Fairly Positive

Mobile Campus Assistant – Video for JIF2010

Mike Jones — Thu, 22 Jul 2010 14:56:36 +0000

I’ve created a screen cast video on Mobile Campus Assistant for JISC’s Joint Innovation Forum, 2010. The event is being held next week (28th and 29th July) and I’ll be hanging around an exhibition stand for MCA and Visualising China.

The Mobile University

Mike Jones — Mon, 24 May 2010 14:48:57 +0000

On the 13th May I attended Eduserv Symposium 2010: The Mobile University at the Royal College of Physicians, London. It was a stimulating event with talks from people involved in both the education and private sectors. It provided an opportunity to network, meet current and former work colleagues and talk about the Mobile Campus Assistant project to anyone who would listen.

The slides and videos of the presentations are available online. All of the talks were interesting, but three stick in my mind:

The opening keynote, “Mobile, Mobile, Mobile!”, was given by Paul Golding. Golding is the CEO and Lead Innovation Architect of Wireless Wanders and author of Next Generation Wireless Applications: Creating Mobile Applications in a Web 2.0 and Mobile 2.0 World. The keynote started with an overview of the development of mobile technologies in the in the last 10 years, using the terms Mobile 1.0 and Mobile 2.0. There were some interesting statistics given, including 1.2 billion mobiles are sold annually and smartphones are expected to have 40% market penetration within the next 2-3 years. Some of the drivers for the success of Mobile 2.0 include data friendly tariffs, faster networks and mobilised social networks, such as Facebook. In addition, mobile technologies were a closed platform 10 years ago where it was difficult to distribute applications. The platforms are more open with 2.0. Golding believes the future will be focussed around augmented reality where phones can recognise objects or people! There are a number of existing services like Google Goggles.

Dr Christine Sexton, Director of Corporate Information and Computing Services at the University of Sheffield, “The role of a University Computing Service in an increasingly mobile world. Or: ‘We don’t support that…’”. Sexton talked about the challenges facing IT departments in supporting mobile devices, such as infrastructure, security, licensing and support. It was interesting to hear that the wireless networking infrastructure installed in buildings three years ago can no longer support current demands. Sexton outlined different support models and emphasised that IT departments can no longer default to the ‘we don’t support that’ stance with mobile devices.

Tom Hume, Managing Director, Future Platforms talked about “Real life experiences launching mobile apps”. Hume’s talk was particularly interesting because he highlighted how, in developing applications, the market remains very fragmented. For example, to reach 70% of UK mobile owners you need to support 375 different handsets. iPhones will only deliver 3.63% and the ten most popular devices only covers 28.11%. It is expected that the fragmentation will only become worse – even if you develop for iPhone OS you still have devices (iPad, iPhone, iPhone 3GS, iPod Touch) that have differing capabilities. In the questions after the talk it was suggested that the Web provides better opportunity for supporting more devices. In a recent O’Reilly Radar article, Jason Grigsby illustrates that even though the Mobile OS market continues to fragment, the Mobile Web continues to converge on HTML 5 and Webkit.

I would highly recommend watching all of the videos if you have time.

Other blogs that mention esym10 include:

The whole event fed my interest in developing for the Mobile Web and I hope, at some point in the near future, that ILRT and the University of Bristol secure funding for the continued development of Mobile Campus Assistant. If you are interested in this project my colleague, Damian Steer, will be talking about the Mobile Web at Institutional Web Management Workshop 2010, 12-14 July. I will be giving a demonstration of MCA at JISC’s Joint Innovation Forum 2010, 28-29 July.

Mobile Campus Assistant in the News

Mike Jones — Fri, 19 Mar 2010 10:25:58 +0000

The public relations office at the University of Bristol wrote a really good news item on Mobile Campus Assistant: Smartphones get smarter with ILRT innovation

Dev8D Lightening Talk

Mike Jones — Fri, 12 Mar 2010 17:37:51 +0000

I recently gave a lightening talk on Mobile Campus Assistant at the JISC Developer Days event, also known as Dev8D. I’ve written a review of the event on the Research Revealed blog.

The slides are available on Slideshare:

Dev8D: call for help!

Mike Jones — Sat, 20 Feb 2010 22:36:00 +0000

I’ve just put the following plea for help on the dev8D wiki:

I’m currently working on a small project that merges some of my current interests: SPARQL and developing Mac applications with Cocoa and Objective-C. The application … currently called Linked Data Viewer … allows you to query SPARQL endpoints. I’d love to speak to the following people about the project:

Developers or others who write SPARQL queries. What type of things would you find useful if you used this type of application? Syntax highlighting? Query history?

Any experts in User Interface design who could make suggestions on making an intuitive interface.

Any developers familiar with Cocoa. I’ve got some experience of writing native iPhone applications but very little Mac development experience.

Can you think of a better name for the application/project?

I’ll be at the event on on Friday and Saturday

Release 0.4 – query with SELECT, CONSTRUCT, DESCRIBE and ASK

Mike Jones — Fri, 19 Feb 2010 17:34:38 +0000

I’ve made 0.4 available as binary on GitHub. This version checks whether or not you are writing a SELECT, CONSTRUCT, DESCRIBE or ASK statement and updates the results format option list appropriately.

An example of a SELECT query:

A CONSTRUCT statement:

A DESCRIBE statement:

An ASK statement:

Binary download: LinkedDataViewer-0.4.dmg

Release 0.3 available

Mike Jones — Wed, 17 Feb 2010 10:22:16 +0000

I’ve made release 0.3 available. This included the basic syntax highlighting for SPARQL queries and the new place-holder application icon. The application can only properly handle SELECT statements … I’ll be working on making sure the correct headers are used for other queries very soon.

LinkedDataViewer-0.3.dmg

Application Icon

Mike Jones — Tue, 16 Feb 2010 23:35:06 +0000

I was bored with the default icon that xcode gives projects, so created a new place-holder one with Inkscape:

It will do for the moment, albeit the text doesn’t scale very well and is pretty unreadable in the dock:

Syntax Highlighting

Mike Jones — Fri, 12 Feb 2010 08:36:46 +0000

I’m currently experimenting with providing some basic syntax highlighting for SPARQL queries. I’ve chosen an implementation based on examples given on the CocoaDev website. Its fairly rudimentary and just highlights SPARQL keywords in blue.

I’m wondering if URIs should also have a different colour?

Ideally, the user should be able to set the colours in the application preferences.

10.5 Now Supported

Mike Jones — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 22:18:54 +0000

I’ve updated the LinkedDataViewer application so that it will now run on Mac OS X 10.5 – this involved a minor code tweak and slightly changing some issues with the user interface. This version is downloadable as LinkedDataViewer-0.2.dmg.

Here is a screen shot of the tweaked user interface: