Archive for July 2009
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This is an emergency guide to iPhone software development, i.e. a guide for competent developers who haven’t written code for the iPhone platform before, and just want to get started right now.
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Open Softwear is a book about fashion and technology. More precisely it is a book about Arduino boards, conductive fabric, resistive thread, soft buttons, LEDs, and some other things.
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Here’s the un-bit.lyfied version to download your last 3,200 tweets in one shot on a machine with curl installed.
[Crossposted from the Headshift blog]
The news this morning is full of a report from Morgan Stanley on teenage media habits – written by a 15-year-old intern, it dismisses Twitter and describes online advertising as pointless.
Morgan Stanley seem to be promoting the report heavily, although I’m not entirely clear whether this is from the viewpoint of it being a lucid piece of analysis or more of “look! a little person! how quaint!”
The report has turned up on the Guardian website, and while it might be a fairly impressive piece of work for a 15 year old, most of the conclusions are not overwhelmingly suprising. Teenagers don’t read newspapers, they’re “very reluctant” to pay for music and they see adverts as annoying distractions. This is hardly earth-shattering, and wouldn’t have been earth-shattering at any point since the word “teenager” was invented. It’s a long time since I was that age, but me and my contemporaries were hardly huge newspaper consumers and were the generation that was allegedly killing music with home taping.
The more suprising conclusion was about Twitter. “Teenagers do not use Twitter,” Robson wrote. “Most have signed up to the service, but then just leave it as they realise that they are not going to update it (mostly because texting Twitter uses up credit, and they would rather text friends with that credit). They realise that no one is viewing their profile, so their tweets are pointless.”
This directly contradicts my experience of teenagers using Twitter. The teens of my aquaintance are voracious Twitter users – a quick random sample of 5 taken this morning show them having produced over 20,000 tweets between them in a 3-month period, and far from using texts to update the service, they’re using the web on both browsers and phones as well as API-based clients like Tweetdeck. In fact, their use is more akin to public IM – there’s a huge amount of direct conversation between individuals going on, which suprised me given that the asynchronous nature of Twitter doesn’t lend itself to that kind of usage particularly. They’re also sophisticated enough to be integrating Twitter into other services such as Facebook and Tumblr – which is where you need to look if you *really* want to see the kind of content-creating behaviour that this demographic gets up to.
Where Morgan Stanley’s “analysis” falls short from my point of view is that they’re taking the experience of one particular individual, and extrapolating from that. It would be an interesting starting point for future research, but these aren’t evidential findings any more than my anecdote above is. And in any case, I suspect that a 15-year-old who spends the summer writing reports for Morgan Stanley is far from a representative sample of typical teenagers – so while there’s some interesting anecdotal findings here, I’m not sure it fully-deserves the breathless praise that’s been showered on it. Full marks to Morgan Stanley’s PR people, though – there’s been acres of free publicity which is ultimately worth far more than the 15 minutes of fame that’s come Matthew Robson’s way.
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Scroll Follow is a simple jQuery plugin that enables a DOM object to follow the page as the user scrolls. Scroll Follow has been successfully tested on IE6, IE7, FF2, FF3, Safari 3, and Opera 9 on Windows. It has been successfully tested on FF3 and Safari 3 on MacOSX.
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Uploadify is a jQuery plugin that allows the easy integration of a multiple (or single) file uploads on your website. It requires Flash and any backend development language. An array of options allow for full customization for advanced users, but basic implementation is so easy that even coding novices can do it.
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Ideally, users will fill the web form with necessary information and finish their job successfully. However, people often make mistakes. This is where web form validation comes into play. The goal of web form validation is to ensure that the user provided necessary and properly formatted information needed to successfully complete an operation. In this article we will go beyond the validation itself and explore different validation and error feedback techniques, methods and approaches.
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The "seekAttention" plugin gracefully get's your users attention by fading out a definable area but leaving the target element (the element which is seeking attention) un-faded and thereby focusing the users attention on it.
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A set of methods that provide an inline, customizable way to show JavaScript alerts, confirmations, and prompts.
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Glow is a JavaScript library which gives you…
* Simplified DOM manipulation, event handling, animations, etc
* A versatile set of user interface widgets
* Clear and comprehensive documentation
* BBC Browser Support Standards compliance
[Cross-posted from the Headshift blog]
The great and the good of social media (as well as the rest of us) descended on the Institute of Electrical Engineers in London yesterday for Reboot Britain, a 1-day conference run by NESTA looking at “how the promise of our new digital age can tackle the challenges we face as a country”
There have been a number of conferences and gatherings happened over the last few months that have had this theme, but this was the largest and most “official” so far. The participants were mixed – the usual social media suspects, non-profits, public sector and the hackers and the enthusiasts. Speakers ranged from from the official spokespeople such as Martha Lane-Fox the Digital Inclusion “czar”, Shadow Cabinet members through to the doers such as School of Everything’s Paul Miller and the celebrity experts in the form of Howard Rheingold.
If there was a theme, it was that something’s gone fundamentally wrong with the way we operate many aspects of our society, and digital technology gives us an opportunity to fix some of these. The opportunity was partially summed-up by Jonathan Kestenbaum of NESTA when he talked about there being no shortage of ingenuity in the UK, but that it’s now about moving this “from the marginal to the mainstream”.
The opening keynote was delivered by the Shadow Culture Secretary Jeremy Hunt. He’s the very model of a modern Tory (shadow) minister, straight from Conservative central casting – no notes, no podium and no tie. He’s got a good line in expenses-related self-deprecation, which is probably all that stands between most politicians and their heads on spikes over Westminster Bridge these days, and played to the audience with references to the IT Crowd sitcom and “rebooting PCs” jokes.
His opener was that the current cynicism with politics is linked to the reach of technology – as organisations such as MySociety shine a bright light into some fairly murky corners, the information that comes into view shows the political processes for the corrupt and dysfunctional mess that they are. Politics is now stuck in the old model of “getting on with it for now and get reelected every 4 years”.
The soundbite phrase he used was “collaborative individualism”, and there was a grab-bag of use cases – Wikipedia’s virtually instantaneous response to the 7/7 London bombings as an example of wikinomics in action. The flip side to collaborative individualism is nanny-state paternalism – I’m not sure I entirely agree with that distinction – to me, conservatism can be just as paternalistic – but it is at least distinct from the tendency of the current government to firehose public money at grandiose and badly defined mega-projects while staring starry-eyed at US corporate consultancies.
He also made a point that hadn’t really occurred to me before – whereas in the US, the opportunities offered by digital media were embraced by the centre left (or at least as left as the Obama administration gets), whereas in the UK it’s been taken up by the centre right. He explained this as being down to the instinctive Tory like of decentralisation, and the way that the web can be seen as a fairly pure expression of evolution in action – good ideas get traction and services succeed, while poor ones don’t get the traffic and wither and die. Again, that strikes me as a simplification, particularly when you consider public services where the concept of “competition” simply doesn’t apply – but it does at least give us examples of what works and what doesn’t that can be used as the basis for more successful online public services.
And there were a few semi-concrete ideas thrown out, such as making details of all expenditure of more than £25,000 freely available online – although that does raise the question of how many transactions will come in at exactly £24,999.99 once that goes live, of course…
What was most interesting, given where we are in the electoral cycle, was the complete lack of any Government representation at the conference – unless you count Tom Watson MP who was there in his capacity as a backbencher (or perhaps as the “Member for the Internet”?) I supposed you could argue that this is down to the Government being busy – well, Governing – but it did strike me that here was a missed opportunity for a practical demonstration of the “listening” that is supposed to be happening. Perhaps if the conference had cost 4 figures and delegates got bags emblazoned with large US corporate logos as freebies, we’d have seen a few more Government representatives?
Video of the speakers and the subsequent conversations are being curated at the Reboot Britain site, and there’s also a conference wiki where (hopefully) more follow-up will take place.
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Page that captures details about client settings – IP, browser, resolution, flash version etc; and allows PDF/CSV/email export of details
