightless protocol)
  • 10 yr battery life
  • 5-10km range
  • unhelpfully called “super-wifi” in america (802.11AF)
• needs a whitespace database…
  • being worked on right now
  • need to check every 15 minutes
  • check OFCOM for list of approved DBs
  • then check with your licensed DB
  • but you’re not reserving space, just agreeing to share
  • see also http://uk-whitespaces.spectrumbridge.com
• neul now making a 4.5cm² board
  • expected price $17 (at scale)
  • range: 1-8km
• new phrase: “the fog” — like the cloud but on the ground :-)
• open source boards
  • using software defined radio chip (lime something)
  • myriad RF
  • nuand bladeRF
  • also hackRF?
• has some location capabilities based on triangulation
• ideas?
  • bike theft detector using the frame as the antenna
  • oxford guerilla sensor network for flood detection

Appium: Mobile Automation Made Awesome

Jonathan Lipps https://twitter.com/jlipps

• cross-platform solution for native & hybrid mobile automation
• other options for ios:
  • calabash-ios
  • Frank
  • ios-driver
  • UIAutomation
  • KeepItFunctional
• other options for android:
  • calabash-android
  • MonkeyTalk
  • Robotium
  • UiAutomator
  • selendroid
• wanted to set some ground rules:
  • test the same app you submit to the store
    • don’t want to add additional code into the app
  • write your tests in any language & framework
  • use a standard automation API & spec
  • make it open source and foster a large community
• appium supports:
  • ios, android & firefox os
  • real devices, simulators
  • native apps, hybrids, mobile web
• can write one set of tests that work across multiple platforms
  • if you’re careful in how you structure your app
• appium exposes an HTTP server than allows selenium to run
• selenium webdriver has clients in many languages
• and is a W3C working draft, so nearly a standard :-)
• appium also extends webdriver protocol with additional mobile-specific behaviours
  • talking to selenium to get those changes into
• under the hood:
  • iOS: Apple Instruments & UIAutomation
  • Android 4.2.1 and up: Google UiAutomator
  • older Android + hybrid: Selendroid
  • Firefox OS: marionette
• written in node.js, so npm install appium and write tests in node
• or else have a GUI runner to set flags
• GUI also comes with an inspector
  • so you can see what’s going on at each step
  • (don’t need to be the app developer to write a test)
  • will create some initial code for you from your actions
• find things by:
  • accessibility
  • element type
  • hiearchy xpath
  • android id
• you can use a config dictionary for IDs/xpaths to help cope with platform/device differences
• instruments can only run a single test at once per host machine

• Sauce Labs have lots of devices available across the net

  • provides scaling and device selection
  • can switch to Sauce just by changing appium end point + adding credentials
  • also need to provide app: pre-upload using Sauce API, or host on a server somewhere
  • http://saucelabs.com/mobile

• Q: can you switch between apps?

  • we could use a second app to turn on/off wifi
  • A: doesn’t work on iOS — when you jump to another app then UIAutomation loses its context and quits
• Q: can you fake location?

Programming is terrible

Lessons from a life wasted

Tef https://twitter.com/tef

• Watch out for The Group Project: getting together to work on a project that individuals have not made time for themselves…
• make your code easy to replace more than easy to extend
• people often learn more from maintenance than from building from new
• people tend to teach in the way that they learned best
• C, Java, C# are not a great starting point for new programmers
  • they require concepts to figure out even before you can make things happen
• learning programming should be a side effect of doing something exciting
• girl at MIT struggling with English grammar
  • Seymour Papert asked her to write a sentence or poetry generating programme
  • after a few hours, she exclaimed “I know what nouns are!”
• view source
  • one of the best features of Scratch online
  • learn by seeing something you want to copy
• computer anonymous
  • support group for everyone
• for a starter, introduce constraints if they’re not already there

Over The Air 2012

Only just noticed (in September) that I hadn’t posted my notes from Over The Air 2012 in June!

I had a fantastic time — and so did my dad and my son! We had three generations at the same tech conference :-)

I need to write a separate blog post about the LEGO hacks that people put together during and following my LEGO Mindstorms workshop, but in the meantime, here's my notes from the other sessions:

Hacking Science and Space

Ariel Waldman @arielwaldman

invisibility

• dark energy pushing us apart
• dark matter keeping us together…
• invisible superpowers:
  
  • belt that vibrates when you face north
  • synaesthesia for those that don’t have it…
  • syneseizure — feel vision through a gimp mask!
  • particle windchime
  • what would particle collisions sound like?
  • being used as an augmentation interface in collision labs

cyborgs

• your phone has loads of sensors, available all the time
• quake canary
  
  • monitor on your phone

interstellar

• humans are really good at pattern recognition
  
  • galaxy zoo
  • planet hunters
  • the work you do actually gets credited to you!
  • grean peas galaxies
  • discovered as galaxy zoo lets you drill down into data behind images
• NASA makes stuff available, but not necessarily accessible
  
  • spacelog.org
  • takes PDFs of transcripts and makes them come to life

science hack day

• weekend hack day
  
  • isodrag: a typeface where all the letters have the same wind drag
  • DNAckery: cocktail of extracted Strawberry DNA…
  • arm alarm: won’t shut off until your pulse is angry
  • near death lamp: lights up when an asteroid gets close to the Earth

Open Web Device

Francisco Jordan @mepartoconmigo, O2 Labs

Slides available

• still lots more people with feature phones than smart phones
  
  • 4 billion feature phones will be sold between 2011 & 2015
• mainly because they can’t afford a smart phone
• especially in Latin America, where Telefonica is trying to grow
• want to provide a phone for $60-70!
• Open Web Device - based on Boot 2 Gecko
• plan to launch in Brazil at beginning of next year
• Also partnering with Qualcomm to provide the chipset
• still haven’t decided the OEM(s) who will be manufacturing
• all open source: http://wiki.mozilla.org/B2G
• can build your own ROM based on Android 3.0 or 4.0 kernel/driver backends
• can also build B2G for desktop
• Gaia is Mozilla’s front-end for B2G (also open source)
• don’t have to use Gaia — B2G doesn’t even have to look like a phone
• the keyboard itself is an application
  
  • you can replace the keyboard with another web app!
• most new APIs in B2G are also finding their way into Firefox for desktop
  
  • just download Firefox nightly to see what’s available
• apps are just webapps in a directory with a manifest.webapp JSON file
  
  • can use appcache to store stuff locally as well
• using Sumon as a demo webapp
  
  • runs about 3x faster on B2G than on iOS!
• Marketplace: http://marketplace.mozilla.org
  
  • open for developers, but not yet for users
• or install from web: navigator.mozApps.install(manifesturl);
  
  • install an app from directly a web page

Anyone Can Code an Embedded Controller

Nicholas Herriot @nicholasherriot

Example device: connected printer — text questions to it and it will print them out!

• Vodafone trying to bring connectivity to embedded controllers
• Arduino and other microcontrollers exploding since 2005
• mbed (http://mbed.org/) similar to Arduino, but started by ARM
  
  • 96MHz
  • ARM Cortex M3
  • can run USB host and I2C slave
• online compiler & tool chain - works cross platform
• easy to install & run code:
  
  • runs as a USB mass storage device
  • just copy code across and press restart button
• can export from mbed online IDE to other toolchains:
  
  • CodeRed: eclipse & gcc based
  • others
• wanted to set up a platform for microcontrollers
• online IDE has a built-in SVN repository per project
• built-in libraries has lots of common stuff
• can extend with downloadable libraries (search available through online IDE)
• Vodafone has an M2M network - GDSB
  
  • used by Kindle, TomTom
  • SIMs don’t expire, don’t need to top up
• trying to open GDSB to developers…

You do know it is a phone, don’t you? (Adding voice to your mobile apps)

Tim Panton @Steely_Glint, Tropo

Tropo API

• SaaS for server-side phone handling
  
  • Voice (PSTN, VoIP/SIP, Skype, iNum)
  • SMS
  • Other services via HTTP or XMPP
  • Multi-lingual (with multiple voices in each language)
• SaaS provided by Voxeo
• Web API is JSON/javascript based
• also scripting APIs for Python, Ruby, etc
• example uses:
  
  • making calls without sharing phone numbers (e.g. speaking to taxi driver)
• scripting vs web api
  
  • scripting runs on Tropo servers and has no access to external data
  • web api runs on your servers - can access your data
• also a REST API to start outgoing calls and other control & management services

Phono

• jQuery plugin to make phone calls from the browser
• open source client
• picks up microphone from computer
• can use server-side voice recognition…
• can also pick up messaging from the tropo service
• requires a back-end (but same API for all)
  
  • Flash
  • Java applet - takes much longer to load
  • Panda (Flash with echo cancellation)
  • WebRTC - native in Chrome Canary
  • PhoneGap/Cordova plugin
  • iPad/iPhone actually works better than most laptops
  • pot luck on Android < 3.2
  • much better on Android >= 3.2
  • early version of native iOS (available in github/phono/phonosdk)
• can run both Tropo & Phono from a car battery
  
  • has been done at Burning Man

Development costs

• in the US can make free calls
• outside the US, need to ping Tropo for permission
• they will often let you run a demo server with small number of minutes for no money

Mobile Websites Can Have Nice Fonts Too…

Laura Kalbag @laurakalbag, front-end designer

slides available here

• typefaces can evoke emotional responses
  
  • not just in typographers!
• iOS app: Fonts by AppEngines — shows you all the fonts available on your device
• embed them on mobile using @font-face in CSS, just like on desktop browsers
  
  • works on opera mobile, android mobile >4
  • doesn’t work on IE Mobile, Opera Mini
• sources of fonts:
  
  • fontsquirrel - all free
  • fontspring - one off license per domain
  • myfonts - one off license per domain
• but can have a high impact on performance
  
  • and can flicker when load, etc
• tips for better performance:
  
  • just use the fancy font for headers
  • can choose to subset a font on some services (e.g. FontSquirrel)
  • see http://24ways.org/2011/unicode-range
• hosted fonts:
  
  • google web fonts - loads of free ones, but not so good quality
  • typekit, fonts.com, fontdeck are better - but pay subscription costs
  • but loaded using javascript… can be laggy
• watch out for missing fonts on mobile (e.g. no Arial on Android)
• and fonts can render differently on different devices

choosing a good font

• heineman: designed for people with dyslexia
• want to make something that’s really inviting to read, but then just sit back and actually read it easily
• what makes a typeface relevant?
  
  • context of content & features of typeface
• old style or humanist serif: based on early printing presses
• transitional serif: high contrast, sharp
• modern serif: modern classic, magazines, high class sophistication
• egyptian/slab serif: marketing, shouting, very bold
• humanist sans: clean & easy to read
• transitional sans: utilitarian, clinical, swiss
• geometric sans: clean, slick, structural, slightly childlike
• script: lots of variety, generally not good for body text, better for logos or headers
• novelty or themed: lack any subtlety, cheesy, decoration on a poster
• watch out for free fonts — they’ll most likely be overused
• choose the weight carefully:
  
  • too heavy is hard to read
  • too light may disappear on smaller screens

laura’s taste

• easy to read
• attention to detail
• subtle
• well-balanced, consistent & uniform
  
  • nothing jumps out too much

ePatient 101

Mark A M Kramer @mamk

• a lot of healthcare is based on communication between the doctor and the patient
• often doctor communication is not very effective
  
  • slow responses to email
  • constrained mobile devices due to privacy & security issues
• big issues just scheduling appointments
• quantified self — capturing and logging health information:
  
  • especially body monitoring
  • apps that take photos of food, confirm the food, then estimate the calories
• Dan Appelquist: most mHealth is focused on the hospital & medical enterprise

Over The Air 2011: The FT Web app - We've Got a Website for That

Andrew Betts, Assanka @triblondon

• An app is:
  
  • responsive design
  • responsive to human interface (mouse, keyboard, touchscreen, TV remote, …)
• The Daily app is now generating less than 50 tweets a day (and still going down)
  
  • Down from over 200
• iPad web app also works on other devices
  
  • not just tablets – phones too
  • currently only accessibly on iPad
  • works on Android & QNX but not released yet
  • Android imminent, QNX a few months
• server serves the same code to all devices
  
  • client does customisation and caches as much as it can
  • so can go offline and still access pages
• FT web app
  
  • 8 months with 3 people
  • then additional 4 months with same people to get Android & Playbook

issues

• flowed columns and flowing text around fixed elements
  
  • adobe webkit fork has great flow additions - but not available on devices
  • css3 template layouts – but again not supported
  • so have to measure content and cut it into positioned containers using Javascript
• content balancing
  
  • always show a whole number of items across the width
  • done by classifying devices into four groups according to screen size
    
    • small, medium, large, large wide
• podcast pages
  
  • want to keep playing audio even when move to another page
  • put audio player at the top of the DOM, so not altered
  • entire app is in a single page – just swap content in and out
• swiping between sections
  
  • continuous carousel made out of three divs
  • middle one is always the current
  • outer ones are preloaded as required
  • implemented swipes using touch gestures
  • have to do your own gesture interpretation
    
    • distinguish between slow drags and flings

tools

• playbook has remote web debugging
• WeinRE can do similar, but can’t debug Javascript
• TouchScroll allows you to keep headers fixed and snap to columns when swiping across
• web debugging proxies (e.g. Charles)
• use desktop for layout, but real device for interaction (swiping)

discoveries

• people use native apps differently
  
  • they tap lightly and fast
  • the web browser waits for fast taps in case there’s a double tap to zoom
  • if you don’t want double tap to zoom
  • Assanka made fastclick

offline access

• launching app offline
  
  • need to specify URLs in app manifest
  • if you change a single file, all of the manifest needs to be re-downloaded
  • store as little as possible
  • the more you store, the longer your app will take to launch
  • iOS manifest is buggy – you can get name conflicts with other webapps
    
    • so make sure you give your manifest a custom name
  • development is hell – things get cached the whole time
    
    • instead, add a comment that changes every minute (for dev)
    • still leaves you time to refresh a few times to check the cacheing
• manifest is no good for editorial content
  
  • local storage is much faster than SQLite
  • so if you only access by key then use it
  • you need permission to store > 5Mb
  • strategy:
    
    • launch app from web, just store <= 5Mb and prompt to save to home screen
    • saved from home screen, immediately ask for 50Mb and never ask again
  • images downloaded from server as base64 encoded strings
    
    • can combine images into single requests
    • and can then gzip the whole thing
    • stored in local SQLite
    • rendered into DOM as a data: URI
    • base64 transfer also avoids operator image recompression!
• analytics
  
  • can’t use Google analytics
  • log user actions into local DB
  • POST the log when requesting updated content
  • on the server, rewrite the log into an Apache format access log

unresolved issues

• SSL security: no browser chrome, so no browser padlock
  
  • trusted, because we tell you…
• Social media integration – OAuth in separate window doesn’t work
  
  • have to reload completely when return to app
• offline adverts:
  
  • not technically hard, but ad server companies don’t know how to deal with them
  • can’t retract the ad
  • can’t measure clicks
  • can’t click through at all…
• automated QA – selenium doesn’t really work
  
  • ended up using lots of people and lots of devices

platforms

• Android is by far the poorest web environment when compared with iOS and QNX
  
  • mainly due to lack of hardware-accelerated CSS transitions
  • so FT have a native Android app which has a single native component – the gallery to enable swiping
  • the rest of the app is HTML/CSS/JS
• QNX has a native app too, but only to have a home screen icon and to provide distribution

Q&A

• upset Apple?
  
  • probably not – FT are specific market
• differences between web app and native
  
  • web has more sections than native ever had
  • web app preloads content, so people swipe more often
  • as a result web app gets much more interaction
• is not appearing in the app store an issue?
  
  • yes, but instead making tactical native apps
  • e.g. FT Top 100 Companies – tells users if you want the full edition, go to the web app

Over The Air 2011: OpenBTS - Open Source GSM

Will Rogers, Senior Consultant at Detica

• Open Base Transceiver Station: http://openbts.sourceforge.net/
• software implementation of radio towers
• USRP: universal software radio peripheral
• written in C++ on top of GNU Radio
• fairly stable – maintained by Free Software Foundation
• only acts as an access point – doesn’t simulate entire mobile network
  
  • another project: OpenBSC does more
• but, can translate GSM into VOIP – Asterix
• originally built by David Burgess (Range Networks) and Harvind Samra
  
  • Range Networks building commercial implementations (e.g. Femtocells)
• originally designed for:
  
  • signals intelligence…
  • disaster relief
  • developing countries
  • Island of Niue project - March 2010
• enables GSM network for $1/month per subscriber
• hardly uses any power
• range depends on antenna & height
  
  • Burning Man covered 5km – with a microwave backhaul
• supports handset registration
  
  • requires no pre-provisioning
  • get a text with a code – reply and your IMSI gets added to the asterix
• some branches support USSD (free data)
• requirements:
  
  • hardware:
    
    • can run the whole thing in a VM
    • USB (for USRP 1), or ethernet (for USRP 2)
  • software:
    
    • most linuxes (Ubuntu well supported)
    • GNUradio
    • Asterix PBX
• USRP was chosen as it was available, but it’s not really designed for GSM
  
  • better to have multiple of 13MHz clock
  • daughterboards available for various RF frequencies
  • need to have GSM-specific one
• resources
  
  • OpenBTS for Dummies
  • Will has an Ubuntu installer script that just works
• channels
  
  • default is one logical channel for control
  • everything else (7) for voice
  • that means 7 simultaneous handset calls at once
    
    • e.g. 3 on-network conversations + one outbound
  • if you want more then you need multiple BTS units
  • if want SMS then need to steal a voice channel for control
• SMS messages need routing, so OpenBTS includes smsqueue which forwards messages
• limitations
  
  • doesn’t support live handover of calls
  • no data support (GPRS or Edge)
  • no way of supporting roaming or billing
  • 3G/UMTS boxes are available, but not yet open source
    
    • OpenBSC may get there first
  • doesn’t support encryption
• use CC/MNC of 001/01 – these are the test values
• OpenBTS console has various commands
  
  • timsi lists connected IMSIs and IMEIs
  • testcall creates a UDP connection to the phone
    
    • you can then send Layer 3 packets
  • sendrrlp sends a request for location (as mandated by US Gov)
    
    • can provide info about cell tower locations and phone will calculate location itself

Over The Air 2011: Exploding the Gap Between Web and Native

James Hugman - Engineer at Future Platforms @jhugman

• Web vs Native is a false dilemma
  
  • the answer is: it depends, or it’s both
• often a lot of display in UI
• story of the glastonbury app
  
  • Orange app for iPhone, Android and Nokia
• three/four phases of content:
  
  • before (and before embargo)
  • during
  • after
• lots of data
  
  • 3000 bands, 65 stages – timings could change

experimentation & research

• assumed offline and native UI
• but native was too expensive for three platforms
• how do you make native in web technologies?
  
  • every phone has a different web view
  • Android users don’t like seeing iPhone UX
  • and Android back button can exit app if you’re not careful
  • there is no release cycle of WebKit
    
    • manufacturers just take the trunk and fix bugs
  • dev and cpu time spent getting UI just right
• Titanium: write your UI in Javascript, render natively
  
  • ListViews either don’t look right, or leak memory
  • doesn’t always deal with latest design patterns – can’t override platform-specific behaviours
• Impact for iOS: javascript talks to OpenGL
  
  • experimental & proprietary
  • morphed into appMobi’s DirectCanvas
• game{closure}
  
  • pre-alpha – HTML5
  • also node.js
  • debug your mobile app and your browser app all in the same browser
• but Game UI is not platform UI
  
  • easier to make cross-platform game UI as the UI is brand-specific, not platform specific
• important to get events passing between rendering and UI logic
  
  • all frameworks bundle their own Javascript engine
  • Android users don’t like big apps – Titanium hello world is 6Mb!

new platform

• Kirin requirements:
  
  • native, platform appropriate UIs
  • minimal download
• design:
  
  • native UI
  • JS application logic
  • native platform
• advantages:
  
  • raw events processed natively
  • only app-specific events passed through to app
• “the keyhole”
  
  • instantiate an invisible web-view
  • build proxies for objects
  • javascript calls into native and the other way
• modular javascript using CommonJS
  
  • each screen has its own module (one file each)
• threading using asynchronous APIs, inspired by node.js
• native-specific features available as services
  
  • e.g. Location, SQL, Network access
  • same Javascript to native bridge
  • JS just uses a require(...)

releasing as open source

• available now on github
• as a 0.5 release
• apache license
• looking for feedback
• iOS and Android only at the moment (Qt coming later)
• Windows Phone 7 might come later

Q&A

• testing & debugging:
  
  • build script runs node.js
    
    • so can include unit tests at build time with assert
    • have console access
    • no actual debugger
• why port model code – isn’t it simple?
  
  • but if using database on device, then model not so portable (Core Data doesn’t port well)
• porting pain? scaling to iPad?
  
  • most of pain was electronic programme guide
  • download & syncing

Over The Air 2011: Crap! It doesn't quite look right!

Or… how I learned to stop worrying and set my web sites free

Lyza Danger Gardner, co-founder Cloud Four @lyzadanger

Crap! It doesn't look quite right, or, how I learned to stop worrying and set my mobile web sites free

View more presentations from Lyza Gardner

• Founder of Cloud Four in 2007
• Explicitly for mobile web
• Lyza was on the team that built the Obama app
• Went through the app and realised that there was nothing in the app that couldn’t be done with the web
• hautelook.com – high performance mobile web
• deschutes brewery – one web
  
  • uses geolocation to find where to buy the beer
• mobile web is hard and getting harder
  
  • and it’s not just phones any more…
  • car radios, televisions, …
• and there’s a whole stack every time (any of which can change)
• in the 1990s, took print ideas and applied them – pixel perfect
  
  • customers believed that we had control…
  • “could you move the logo a half pixel to the right?”
• no one can possibly know enough – devices are continually appearing and you still have to deal with the old stuff
• how do you deal with WYSIWYG for customers…?

mobilewood

• 10 highly experienced mobile developers
• working on where we wanted the mobile web to go
• built http://futurefriend.ly
• three pages, two images, no interactivity
• 100 man hours
• -> not scaleable!

testing is very hard

• Cloud Four helped set up a device laboratory in downtown Portland
• multiple operators, device manufacturers
• but even a well-stocked device library will not help

take heart!

• relinquish control over a few things we thought we had down pat

• four considerations:
  
  1. content like water
     
     • consider wireframes that demonstrate the flow and flex of content across a continuum of device and window sizes
     • design approach: like proportion – not pixel perfect
     • build functional mockups, so you can show (not tell)
     • it will be an iterative process
     • will not be an overnight change – it’s not a brochure, despite what we told you earlier
     • it’s often surprising how willing customers will be to adapt or modify their content APIs
     • try using textile or markdown in CMS
  2. essentials first
     
     • not just mobile – pare down to the essentials
     • not just about design – about process, performance, experience for every user
     • start serene and simple
  3. arm the weapons!
     
     • responsive web design
     • fluid media: 100% width images
     • fluid grids
     • use media queries to enhance (mobile first)
     • see also Responsive Images (by Scott Jehl)
     • Boston Globe is a showcase
     • it’s ok to leave unmanaged gutter in % widths
     • use Modernizr’s modular approach (don’t test everything)
       
       • but it’s not infallible
     • use server-side work:
       
       • reordering – moving navigation around
         
         • android devices are too buggy
       • reduction – smaller images
       • respect – your users: don’t download graphics if you don’t use them
     • user agent sniffing – it ain’t perfect, but it gets the job done
     • don’t be afraid to do some server-side optimization
     • optimise!
       
       • especially your htaccess or apache config
       • use YSlow
       • make sure you gzip everything you can (not just html)
       • cache manifests are a little tricky to deal with
     • Cloud Four images:
       
       • server side sizing using WURFL for major sizes
       • common images are then cached
       • then 100% fluid sizing
  4. draw the line
     
     • set expectations with your customers
     • explain how you don’t have control over everything
     • don’t be afraid to pull out egregious hacks!
     • be ready to fail gracefully
     • this isn’t religion!
• frameworks:
  
  • Lyza likes the columnal CSS framework
  • most complex projects end up rolling their own…
• iOS rotation
  
  • use -webkit-text-size-adjust:none;

Lyza is writing a book – Head First Mobile Web

Over The Air 2011: BBC Digital Public Space

Mo McRoberts - Developer, BBC Archive Development @nevali

Digital Public Space at Over The Air 2011

View more presentations from Mo McRoberts

• Trying to make BBC Digital Archive accessible
• Then working together with other organisations:
  
  • BFI, Kew, national maritime museum, royal opera house, british library, national archives, national library of scotland
  • have 25–30 organisations who have said yes to accessing data
  • but only have Mo to connect things!
• lots of separate catalogues
• each catalogue refers to things in asset stores
  
  • may not be able to get to asset stores, but linking catalogues by itself is useful
  • also link to external sources such as dbpedia, geonames, etc
• want to make the archives accessible to people other than archivists
• golden rule:
  
  • give everything a single, permanent URI
  • make the data about that thing accessible at that URI
• could try to fit everything into one giant, extensible XML schema
  
  • or else just go with RDF…
• can put all the RDF from catalogues into an RDF Aggregator
• wanted to find overlaps in the catalogues
• aggregator evaluates all info coming in and tries to find matches
  
  • not just exact matches, but close matches too
  • disambiguating is the hard part
• create lots of stub objects
  
  • people, places, events, things, …
• eventually want to have spindle in the hands of the public
• the archives themselves are slowly being digitised, but it takes quite a while
• BBC Redux captures and stores TV and radio, transcodes them and makes them available in various forms
  
  • been running since July 2007 for everything that’s been running centrally (not all local opt-outs)
• now has an API and developers’ guide
• available to developers for the duration of OverTheAir:
  
  • prototype RDF aggregator to query
  • API to Redux
  • references to Redux are not fully tested – may or may not work
• genome project:
  
  • scan in, OCR and codify all of the Radio Times issues
  • from 1920 to 2009
  • this and /programmes will provide a public API for all broadcasts ever
• three windows of content availability:
  
  1. free to air on iPlayer
  2. commercially useful
  3. out of commercial time: e.g. desert island discs (but no music)
• aiming to have content available in 10 years’ time
  
  • BBC Director General has committed to this
• 1 recent episode of Doctor Who has 80 rights clearances
  
  • an older episode would be worse as you would have to find the appropriate rights holders

Over The Air 2011: Stolen and lost phones - can mobile phone applications help with the problem?

Detective Sergeant Andy Williams

• National Mobile Crime Unit – based in Notting Hill
• Criminals stealing to order
• Cops are not the most technologically advanced people – when Andy wants something done, he asks his children…
• in 2001, 45% street crime linked to mobiles
  
  • this was from the British Crime Survey – not reported crime, but surveyed
• current stats:
  
  • 9.7% of all UK crime accounted for by theft of a handset
  • 60% of mobile phones stolen in personal robberies are iPhones or BlackBerrys
    
    • not just the phone is high value, but the data on the phones
  • avg 8,000 phones stolen every month in london

what happens to stolen phones?

• used until blocked (by IMEI)
  
  • IMEI blocking works across UK, 60% of Europe, plus North & South America coming in soon
  • but main export markets are North Africa (mainly Algeria) & Romania
• some handsets are vulnerable to having their IMEI changed (so can be unblocked)
• phones used for parts (broken screens, etc)
• phones used for non-phone functions – mp3 player, etc
• blocking:
  
  • operator will block SIM
  • will also request IMEI to be blocked
• individual can install a theft tracking app, but police would need a signed warrant
  
  • police can’t monitor 8,000 phones a month
• IMEIs are personal data in Germany
• phones offered on eBay, shown as blocked or no signal

immobilise – national property register

http://immobilise.com

• if device is registered with immobilise, police don’t need to go through RIPA
• can put anything with a serial number on there
• can check on people’s phones when stop people on the street
• private company set up and operated in conjunction with the police

formation of NMPCU

• initially front line - reducing robbery
• expanded to all acquisitive crime
• working at all levels of crime - local through to organised
• now an offence to offer to reprogram a phone (change the IMEI)

Police Central eCrime Unit

• trying to combat cyber-criminals
• looking at denial of service attacks, etc
• front line police notoriously poor at dealing with cyber crime
• but no law enforcement agency that specialises in all areas of cyber crime
• most expertise is in the forensic area
• judicial system is not set up to deal with cyber crime
• judicial boundaries don’t help – if online connections are not in UK…
• recently starting up new kind of officer: Covert Internet Investigator
• not very many across the country

Case study: organised criminals targeting music events

• following same bands the whole time
  
  • bands with mosh pits…
• Download 2010: 3 people found with 140 phones buried under their tent

Security & new mobile tech

• Man City gave 20 season ticket holders their tickets on their phone
• if someone steals your phone, they have access to your wallet, your ticket, your flat…
• NFC requirements requested by police:
  
  • PIN required for all payments – not gonna happen!
    
    • at the moment, 5 payments of £10 until a PIN required
  • capture IMEI during transactions
    
    • possible but not gonna happen
  • compulsory registration with financial institution
    
    • may happen

key areas

• registration at point of sale
• carphone warehouse register 25,000 phones a day at Xmas
• only 4 in 10 PIN lock their phone
  
  • significant barrier
• locating devices post theft
  
  • works ok, but not great – won’t work if someone goes into a block of flats
• identification of a SIM change post theft

checkMEND

http://www.recipero.com/checkmend

• can find out if an IMEI is stolen
• some operators run this service for free
• but otherwise may cost £1 a shot

MomoLondon: Demo Night

I’m catching up on blog posts slowly. This one’s the Mobile Monday London Demo Night from 13th September… Together with Ewan and Sergio (manfully representing FuturePlatforms), I was presenting my Over The Air hack from the weekend (see previous post) and I was consequently suffering from a lack of sleep. Here’s a quick run down of the other presentations:

psonar

http://www.psonar.com/

• upload music to psonar
• get at music on any HTML5 connected device by streaming or downloading

roulette cricket

http://www.roulettecricket.com/

• great idea
• impressive implementation by FuturePlatforms, as usual…
• £2.50/month to play for prizes, or a revenue share from bets

HipSnip

http://hipsnip.com/

• mobile notepad for the things you want
• enhanced with smart searches & geolocation:
  • wine.com, cnet, imdb, yelp
• mobile design a little too small for hands… need to follow Apple HIG on Android too :-)
• user research: found that people take photos, or save a draft SMS but then forget
  • wanted to have a way to remind people

The logo is an aleph. Is that for infinity or for hebrew? The letter carved into the head of the golem…?

Toshl

http://toshl.com/

• personal expense record
• quite secure
• have apps for android, iphone & maemo
• sync to web
• on web, can analyze, export
• currently 45,000 users, 1/3 active
• iPhone downloads in 3 weeks almost surpassed Android’s 6 months
• are in negotiation with banks for auto-download
• currently have a freemium model, looking for investment from banks for rebranding
• some great observations:
  • RIM apps generally look ugly
  • front end and usability on mobile apps takes 50% of development time
  • cross platform development is nose bleeding expensive!

Collinson Group

http://twitter.com/mtjmelody

• Columbus Insurance is one of their brands
• a mobile trip planner
  • but with a surprisingly comprehensive offline database of airports, flight plans, hotels and car hire
• had a desktop version for quite a few years, just brought across to Apple platform

Appmarks

Adrian Cuthbert

http://www.myappmarks.com

• bookmarks in that point to specific places within apps
• want to add Android version too
• if app not available, offers to download it from store
• would like apps to supply relevant info

Milestone Planner

Benjamin Ellis

http://milestoneplanner.com/

• need a plan, but things change very fast
• wanted a plan on a page that everyone could update
• webapp written with HTML5 and javascript
• server keeps a full history of all changes
  • can view as list in webapp, RSS, export to twitter
• facilitating a discussion around the plan
• automatically generate weekly reports in PDF
• most planners are based on TODOs, this is based on outcomes and people instead, larger scale

Qootia

tomaz@qootia.com

• big screens that people can interact with by making voice phone calls
• good demo, with great timing from the presenter

Liquid Air Lab

http://twitter.com/spodtronic

• 480 apps developed on most popular smartphone platforms
• 7.8 million users
• 33,000 downloads per day
• Android users are little more techie
• BlackBerry users especially in the US
• Nokia user… is catching up fast… !?!?
• Ovi store has overtaken iPhone share
  • (since they have a special category for Radio apps…)
• iPhone is going down in share compared to the others
• started on Symbian and moved on to iPhone, etc
• now have 7 platforms…

Over The Air Hack - a LEGO robot with an iPhone brain

As promised, here are the details of my Over The Air hack — The Eyes Have It — which won prizes for “Best Hardware Hack” and “Best Use of Other Features” in the overnight hack-a-thon competition. I also took it along to Mobile Monday London’s Demo Night on the following Monday.

The hack was a LEGO Mindstorms robot with an iPhone brain that followed faces in front of it and steered towards them. It performed well on stage, following me as I gestured towards it, just like a small pet.

The hack was composed of two parts: an iPhone app that detected faces in the video feed from the front-facing camera; and the LEGO robot that took instructions from the iPhone and steered accordingly.

Communication

Getting the two parts to communicate was one of the trickiest areas to get right, and caused extra headaches before each presentation. Both LEGO Mindstorms and the iPhone can communicate over Bluetooth, but Apple has restricted Bluetooth communication to companies that will pay the Apple “Made For iPhone” license fee or that use particular hardware. Bluetooth comms is not available through the standard SDK and apparently needs some kind of “secret handshake” to work.

Unfortunately, Mindstorms came out a while before the iPhone and uses a different Bluetooth chip; and LEGO and Apple haven’t managed to do a deal to provide Mindstorms access from the iPhone (perhaps because LEGO has open sourced much of their software?). LEGO has now released an Android app to showcase mobile phone integration, so let's hope Apple can work with them to get some iPhone apps too.

So no Bluetooth, and Apple won’t let you talk over the dock connector either… That left feeding information to the robot through one of its five senses — a touch-sensitive button, an ultrasound distance sensor, a microphone, a light sensor or the motors themselves (which can detect rotation).

A quick search on LEGO Mindstorms iPhone brought up the iPhoneRobot which used the light sensor to pick up different greys on the screen. This was a great start, but it wasn’t quite what I was looking for. For a start, it required the LeJOS firmware on the Mindstorms brick — this is a cut-down Java VM that replaces the built-in LEGO firmware. I’ve left my Mindstorms with the default LEGO firmware as I use it with my 7 year-old son. He’s not quite ready for Java, but can easily understand the Labview-based visual programming that comes with the Mindstorms kit. Secondly, the robot itself wasn’t quite suitable — I wanted a robot that would recognise faces, so I needed the iPhone to be pointing upwards towards people’s heads rather than along the ground.

Motor skills — building the robot

Designing a new robot from scratch takes quite a while and I only had overnight. Unlike normal LEGO with bumps and holes, the Mindstorms kit uses the new-style LEGO Technic, which is mostly holes and connectors. Also, LEGO’s own sample models are pretty complex, as they are built to look like animals or people as well as interact.

Fortunately, I found a great site with designs for quick Mindstorms models that are easier to hack to do what you want. Some of the ideas are amazing — especially a Segway that actually balances! I started with the 3-Motor Chassis and added the distance sensor on the front to prevent crashes. I also added the button sensor on the side to help with starting and stopping the program, as the iPhone was in the way of the program buttons on the Mindstorms block.

Here’s some pictures of the final result, holding the iPhone pointing upwards. I’ll try and generate some build instructions later.

Computer vision — the iPhone app

Humans are exceptionally good at seeing faces. Our brains have been trained from birth to detect and analyse faces very quickly. We can tell which way people are looking from far away and even see faces in random patterns.

Computers have a harder time of it, although recent developments have massively improved what is possible. Companies such as Polar Rose have shown demonstrations of both face detection (finding out where any faces are in an image or video) and facial recognition (matching the detected faces against a database of known images) running in real-time on mobile phones. Unfortunately, their code is not available to an overnight hacker, though they’ve recently been bought by Apple so we may see interesting capabilities in future iPhones.

However, Intel launched an open source project back in 1999 called OpenCV (for Computer Vision) and not only is it still going strong, but the library is easily compatible with the iPhone and has a git repository of a ready-built library. OpenCV is all about providing well-optimised functions for real-time computer vision, so that developers do not have to reinvent the wheel. It includes face detection algorithms and a guy called Roy has posted some examples of how to get face detection working on an iPhone video feed.

Roy’s sample code was written for iOS 3, and iOS 4 provides much easier methods for accessing the video feed from the device. I updated Roy’s code to use the new AVCaptureVideoDataOutput class that provides direct access to uncompressed video frames from any iPhone camera. This bit took a little while longer than it should have done, as the video feed is provided as landscape (you’re recording a video, right?) whereas its preview feed is oriented the same way as the camera. This was not obvious, and made worse by the fact that face detection algorithms do not work when the image is rotated by 90°… There was a point in the early hours of Saturday morning when I thought there would be no face detection at all!

Anyway, following Roy’s recommendations, I scaled down the input image and adjusted the parameters of the OpenCV face detection call. At the moment I transpose the image before sending it to the detection algorithm, but I suspect it would be faster to use a rotated Haar feature set (the bits that the algorithm picks out in each image to match faces). I also didn’t use Roy’s changes to use integer arithmetic rather than floating point — it turns out that the iPhone 4G has enough grunt to cope with the standard OpenCV code.

You can get the iPhone code from my github repository and try it for yourself. Note that it’s hardwired to use the front-facing camera at the moment. If you don’t have an iPhone 4 just change the AVCaptureDevice to point to the ID of the other camera and the rest of the code should still work (though possibly a little more slowly…).

Light and dark — the LEGO program

So now I had a robot base and an iPhone app that could see faces. The next step was to connect the two together using the light sensor.

LEGO provide a drag and drop programming interface for Mindstorms that lets you build up programs using blocks such as “move motor”, “wait for sensor input” and control logic of loops and if/else switches. It’s quite capable and makes simple programs relatively easy, but using variables and arithmetic can be a little cumbersome.

The main issue in getting the robot to drive was calibrating the light sensor, especially when each demo was under different lighting. After a fair amount of tweaking (some just minutes before presenting at Mobile Monday London’s demo night), the best results turned out to be when I crammed a small piece of cardboard into the hinge that held the light sensor onto the iPhone…

You can download the “.rbtx” file from my github repository, but for those who don’t have the LEGO software, the algorithm is essentially:

1. Calibrate the sensor when pointing at the black and white squares to either side of the control square on the iPhone screen
   • The robot prompts for each reading with its display and waits for you to press the button between each sensor reading
   • The program reads the raw values from the sensor and calculates its own scaling values, as the built-in calibration routines turn on the light on the sensor — this works for reading black lines on a white sheet of paper but isn’t so good at reading the backlit screen of the iPhone…
2. Wait for another button press to start the robot moving — so you can step back and make sure your face is in frame
3. Read the raw value of the light sensor, convert it into a value between -90 and +90, and then steer that amount, then repeat
   • The program checks that the light sensor value is within a reasonable range before steering, otherwise the robot tends to go round in tight circles and you have to run round it like a lunatic trying to get your face in the camera frame!
4. When the distance sensor picks up something closer than 6 inches, stop, play a sound and show a beating heart on the display (“I’ve found you!”)
5. Start moving again when the button is pressed

To give you an idea of what this looks like in the Mindstorms NXT software, here’s a picture of the program!

Prizes

Thanks to Monotype for the beautiful poster of Gill Sans Bold Extra Condensed. They were going to give me two, but were happy to swap one for a copy of FontExplorer Pro instead, so I can see my digital fonts presented almost as prettily. Apparently, it’s now available for Windows as well as Mac OS X.

Over The Air 2010

This was my third Over The Air and it more than lived up to the expectations set by the previous two. Billed as “a grass-roots mobile developer event”, Over The Air is an unmissable event on the mobile developer’s calendar — a weekend of fresh presentations from people who are at the cutting edge, mixed with an overnight hack-a-thon competition with prizes awarded in the final presentation.

This year the organisers went for a couple of keynotes (including the major coup of Tim Berners-Lee on the Sunday morning) as well as over 40 seminars on topics ranging from business oriented pitch and product workshops and DIY PR; through introductions to design & prototyping tools such as Flowella and iProcessing; all the way to detailed technical explanations and tutorials such as using Paypal’s mobile SDKs and Bryan Rieger’s excellent presentation on building mobile and desktop compatible web sites (of which more later).

I’ve put my rough notes on the presentations below, but it’s worth checking out the other presentations that were spotlighted on Slideshare and the other blog entries featured in the overtheair twitter stream.

I also entered the hack-a-thon competition and won Best Hardware Hack as well as Best use of “other features”?! for my LEGO Mindstorms robot with an iPhone brain that followed faces. I’ll be posting the code for my hack shortly…

Keynote: the art of emotional design

Aral Balkan — @aral

• when computers made the impossible, possible, features mattered
  • …and it didn’t matter if the interface was hard
• mobile phones are now a commodity, but we’re willing to pay extra for some things
  • “I think Apple is on to something”
• you cannot compete on features any more:
  • when infrastructure is commoditized, the differentiating factor is User Experience
• Le Petit Prince: “perfection is achieved … when there is nothing left to take away”
• you need someone with the authority and responsibility to say “no” to extra features
• “usable” = “edible”
• we want to aim for “magical”
• Aral tries to stay “naive” so that he can understand interfaces from the point of view of an everyday person (not a developer)
• don’t trick the user
• build in “delighters”
  • not required for interaction, but…
• oslo bullet train ticket machine:
  • just a credit card slot
  • exit also has a credit card swipe
  • can get a receipt later online
  • made a difficult decision: knew that fraud rates would go up
  • but worth it for increased usage
• dangers:
  • weakest link is what is not under your control
  • e.g. facebook pulled the plug on Feathers for Facebook (now Feathers Visage) without warning, just as the app was featured on the German and Austrian app store

DIY research workshop – informing the design process

Mark A.M. Kramer — @mamk

• users have different issues to those in the mobile industry
• Mark does “nomadic ethnography” — mainly based on trains :-)
• often finds himself being a participatory observer
• Mobile research methods
  • e.g. woman on circle line instinctively knew when network was available — put the paper down and switched to checking her mail
• iPhone is a good ethnography tool — can take pictures secretly!
• mobile also enables surveys in the field
• culture is changing:
  • mobile is enabling “just in time” — e.g. “just google that”

Mark then showed us various interviews:

• inventor of makerbot and thingiverse:
  • “share or die”
  • integrate game mechanics into whatever you’re doing
• reactable music interface:
  • play along
  • make it fun
  • can really make instruments with accelerometer
• feature phone user from Eastern Europe (no smart phone culture):
  • want something I can read my magazines on (comic books)
  • but want it portable
  • I’ve seen others using iPads etc.
  • social shaping of technology
• 10 year old — what I like about my iPod touch:
  • app developers will become rich if they make something that people like
  • he likes games
  • doesn’t want to pay for things

things to think about:

• eWaste — what about all those unused phones?
• social isolation
• generational differences
• impact on children
• designing for inclusion & accessibility

Orange Mobilise – the mobile volunteering initiative

David Simoes-Brown (Strategy Partner at 100%Open), Jogesh Limbani (Head of Open Innovation at Orange R&D UK)

• Orange using open innovation to encourage ideas to come in to Orange
  • The Wisdom of Crowds, James Surowiecki
  • Cognitive Surplus, Clay Shirky — 100 million hours of adverts watched over one weekend in America, equivalent to the amount of time taken to create wikipedia
• Orange want to help minutes matter
• Tuangou (cloud clout buying) in China
  • gathering people together to negotiate a discount
• Orange want to capture 5 minutes a day from the 3h 45m TV watching for volunteering
• Have previously launched Orange Rock Corps — can earn a ticket to a gig by volunteering
• 1 million people giving 5 minutes = a decade of real time
• http://mobilevolunteering.co.uk:
  • Orange building an app (iPhone to begin with)
  • Gathering ideas
  • Promoting existing apps
• Challenge:
  • can pick an app from suggested ideas
  • contact the author and go
  • OR submit an existing suitable app
• Orange will launch the top three voted apps & actions in October
• Will also launch 7 other apps & ideas as chosen by Orange rather than community
• Voting criteria:
  • You’re on the bus with five minutes before the stop — what can you do?
  • Popular & used often
  • Has a clear social or environmental benefit
  • Practical & attractive to a sponsor charity — needs a backup
  • Looking for a balance of actions:
  • research | lookout | reach out | skill set
  • Also looking for a balance of purposes
• suggest to look at latest & most active rather than top scoring

Rethinking the Mobile Web – a pragmatic look at creating an accessible and inclusive mobile experience

Bryan Rieger @bryanrieger

Bryan gave a fantastic presentation about how to make workable web sites for mobile and desktop use. There’s also a whole load of discussion on slideshare below the presentation about different approaches. The how-to bits of the presentation start from about slide 104, but there’s a load of stats up front to convince you that having a mobile-friendly site is worth it, and that mobile-friendly does not just mean iPhone…

Rethinking the Mobile Web by Yiibu

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• iPhone in US only covers about 6% of the population and only 4% of 5 major EU countries
• Huge impact but not huge penetration (at least of people, but huge percentage of traffic…)
• nice comparison of older (desktop) Macs vs recent mobile phones
• feature phones of today are the smartphones of yesterday
• the old devices don’t suck
• gs.statcounter.com stats from 02/2010
  • lots of Opera Mini in Nigeria
  • lots of BlackBerry in Australia
  • in Feb. the UC proxy browser ate Nokia’s Chinese market share
  • Nokia bought Novarra in March 2010…
• going forward, main browsers in use are WebKit and Opera Mini
  • coming up later are Mozilla Fennec (will be Firefox Mobile), Ovi & UC proxy browsers
• why is it ok to say “this site works best on Safari 4”, when it wasn’t ok to say “this site works best with IE 4…”?
• design “mobile first”
  • @media queries often fail — so taking a desktop site + media queries results in a desktop site on mobile
  • mobile site + @media queries => desktop site
  • not a new idea — just progressive enhancement!
• use screen and handheld types for first stylesheet
• book recommendation: DOM Scripting by @adactio (if jQuery not available…)
• http://tinysrc.net will resize and compress image for you
• infographics may need reinterpretation for smaller screens, rather than just resizing
• a bit of a dream: Bryan would like to extend the <img> tag to have multiple images for different screen sizes
• Q&A: Opera has device stats available from http://www.opera.com/smw/

Viral Survival Kit: Cloud Computing for Highly Scalable Apps

Matt Wood, Amazon Web Services — mawood@amazon.com

A quick overview of Amazon’s cloud services. Useful for working out what you might need. I was kind of hoping for something more technical, but this is good too. Especially useful is the link to the Amazon Simple Calculator, so you can work out how much your requirements might cost.

• Amazon started with two servers (1 db, 1 app server)
• They refactored so that:
  • dev teams could request resources on demand
  • wouldn’t have to worry about scaling & reliability
• AWS is a datacentre abstraction
• can provision a server in about 20-25 seconds (though Windows servers take a little longer due to security certificate isses)
• guardian open platform is delivered using AWS

S3 & CloudFront

• all data is replicated to three different centres
• scaled automatically as demand rises
• can have a reduced redundancy service at lower cost (only 5 9s rather than 11…)
• CloudFront provides CDN

other services

• RDS: relational datastore — MySQL as a service
• EBS: elastic block store
• EMR: elastic map reduce — hadoop on demand
• VPC: virtual private cloud — elastic resources in the cloud appear in your own network through a VPN
• CloudWatch: monitoring, autoscaling
• ELB: elastic load balancer

some detail

• m1.small available for about 8¢/hour
• m1.large has more CPU etc
• t1.micro is even smaller, only 2¢/hour
  • tight RAM constraints (600Mb), but has automatic CPU scaling
• can plan over longer term and get reduced price (0.07¢/hour if you pay $50 upfront)

designing for failure

• can attach an elastic IP address to an instance
• if server fails, can just repoint to another instance in the same datacentre
• also deal with datacentre failures
  • four regions (East Coast, West Coast, Dublin, Singapore)
  • each region has multiple availability regions
• RDS can enable master/slave with an API call

automation

• can pull monitoring data into ganglia
• monitoring can be connected to autoscaling
• can set thresholds for setting up and killing servers
• integrated with availability zones

security

• can have multiple roles with fine grained access
• provide mitigation against DDOS
• default-deny firewall
• see http://aws.amazon.com/security for details
• data stays within regions

Q & A

• Amazon Simple Calculator provides an estimate of costs

What Would Picasso Do — a panel of art and technology

Another brilliant Bryan Rieger production: find six people with interesting ideas and ask them to inspire the audience by talking about what they liked. It worked…

• Bryan Rieger: http://yiibu.com
• Filip Visnjic: http://www.creativeapplications.net/, curator of http://processing.org
• Jason Fields: Head of Multiplatform User Experience at the BBC, also runs http://app.itize.us/
• mills: ustwo
• Matthias Dahlström: lastminute labs
• Tom Hume: Future Platforms

What Would Picasso Do?

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Tom has been thinking about…

• Joseph Beuys: “everyone is an artist”
• Music industry history is minuscule compared to whole history of art
  • we focus on near-sighted things
• Art doesn’t seem to scale
  • engineering efforts can take 100Ks of people
  • what would art equivalents look like
• Constraints feed creativity

mills is enabling creativity…

• granimator: enabling the public to create screen backgrounds
  • invite artists to contribute assets
• making creativity accessible

matthias has been playing with plasticine…

• dali from 1950s: gem-decorated heart with pumping action
• we work on the surface with the gems at the moment
• need to work deeper
• plasticine interfaces — when they’re rough, people want to grab them and play
• Sony has a big blue design book
  • explored wireless headsets in 80s
  • worked in the home, but in shared spaces you would get someone else’s music
  • dismissed at the time, but might now be treated as an interesting feature

Jason has been looking at apps…

• UK is much more advanced than US in area of IPTV & set-top boxes

Filip has been thinking about art…

• linear vs dynamic
• goals vs accidents
• framing / positioning
• interactive vs reactive
• sense of ownership

Q & A

• Are creative apps on iPad/iPhone merely frivolous?
  • e.g. Brushes, Magic Piano
  • TH: 11-point multitouch is not frivolous
  • JF: a device to interact with while watching TV
  • TH: Jeff Minter: apps for Amiga
  • no intermediation — straight onto the screen
• Are there any useful consequences of art-related apps? Can they be applied to productivity-related apps?
  • TH: epic win: a todo list manager that takes game mechanics and gives you experience points for completing todo items…

tweetalondoncab

This wasn’t a presentation on the main schedule, just the cabbie who started @tweetalondoncab talking about where he’s got to and where he wants to go.

• gone from 2 drivers to 120!
• however, can’t cope with more than 3-4 jobs at a time

process

1. customer DMs to @tweetalondoncab
   • may have to come back to them and get further details (inc phone number)
2. the chair account (protected account) advertises the job (removing specifics) with phone number of person in chair
3. drivers get a text alert when tweet sent from chair account
4. driver responds with a phone call and gets job allocated
   • receives phone number and address of pickup
5. chair account sends out that job has been allocated
6. chair account informs customer of their driver’s details
7. driver contacts customer by phone when they’re ready

also have @cabup protected account that provides shared information updates on demand & traffic — added value for drivers who join in

future ideas

• would like to include cab sharing
• still want to advertise to all drivers as it’s their decision to take it
  • first come first served at the moment
  • but would like to add in how long the driver would take to get there
  • especially for higher value jobs (e.g. Victoria -> Gatwick)
• want to attract people who would normally order a private minicab

constraints & ideas

• dealing with 3-4 jobs coming in at once
  • if can see all cabs on map, would be able to tell customers that can’t help within 30 mins
  • driver claiming job is pinch point
  • have a link to a page with how many minutes to be there
  • claim the job automatically
  • could have a form to submit info, so jobs are better structured

Keynote: Sir Tim Berners-Lee

I didn’t get to take many notes during Sir Tim’s keynote as I was busy finishing my hack (of which more in the next post). He was an inspiring speaker in his own way — you could see the passion for his subject shining through.

His main points were about ensuring things are referable, and that the reference can (and should) be done with URLs.

• if an app doesn’t have a URL then it can’t be linked
• it doesn’t get the interestingness — people can’t use it for other things