mobile – Page 5 – Dave Briggs

What I’ve been reading

July 14, 2011

I find this stuff so that you don’t have to.

The Case Against Online Participation and Government As A Platform – "the question is: should we just give up and consider open government and government 2.0 an interesting, nice-to-have, but hard-to-sustain development, and perhaps let it die?"
Social media for social care: how Monmouthshire foster carers support each other with Yammer – helen reynolds – Nice little case study.
Huffington Post UK: What does it add? – Good stuff on the rather underwhelming launch of HuffPo UK – which has been rather overshadowed by other media news this week.
Epic | Mobile learning – Epic's mobile learning stuff looks really interesting.
Home :: PetitionYourCouncil.com – MySociety makes local e-petitions more findable.

You can find all my bookmarks on Pinboard.

What I’ve been reading

July 1, 2011

I find this stuff so that you don’t have to.

Can digital save our libraries? « corrinnedouglas – Some useful thoughts on an important topic
Google Sites – Mobile Templates – Interesting tool for making mobile friendly site templates.
Patch, the hyperlocal website from AOL, is totally off-putting – "Is it too late in the game to call hyperlocal efforts a complete waste of time and resources?" – No, just confirmation of my feeling that centrally imposed platforms don't work locally.
Ten ways to create a knowledge ecology – Nice list from Euan Semple on how to make your organisation one that values knowledge and learning.
Epic Idea Management #Fails – Things to avoid when sourcing ideas from James Gardner.

You can find all my bookmarks on Pinboard.

More notes on mobile apps and government

May 16, 2011

I still haven’t really got my head around mobile apps and their use for government services. However, James Coltham wrote up some excellent notes from a meeting up in Scotland on the subject recently:

There is definitely a groundswell of interest, though, as well as a growing demand from the public, making for interesting times for anyone involved in making sure their services are ready to go mobile.

I wrote a few bits down last August, and if I’m honest my position hasn’t much changed from:

Platform neutral mobile friendly websites are probably a better bet in an age of austerity
App development is probably a job for the private sector, but I’m not convinced there’s an actual market (ie would people pay for an app to access government services?)
Any app that would work for more than one organisation will need open data in a common format which doesn’t yet exist, though it might do soon (LinkedGov, KnowledgeHub, etc)

Also, what are the sorts of things people will want to do with councils or other public services on their phones? I suppose there are two elements to this:

Those things you might want which are suited more to a mobile device than anything else: ie, I need this information now, and here. Bus timetables are a good example, perhaps, or something else that can use location data.
Everything else, but delivered to a phone because that either where the owner prefers to access information and services, or because it’s their only way of accessing information and services

I think the second point is probably key to winning the argument for whether government organisations should seriously explore delivery via mobile devices. If we come to a point where a lot of people don’t bother with PCs because their phones do want they need them to, then that’s where the focus of electronic delivery probably should be pointed.

In other words, what does e-government look like in a post-PC era?

Android thoughts

August 20, 2010

So, I was lucky enough to be given a Nexus One by my wonderful employers a few weeks ago, to have a play with and possibly replace my iPhone (3gs) if I liked it. I thought perhaps folk reading this blog would be interested to hear how I’m getting on with it.

Nexus One

Well, the short answer is that I really like it.

Here’s the longer answer:

The Nexus One uses the Android operating system, which is developed by Google, and is a competitor to the iOS of the iPhone and the Blackberry OS, which appears on, yes, Blackberries. Instead of being limited to one company’s hardware, though, Android is open and can be used by any manufacturer.

Here’s a video about the latest version of Android:

This has led to Android being described as a more open system that, say, iOS and this is backed up by the open source nature of Android, based as it is on Linux. The Nexus One is a bit different though, as it is made by HTC, but is to Google’s specification. This has a number of advantages: you get operating system upgrades before anyone else, and the phone is free of any of the crud often automatically installed by carriers and manufacturers. It also means you can stick any sim card you like into it and it should work fine.

Android is therefore often compared with Windows in the 90s, on desktop computers. Apple’s MacOS was only available Apple computers and was tied to the hardware, resulting is a very high user experience but limited sales. Microsoft’s Windows, on the other hand, could be installed on any computer running on an Intel processor, and so was significantly more popular as a result of its portability.

This openness has a number of effects, some good, some not so good. One is that the Android app store doesn’t have the same rigorous checking regime that exists for the iPhone, which means it is easier to get apps listed in the store, but that inevitably brings down the quality somewhat. Indeed, Google are so keen for people to develop for the Android platform that they are making available the Android App Inventor – a drag and drop authoring tool for mobile apps (this reminds me a great deal of the Shoot ‘Em Up Construction Kit on the Commodore 64, but I digress).

Another form of openness is the way the phone integrates with other services. On an iPhone, when you choose to share a photo, you can usually just email it somewhere, or upload it to Apple’s MobileMe service. Choose the share option on the Nexus One, though, and you can email it, or send it to a service like Twitter or Facebook. It also knows if you have installed apps, so on my setup the options to share to Evernote and WordPress are also available. This is in addition to Google’s own services like Picasa and Goggles.

In a similar vein, external service are integrated to your contacts – so I can, if I choose to, add all my Facebook contacts to my phone, where they are added to existing contacts where possible. This is a nice touch, so for instance all my contacts with whom I am also Facebook friends have their Facebook profile picture added to their listing. I can also access people’s Twitter and Facebook pages straight from their contact listing, which is handy.

The camera is a 5 megapixel one, with a flash, and it seems to take excellent photos, as I found on my recent trip to Ireland:

As someone who uses a lot of Google services, not least email, one thing that works as brilliantly as you would imagine it would is the integration with Google stuff. The native email application is a joy to use, and various other Google services have their own apps, or just work extremely well in the browser.

Battery life is pretty good, slightly better than my iPhone 3gs but with things like wifi, 3g and gps turned on all the time.

The downside is mainly the touchscreen, which simply isn’t up to the standard I have come to expect with the iPhone. It’s not as responsive, and typing on it can be tricky. I’ve no doubt I’ll get used to it in time, but for switchers it’s an obvious thing.

So for now I’m sticking with the Nexus One. I’ve had a quick play with an iPhone 4 and didn’t see enough in it to make me want to switch. The Android platform may not be as polished at iOS, but it appeals to my tinkering nature and I’ll forgive some of the user experience let downs for having better control over my phone.

Bookmarks for August 5th through August 11th

August 11, 2010

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I find this stuff so that you don’t have to.

Splashpath – “Splashpath is a free service for Leisure Operators to create, update and communicate swimming pool timetables”
The Value of Transparency Is At The Boundary between Government and Society – “Open government is not a way to outsource problem solutions to others.”
More on Apps for Elephants | Public Strategist – Further exposition from Stefan on the ‘should gov develop mobile apps?’ debate.
Devour – “Devour sifts out the best videos and posts the well-curated collection every weekday. Fewer cute kittens, fewer skateboarding nutshots, fewer tween heart throbs, and lots more awesome.”
Don’t Get Fireballed | brown blog – Nice guide to protecting a WordPress site from traffic overload.
Dig Up Political Influence | Poligraft – Looks interesting and cool, though not sure I fully understand it
Early History of HTML – 1990 to 1992 – “HTML is the language that powers the Web in many respects, as the lingua franca that Web browsers are expected to be able to render. HTML has had unprecedented levels of success, and the uptake is all the more surprising when you realise that it was only invented in 1990, and few people knew about it before 1993.”
10 Reasons NOT to Ban Social Media in Your Organization – Handy list.
UK ICT classes killing kids’ interest in tech – “The Royal Society is to investigate why British schools are failing to interest children in information technology – and why numbers taking classes are falling so fast.”
Crowdsourcing Is Far From Easy for Government – “Once again, this case proves the disconnect between engaging citizens (and voters) and engaging government employees. For open government to work, both aspects need to be addressed and possibly synchronized.”

You can find all my bookmarks on Delicious. There is also even more stuff on my shared Google Reader page.

You can also see all the videos I think are worth watching at my video scrapbook.

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