On the 5th September I was lucky enough to attend Update 2011 (@updateconf) at the Brighton Dome. The event was part of Brighton Digital Festival and had a mix of sessions including presentations, panel discussions interspersed by music. I only went to the conference on the Monday but there were also a number of workshops on design and development on the following days.

The event had a generous education discount … nice :). Anyway, here are my rambling notes on some of the sessions …

The event kicked off with the event organiser, Aral Balkan, singing ‘The Flesh Failures/Let the Sunshine In’ with a live band - it certainly woke up the delegates.

Matt Gemmell (@mattgemmell) gave a talk on usability under an ‘evil’ persona (@evilmattgemmell), looking at how best we can create applications that annoy people, let them know that we have them and, if possible, cause physical injury :). The reverse psychology approach was refreshing and there were some key themes: do less, be useful, support orientaton, localise and be accessible. There were plenty of points to think about and I’ve already started to think about improvements to the Walking Tour iPhone app that I did for the University of Bristol.

Jeremy Keith (@adactio) provided a robust argument that we should be concentrating on using the Web rather than native applications and walled gardens - the Web is great because you don’t need permission to use it and it has a universality because it can be used by any device that has a Web browser. The whole Web versus the native app panel discussion aka Geek Ninja Battle. On the whole, I agree with the sentiment but clearly if you want to use certain hardware features like the camera, you currently have to use native APIs. For the Mobile Campus Assistant and MyMobileBristol projects at the University we opted to focus on the Web but, for some reason, App stores have captured a significant mindshare since people, on the whole, liked what we were doing but wanted to know when they could download it as an app.

Seb Lee-Delisle (@seb_ly) gave a live coding presentation on creating an Angry Birds clone (The Irritable Exorcists) in thirty minutes using the Corono SDK using Lua based code. It was certainly a fun session and Seb is a very engaging presenter. Seb also co-presents The Creative Coding Podcast which is on my list of things to listen too on the bus.

Sara Parmenter (@sazzy), a designer with plenty of experience of working with developers of iOS apps, gave a presentation on designing beyond the HIG and tips for working with developers. You should be thinking about designing with real content and avoiding Lorem ipsum and understanding how developers will use your designs.

Relly Annett-Baker (@rellyab) gave a presentation entitles ‘Arse Over Tit’ whose thesis focussed on the fact that developers decide they are going to make an app, but don’t think about the user and what problem they are going to solve.

Joachim Bondo (@osteslag), the creator of Deep Green Chess, presentation was called “Beyond Delicious” - from the title I thought it was going to be about improved social bookmarking but was actually about creating “delicious” applications that focussed on the user experience. Quality is more that the user interface and the user experience, it also extends to the code. Above all, quality takes time.

Cennydd Bowles (@cennydd) provided the closing keynote that talked about how current economic activity isn’t sustainable, with its planned obsolesce and artificial inflation of demand. However, society is changing and people want to be more than just consumers. Products need to be more human … well, humanise the projects we undertake. We also need to trust the intangibles - great UX creates trust and loyalty. This can’t be quantified. Profit will come. Disrupt, don’t differentiate. Aim for value and significance.

Professional Development

Last week (16-17th February, 2011) I attended the developer conference, Dev8D. This is the third time that the event has happened and the second that I have been able to attend. The focus of the event is to provide cost effective training for developers in Higher Education. The event is free to attend, so Institutions just need to pay for travel and accommodation. Is it worth the investment? Yes!

I’ve been very lucking in my career by having managers and mentors, at both the Universities of Cardiff and Bristol, who saw the importance of training and professional development. The purchase of books and attending training courses have been viewed positively when budgets and time allow. I was disappointed to learn that this is common across the case across the sector.

The event is comprised of tutorials, workshops, lightning talks, panel sessions by experts or ‘gurus’ and challenges. These sessions are predominately delivered by my peers - developers from across the sector. It is humbling to be able to engage with such a talented, clever and friendly bunch. The programme this year was full of exciting stuff, including Arduinos, Mongo DB, Mobile Web, Linked Data, Clojure, Scala, Apache SOLR and much much more.

Presentations

I gave two lightning talks at the event. The first was on MyMobileBristol, which is a project I am currently working on. The project builds upon the (Java-based) software created in Mobile Campus Assistant and powers m.bristol.ac.uk as a beta service at the University of Bristol.

I also gave an introduction to the Nature Locator project which will support researchers at the Universities of Bristol and Hull with tools for receiving and processing crowd sourced data from members of the public.

I also sat on a ‘guru session’ about the Mobile Web with Tim Fernando and Chris Northwood from Oxford’s Molly team. Molly is an excellent Python/Django based framework for creating information and service portals targeted at mobile devices. Due to a scheduling clash I arrived ten minutes late and the questions and panel discussions had moved from the ‘Mobile Web’ to Python appreciation. I had nothing to add since my current comfort zone is in the verbosity of Java (and Objective-C!). However, the discussion soon moved back to issues such as native applications vs. Mobile Web.

Bragging Rights

This year I entered one of the programming challenges. I created an iPhone application that displays some of the data in JISC’s PIMs API - a database that holds information about JISC-funded projects both past and present. I won! I was a little surprised since the other entries were very good, including Paul Walks HTML 5 application, PocketPIMs.

Here is a screen cast of my application:

I got a certificate and won a £50 Amazon voucher … now spent. :-) My colleague, Damian Steer, also won one of the challenges.

Glint is a Mac application for querying SPARQL endpoints. At the moment, it has a number of features:

• Store the location of SPARQL endpoints
• Syntax highlighting for queries
• View the results of a SELECT statements in a table, or view the results as XML or JSON
• View the results of DESCRIBE and CONSTRUCT queries as RDF/XML, Turtle or N3
• Export the results to file
• Ability to receive automatic updates to the application

Why the name Glint? SPARQL sounds like sparkle, and a glint is like a sparkle. I think its better than the previous name for the project … LinkedDataViewer.

The project represents a merger of some of my professional and personal interests: the Semantic Web, SPARQL endpoints and developing Mac application with Objective-C and Cocoa. Basically, I wanted to write a Mac desktop client that allows me to query SPARQL endpoints. It is also provides a refreshing anthesis to my main development skills and focus at the moment, namely Java, web applications and the Mobile Web.

A lot of the projects I’m involved with in the Web Futures team at the Institute of Learning and Research Technology (ILRT) use Semantic Web technologies and we are starting to use SPARQL endpoints more in our projects. The development on Glint is partly associated with the ResearchReveal project, albeit most of the work is happening (rather slowly) in my own time.

The project is still in the early stages and I would appreciate any comments, criticisms and suggestions for features that should be supported. Providing a history of queries is pretty high on the list of new features.

The latest DMG can be obtained from the project page on GitHub.

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.

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:

• Electric Chalk
• Geo-Mobile Blog
• Crossed Wires
• Ramblings of a Remote Worker

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.

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.

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:

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 :-)

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.

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