reyespowered.com

Recorded on the flip mino, enjoy.

You can also view the videos at my vimeo profile page

The Future of Mobile is a Carsonified run event which is happening on the 17th and 18th of November. The first day of the event is feature packed with speakers from all areas of mobile; industry leaders, entrepreneurs and bloggers will be presenting throughout the day, the focus of which will be on identifying future challenges and opportunities in the mobile market from current trends and experiences.

Day two is set aside for workshops where mobile development in key mobile platforms as well as mobile business courses will be run.

A special mention goes out to the registration process for Future of Mobile. Once registered, you are provided access to a site which lets you connect with other attendees, swap contact details and share profile information prior to the event. In effect once registered the experience begins immediately.

I am attending this event will follow up with some videos and summaries following it. If you are booked I’ll see you there. If you are not booked then step this way.

I recently become interested in examining the market for an automated test suite for web applications, naturally as I am self learning it will be from the open source category and first up it’s going to be Selenium.

From what I have seen so far I can record the test actions from a firefox web browser and then run the automated test at a scheduled time of my choosing. This is done by using the Selenium IDE Firefox extension.

What would interest me more is to either run a test suite which is for verification purposes, that is to say to check that actions have been performed on the web application.

I will post again after I have had a chance to play.

This site is now Mobilize by Mippin Wordpress Plugin enabled. What this does is direct mobile traffic to Mippin.com which is rendering a mobile version of my site. In theory it should load quicker and cleaner on mobile devices of any size. The proof is in the pudding so I will have a little play with it and amend this blog entry as time goes on.

So far the iPhone and e71 render very well. the interface is minimalistic and clean. There are quick links to switch from the Mippin ‘mobilized’ view to the original view of my site as seen by a desktop browser.

There are importantly quick links to email blog posts, twitter them, share on facebook and sms links of my site. All handled by mippin’s plugin/rendering engine.

One downside appears to be that comments are not supported. For a site with heavier traffic this might prove to be mildly problematic. Comments can still be accessed by choosing to view the page in it’s original form/google mobile format. It is not intuitive and looks at first glance that the interactivity of leaving a comment is not wanted.

I will hopefully speak with the dev team and ask them about support for comments in their wordpress plugin.

The rating for this plugin is pretty good so far…

Its like something out of Willy Wonka and Chocolate factory (but substitute chocolate with web apps). Those guys over at Carsonified have possibly overdone the coffee this morning as they are offering a free ticket (+flight fare) to one of their events.  

Why is this a big deal you might ask? well only that they are an enterprising, innovative small company which aims high, I recently attended a peresentation by them on the carsonified way and found it very enlightening. I am sure an event run by these guys is a cool way of learning web technology and meeting some genuinely engaging people.

Please take a moment to leave a comment on this page and help me win my place in the prize draw,  thanks for you help!

Carsonified is a web apps design and events company based in Bath, they were the main attraction at September’s geekdinner.

They presented some interesting ideas on working in a creative team and on the work/life balance. The main points being:

• Trust is key in the employer/employee relationship
• They have removed tables and chairs from their meeting room and replaced them with beanbags
• They operate a 4 day working week
• Every year they take a week off from work to concentrate on a mini project as a team

The gains from such innovative ideas they claimed to be working more efficiently and effectively. Greater bonds within the team, as a whole and the company.

It was inspiring stuff listening to Ryan Carson (co-founder), a lot of the ideas came about when carsonified was just him and his wife working from their home. They now have a larger operation but have stayed true to their vision.

What I got from the session was to

• believe in what you do
• Draw a line between work and home life and stick to it (as much as you can of course).

This blog entry is inspired by a Twitter tweet by sachendra@twitter.  It was enough for me to dust off an HTC Raphael/Touch Pro, install the app and have a look.

The release of the iPhone really gave the mobile phone industry a kick that was needed. The iPhone managed to leverage an already successful ipod platform and bring out a mobile device that while not technologically superior was streets ahead of the competition in terms of usability.  This was a device that prompted the user to use their fingers - no stylus and no hardware keyboard, this was brave and I feel, a masterstroke.

Unfortunately instead of the competition pushing the envelope and bringing out re-imagined devices/platforms of their own, they have been trying to play catch-up. Attempting to fudge current offerings to mimic iPhone like functionality.  The biggest culprits I feel are manufacturers releasing devices based around Windows Mobile platform. Nokia are still yet to bring out their supposed iPhone killer - the Nokia Tube.

3rd party developers have been also trying to innovate but within the confimes of the platform being developed for.  In this regard in Opera 9.5 I feel we have a prime example of a successful crossover of an iPhone functionality to another platform.  Opera 9.5 is currently in beta and available for download for Windows Mobile devices from the website.

I have seen plenty of devices the majority of which are Windows Mobile PPC based attempting to ape the OS gui and apps of the iPhone, mainly failing quite badly.  It was with a rather cynical attitude that I replied on twitter to sachendra

When I started to use the app, to my surprise I found an extremely polished UI on Opera and good use of the Windows Mobile platform to give it a more iPhone look and feel in its usability.  The main features of the successful iPhone Safari browser are all accounted for:

• Instead of multi-touch to zoom in/out Opera uses double tap action.
• The actual zooming action itself is very smooth.
• Multiple pages can be opened
• Optimisation for use of finger instead of stylus

I also liked the seamless installation and setting of default browser. The illusion of the iPhone-esque feel is broken when you leave the app and move into a different app such as the pdf viewer (I found myself trying to double tap the screen to zoom, this is an Opera only functionality).

All in all it does in fact compare quite well against the iPhone browser.  The only problem now is with the Windows Mobile platform which really needs an over-haul from a usability point of view.  Microsoft need to get their hands dirty rather than leaving the work solely to hardware and 3rd party app developers to find shortcuts and create solutions.

The basic premise is that Retaggr is that it is an online interactive business card. The graphical look is that of a business card.  Underneath the look though is a powerful aggregator of online profiles web2.0, rss, widgets realtime and static contact information.  The real bonus is its integration with blogs.

I have added Retaggr to this site which provides an agregated link to all my online profiles. The service also offers secure connections to me. This out of the box functionality is enabled as I add contact details such as email forms, and guest accounts with direct IM access to me.

The retaggr service provides excellent contact information aggregating my whole online presence.

The javawug event presented this time by founder member Peter Pilgrim introduced JavaFX.

It appears this is Sun’s attempt to reclaim the desktop. They were the originators with their java applet which they introduced back in 95. This allowed content to be served from the kjnternet and be processed on the desktop. It never took off past proof of concept as the Internet at the time was not mature enough (I remember it being a hefty download for dialup connections). Sun stepped back and focussed on their server side implementation. This allowed what eventually became Adobe’s Flash to seize the initiative, streamline the download and perfect the execution of client side experiences.

Fast forward to present day and Sun is back in town with JavaFX looking to reclaim it’s crown.

The key point made was that JavaFX is not for Java devs, it is geared more towards designers working alongside developers

For the last couple of months Adobe has been running a series of lunch and learn days. The aim of course is to provide information on the latest suite of Adobe products and how to integrate them into digital creative design work. The ‘product placement’ aspect is very to the point though the subjects would suggest that more generic subjects were being covered.  The ones I attended were:

• Designing true cross media user experiences
• Reinventing print workflows
• Rich Internet Applications: Designing and developing next generation experiences

The sessions have shown how the digital workflow can coexist and add value to the print workflow.

• Easy edition of work prior to print
• creating one doc that translates equally to online use as well as print (interesting feature shown was a placeholder that contained a video yet when you printed it had a print quality picture in it’s place)
• allowing several parties in the supply chain to work collaboratively rather than just off loading
• completed take to the next dept for processing.

Adobe air was presented and the power of it to bring online apps; offline and then being able to switch between the two (e.g an offline interactive catalog which would update onlyne and have a shopping basket that would connect online at the checkout point).