Month: September 2007

Windows Mobile software gets smart

Pocket CM software

I'm going to say something very positive about the Apple iPhone please don't be shocked. Since the iPhone launch, its been amazing to see the quality and attention to user experience windows mobile software has increased. I've been using this windows mobile locker for quite a while now but Nizam pointed me at 2 contact managers icontact and my prefered choice PocketCM. Who needs the HTC Touch when you got applications like PocketCM?

I found a site leading the charge in this area – http://whoneedsaniphone.com/. From the site.

We also want to let everyone know that the intent of this project IS NOT TO DUPLICATE THE IPHONE INTERFACE… we just want to take some of the principles of that interface and bring them to Windows Mobile users! One of the big keys here is operating the phone with just your finger… I have always hated having to pull out the stylus to do certain things… bigger buttons and more scrolling without scroll bars and stuff like that…

Comments [Comments]
Trackbacks [0]

The perfect RSS aggregator on any platform

Under tons of pressure for my comments about the lack of a decent RSS reader on GNU/Linux systems. I've decided to list what makes the perfect RSS aggregator client in my head. A lot of the features I want will be specific and maybe out of scope for a lot of people, but its certainly something to consider as normal rss users turn into power or advanced users. I'm also going to try and avoid describing something as advanced as Particls which is really a desktop attention engine, but I'll add some key elements I do like.

  • APML support, I want to rank, sort and filter based on my own explict tags and what the computer thinks I might like (implicit).
  • If APML isn't supported, the application should support search/filter tags. Those tags should attract posts which are related to that tag. So when I click on Dell, I should get all posts about Dell no matter which category its in.
  • Should be able to handle 500 RSS feeds without paging like mad or using 100meg plus. The amount of RSS readers which hang after importing 350 is untrue.
  • Import should support Bloglines, Newsgator and Google reader syncing.
  • It should also support FTP, Webdav and Samba syncing of files, like Feed Demon
  • When I click on a category of feeds, it should display an aggregated view of all the feeds below it in date or feed order
  • The ability to blog, post, add to delicious, etc from the post with a couple of clicks
  • Software should be Free as in Freedom or at least Open Source
  • The abaility to add tags and notes to items and feeds as a whole, then be
  • Support for XSL transfoms on the actual its display pane. If not XSL, CSS at least.
  • Support for Microformats, eRDF and RDFa
  • Extention support like Firefox, maybe XUL support would bemazing
  • Support for assignable keyboard shortcuts
  • Export support for OPML 1.1
  • Ability to export or save current aggregated view without the style (XML/RSS output)
  • Support for wfw:Comments, so you can comment back directly in your own RSS reader instead of using the browser
  • Support for Gecko engine for rendering/display
  • Global search across all feeds and per catergory
  • Support Attachments
  • Automatic updates
  • Support for One/Two/Three Panel support
  • Support for One and Two click processing
  • Reminder/Timed tags, so it alerts you that you should be looking at it at certain time
  • Definable coloured labels for tags and items. As default tags will get a random colour
  • Support for Regular Expressions
  • Support for Xpath queries
  • Print support, PDF support too would be nice
  • Offline support with caching of items and images up to a set amount
  • Offline rules, so you can specifiy certain categories or feeds to be cached with or without images
  • Support for different backends including SQLite, MySql, etc. Plus support for XMLDB
  • Bluetooth OBEX push for pushing items, lists or categories

I think that will do for now…

Comments [Comments]
Trackbacks [0]

Current state of my GNU/Linux switch over

So its been about 2 months since I switched over to Ubuntu GNU/Linux on my Dell Laptop. Things have been a lot better over time and generally day to day I'm having no problems. Its only when I go to do something different is when I get the problems.

First problem, external display from the VGA port. During BarCampBrighton some of the projectors didn't like my laptop's native rez of 1280×800 and would fail to display anything at all. What made things frustrating was the fact I couldn't switch down to 1024×768 because my laptop driver seems to give me only one option.

I stilll have yet to find a decent RSS reader except the preview version of RSS OWL which actually works better that previous versions. I usually keep an eye on the heap memory and it tends to stay within the 40meg allocated memory. So for now its my choice for RSS reading

Blogging from a clinet under Ubuntu is working due to BloGTK but the general expeience is very basic and I closer to W.Blogger that Ecto. If there is a more rich feature blgging application/client do drop me a comment. I miss stuff like being able to update posts and read posts offline.

Battery life has imporved over the months. When I first switched over, it would run for about 4hours on batteries but now its up to 5hours (about the same as I would get out of Windows on the same machine). Hibernate support still fails but suspend now works correctly all the time. Networking still needs to be restarted when I switch on each time but it seems more consistent.

I've still not found something to totally replace outlook. Currently I'm using Plaxo online for most of my PIM type stuff. This is ok but sometimes when I'm offline its frustrating to look at Plaxo and hope I left the page on the calendar section.

I'm still looking to sync my phone with my laptop but I'm having very little sucess with this. I've seen mentions of Opensync but it doesn't work for myself. On the mobile phone front, I've tried to connect my nokia N80 to the laptop using this script but its not worked out so far. I've not even attempted this on my Windows Mobile phone.

Backup and Syncing is totally broken for me. I want to do simple things like backup my laptop to my storage server over samba but unison and rsync don't like samba! This is insane and I've tried many ways to trick it into thinking a samba share is actually a mounted drive but it doesn't work. There seems to be a solution here.I've yet to play with Baclua and Amanda (yes that guy from Amanda I will be contacting you very soon. I'm also looking for some way to generic.

Ok last few things, I've dumped Madma and Xmms in favour of Amarok which works so well now it supports Mpeg3! For ages I wondered why I got no sounds and only in later versions does it tell you your missing the codec in question, before that you were left to work it out alone. Lastly Bluetooth is working but I've not got the Wiimote talking correctly and I'm really missing GlovePIE. And finally to finish off for now. My logtech Camera still doesn't work and I can't find drivers for it anywhere.

Comments [Comments]
Trackbacks [0]

iPhone price drop

iphone -200 dollars

So I heard about this and people have been asking if this makes any difference to my views on the iphone? Simple answer yes it kind of does but I still won't buy one. At 299 dollars its looks like it will be much closer to 200 pounds when it finally hits the UK in the next few months. Although it looks like it will get the compitition it deserves from Samsung, Google, HTC and Nokia.

I know a lot of iPhone users are pissed off with the price drop but I'm sorry they knew the risks with buying new tech on the first day. However something isn't working at Apple HQ. Its obvious, very few companies cancel a product (4gig iphone) and drop the price of by almost 40% within a few months.

Its coming up to the time for a new phone soon, but right now the iPhone isn't one of them on the list.

Comments [Comments]
Trackbacks [0]

Rules for cleaning after a party

1st Rule after a party, don't sleep before everything is cleaned up. 2nd Rule after a party, check behind the sofa for left-overs. 3rd Rule after a party, check your fridge for weird ingredients. 4th Rule after a party, check your freezer for Beer cans because they tend to explode.

Forgot rule number 4 and a week later found yellow ice over most of the freezer. Worst thing is, I cleaned out the Freezer before the party.

Comments [Comments]
Trackbacks [0]

D.construct 2007

d.construct 2007

So I'm at d.construct the community focused conference from the guys at Clearleft. BBC Backstage are official sponsors and all the mens's Tshirts have gone within a hour of opening. In the dome, the venue is large and cool enough. The wireless seems to be operating pretty well even with 600+ people. These are my notes from D.construct.

The Dawning of the Age of Experience by Jared Spool. Talks about how the ipod is technically inferear but the experience of owning a ipod blows the rest out of the water. Jarad points out that everyone is watching the rise of Apple's experience product. Blockbuster vs Netflix. 85% of new subscribers say an existing subscriber recommended them. 93% evangelise Netflix to friends and family. Its been their success and they have done little advertising. Boardrooms have taken noticed.

Changing the experience can be good and can be bad if it doesn't intergrate the user and the business. Jared, talks about the chicken sexing phenomena as an example of something people just do but can't really explain the process of. Just like Midwives estimating baby weight and sex. Sushi chef's also don't know how to make

No one mentions Netflix as a pioneer of social networking or information archeture. Good experience design is Invisible! Hard to show good design.

Experience design applies to everything, even the terms and conditions which people should read but often gets over looked.

Experience design is cultural, need to understand both the audience and business cultures. Need a culture of failure. celebrate failures because people learn from their mistakes. www.uie.com/brainsparks – blog and podcast

Experience Strategies by Peter Merholz. Its all about the experience, even Microsoft in Office 2007 started back at scratch. Tivo could have just done another video recorder but they decided to rethink the whole experience. The Wii decided not to do the technology and feature battle.

I didn't make notes during the rest of d.construct because I was in and out of the main conference quite a bit. But it was a great conference and I look forward to next year. Well done to Andy Budd and the rest of the clearleft team who put on d.construct with the community in the forefront of their minds. It was well attended, had some great speakers and some up and coming new speakers. For example Tom Coates was fantatstic as the last speaker of the conference. He's really pulled things together and will be showing up in more expensive conferences soon.

Above Audio is closed for a private party

This year like last year d.construct had an after party. This time it was sponsored by BBC Backstage and Yahoo. And this time there was plenty of food and drink for everyone. At one point the venue (Above Audio) was so busy we had just over the limit of people. Lucky that was quickly sorted out and people still had an excellent time. The proper food meant few people left the bar till it was time to go home. I don't know when the Yahoo sponsored drinks ran out but it seemed to last about 3 hours which was great. The BBC Backstage sponsored food lasted long enough for about 95 percent of people to get a decent amount of food. Food, Drink, great venue and not bad music. Yep I think everyone had a great time. Fantastic end to a excellent day.

Comments [Comments]
Trackbacks [0]

Keeping very busy

So after Edinburgh (which I still need to blog at some point soon) 2 weeks ago and this weekends BBQ party for my new flatmate we're into a new busy work week. Things are crazy because my travel across London is futher hampered by the 3 day tube strike. Now some of you may say, but Ian your on a scooter. Well trust me I tried to get through the Blackwall tunnell today at 10am and it was packed. Every street I turned down was full of cars, so in the end I took a different route through old street and clerkenwell because angel was so hell-ish. it took 25mins just to get from Kings Cross to the A40 fly over because of the amount of traffic. And what is it with car drivers who block the way so not even cyclist get through the narrow gaps? Does it make them feel better or what? Sometimes I feel like raising my legs up and kicking off their side mirrors, or rolling up next to them and shouting get off your mobile phone!

Anyway, tomorrow I'm off to York for a conference titled Towards a Social Science of Web 2.0 in which I'm talking at on Thursday afternoon. In the usual way, I'm tweaking slides to get the most impact for the different audience it will be.

Then on Friday I'm at D.Construct as one of the official sponsors of the conference, so make sure you come by and say hi at the backstage stand. Although I expect most of the time it will be used as a meeting point for interviews during the day. At night there is the d.construct party which is sponsored and run by BBC Backstage and Yahoo! We worked hard to get such a good venue and hopefully enough food to feed the very hungry conference going crowd. There will be free drinks via Yahoo of course. Its going to be a good night and a excellent end to the long day at d.construct, but for those who want to make it extra long the club will open till about 2:30am, so don't rush off back to London if you can help it.

I expect a lot of people to stay around because of course on the weekend is BarCampBrighton. I'm really excited because I'm hoping to chill out and go to sessions and not get involved in the arrangement at all. They also seem to have got it to a decent size of about 80 people and done the overnight. I'm getting a little tired of barcamp's which do one day or don't have sleep overs. I think its essential to the experience and yes I know how hard it can be to do sleepovers. But the thing is you just end up with a un-conferene which is cool but you miss the bonding part. Anyway, thankfully Brighton is a whole weekend, complete with sleepover.

After that weekend I'm going to need to take some time off to chill out, but otherwise I'm off again near the end of the month. This time I'm off to Boston for TTI Vanguard Wealth of Networks conference, thanks to work. No I won't be talking except to ask questions and maybe offer a slightly different view on things which come up. Have you seen the line up? Wow, this is type of thing I would pay for on IT Conversations. Not only is this a conference but they have lunches and dinners together so you get a full day of excellent mind filling conversation.

For the rest of the year, I got to take a couple of holidays one somewhere sunny (Stowe Boyd, suggested Portugal in October), although I may end up going to South of France. I've commited to going to Berlin in November for Web 2.0 open europe which looks good. I'm also helping out where possible with that event, Boagworld 100 and I expect we will run another Backstage Christmas Party (details are secret right now). The last thing to add is that I'm still trying for BarCampLondon3 and who knows what might happen…

I keep meaning to screenshot my dopplr map or using their new api apply a map to my blog. I did however make the brave move of making my calendar publicly available via Plaxo. Oh one last thing, did I say I won a competition recently?

Comments [Comments]
Trackbacks [0]