The world according to Andrew

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about games for commuters. More specifically how there doesn’t really seem to be any that require any kind of interaction with those around you. It seems like such a missed opportunity. Many people in close proximity, in my case for 45 minutes at a time with little to do and a mobile phone in their hand.

A bit of observational research over the last week has shown me that most people have a mobile of some kind, Blackberry, iPhone or Android and most use them for either playing a game of some kind (95% Angry Birds), sending SMS messages, reading email or looking at Twitter. All of these devices are capable of bluetooth, have GPS and, where it’s available, are internet connected (3G in the UK is rubbish at the best of times but on a moving train skipping between cell’s you might as well just not bother). In fact the number of people glued to their mobile devices for their entire journey is staggering.

A year or so ago I drew up a prototype for a Bluetooth transmitter that could be attached to trains magnetically and that could then be used by brands to broadcast to mobile devices used by commuters, an ideal tool for advertising or streaming in movie trailers etc (these days it could be a wi-fi hotspot rather than Bluetooth). Unfortunatly it also looked like a bomb and with all the bad things going on in the world I didn’t fancy causing a full scale terror alert by carrying out a field test. I still think the idea is sound, although the idea has evolved into one where the phones act as a grid to manage the game where certain devices act as super nodes brokering game data etc in a similar way to which Skype works. It’s on my projects list to prototype in the coming months.

I’ve also started to think a little about what a game mechanic in this area might look like. Imagine if tribes of commuters could play against each other, say the 7.30 from Milton Keynes plays the 5.50 from Manchester, economies could be set up, goods farmed and bartered, battles fought (perhaps for who sits and who stands) I think the scope for this is pretty wide and the opportunities for gamifying the commute many..

The problem I can see though is that commuters don’t really seem to interact with each other, commuting despite the proximity to others seems to be a very solitary activity. I’ve travelled with many of the same people every day, twice a day for the last ten years. I don’t know any of there names and we don’t really even acknowledge we’ve seen each other before. Perhaps this is an opportunity to use technology to change that. In fact on the list is a future blog post about using technology to enable people to interact with strangers as it’s something i’ve been thinking about for a while – why do I never say hello to the woman I see in the coffee shop queue every single morning, why does the man on the platform never say good morning? I know I want to but feel I can’t.

Anyway for now commuters seem happy with the latest iteration of Angry Birds so I guess I have some time :)

After a long hiatus there’s a couple of quotes from me in an article about planning web projects the latest issue of .Net Magazine. Not quite word for word what I said but close enough :) Overall an interesting article with some good insight into how agencies plan their sites.

I was fortunate enough to attend a panel discussion this evening on the future of (written word) publishing. It was brilliantly attended by many UK publishers, startups, industry groups and academics (notably though no authors, magazine publishers or device manufacturers). The outcome of tonight’s panel discussion is to be a paper on the future of publishing, the challenges, the areas ripe for innovation and strategy for the future. I got quite vocal (unusual for me – no really) about the value of the content and content strategy and the over focus on platform. A couple of the panelists disagreed with what I was saying – strangely these tended to be the technologists rather than the publishers which surprised me a little. Challenges wise there did seem to be a few common strains that came out I can’t really discuss here as it wouldn’t be fair – we’ll have to wait for the paper but it’s safe to say ROI, rights management and comparison to the music industry made appearances.

My eyes were opened to the various publishing sectors, academic publishing, medical, children’s etc etc, along with the nervousness about platforms and most notably failure. The notion of failing fast and building on the learning’s is seen as a massive risk and not many people are doing it (read none) – not even with long tail content.

Anyway loads to think about and the depth of expertise in the room was incredible – I made some new acquaintances, have to follow up with a few people and booked a few coffee’s for the n

We hosted the London flash platform group meetup yesterday evening.  There were two presentations. David Kinross did a really interesting overview of AlivePDF and shared some of his experience implementing it. My colleague Tadhg and I presented a talk about developing for kids and families and covered some of the techniques we use both in identifying the various stages of child development and some of the tools we’ve put in place to ensure we can create high quality software targeted at young people.

I was a bit worried about the content as it was quite heavily focused on what we do as a company and the hard work we’ve put into our tools and process rather than purely academic but it was really well received, in fact we had a fab time and met loads of great, smart people. Thanks to everyone who came and I think a video of the talks is going to be posted online soon.

Over the years I’ve never really blogged much – i’ve tried, but I get bored really quickly either with the content or the design and normally nuke and start again after a couple of months. I also worry I don’t really have anything interesting to say – i’m just adding to the noise of the Internet. All that said, I do feel like I want to write so  I’ve decided to make a real effort to get back into blogging. I want to improve my writing style and try out a few of the SEO techniques I have been recommending to clients for the last few years. Cory Doctorow (Author of With a Little Help, For the Win, Makers, and Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom) suggests the following when it comes to improving your writing. I’m taking his advice.

1. Write every day. Anything you do every day gets easier. If you’re insanely busy, make the amount that you write every day small (100 words? 250 words?) but do it every day.
2. Write even when the mood isn’t right. You can’t tell if what you’re writing is good or bad while you’re writing it.
3. Write when the book sucks and it isn’t going anywhere. Just keep writing. It doesn’t suck. Your conscious is having a panic attack because it doesn’t believe your subconscious knows what it’s doing.
4. Stop in the middle of a sentence, leaving a rough edge for you to start from the next day — that way, you can write three or five words without being “creative” and before you know it, you’re writing.
5. Write even when the world is chaotic. You don’t need a cigarette, silence, music, a comfortable chair, or inner peace to write. You just need ten minutes and a writing implement.

Turns out that when Adobe puts their minds to things rather than just getting upset with Apple they can do some interesting things. Last month they released a prototype extension to CSS that they’ve contributed to webkit called CSS regions. It’s a way for developers to get closer to magazine style formatting, even for fluid layouts.

You can read about it in the documentation from Adobe here. So when will this appear in Safari? Well probably not soon but Google are on board so we may well see it in a future release of Chrome.

About a year ago a wrote a piece on this very blog (long gone in the great May 2011 purge) over my concerns about the current state of ICT tuition in UK schools. So I was delighted to read today about a new initiative fronted by David Braben (of Elite fame) – the Raspberry Pi foundation. The foundation’s aim is to get kids hacking on computers again. They share my concerns with the current curriculum and that along with the resultant lack of programming talent coming out of our schools and universities, kids are becoming passengers of their devices. Playing games, using word processors, sending email and communicating over BBM but never really understanding how these things work or taking an interest in the underlying bits and bytes of the technology. The Raspberry Pi foundation are looking to tackle this head on by developing a £15 ARM powered mini computer running Linux designed for hacking that be plugged into any HDMI display. It’s genius in it’s simplicity and harks back to the days of the build your own spectrum – a device that shaped my life and ignited my love of computers, logic and the beauty of code (along with my Amstrad, Oric and Amiga). The device isn’t available yet but when it is I will be buying one and if the foundation’s ideas come to fruition, giving one to a school as part of my purchase (through the buy one give one programme). I cannot wait to see how this turns out. Definitely one to watch if you care about this kind of thing.

Twitter is slowly replacing RSS for me, I still spend far too much time in Google Reader but for the best links I’m beginning to rely on the horde of people I follow on Twitter curating and editorialising the Web for me. It does bother me that I’m starting to put all my eggs in one basket and that a single platform is becoming such a part of my life but maybe i’ll cover that in another post. For now I want to talk about the workflow that I have been pulling together that makes sure that I don’t miss all the great stuff that comes down my Twitter stream, backs it up and makes it searchable. I’ve been putting this together for a couple of weeks now so I thought I’d share.

So to start, I read my twitter stream about three times a day (usually on an iOS device), more if i’m travelling. I quickly read all the tweets and anything thatsounds interesting I favourite (favorite) – this gives me a hook to find the tweet again but also gives kudos to the Tweeter (good karma and all that).

It’s all well and good collecting all these favourites but then what to do with them? Most of them contain links to things on the wider web so I wrote a small script that sits on my home server and checks my Twitter account at 12pm and 12 midnight. This sucks up all my favourite tweets, drops a timestamp and then posts all the favourites that have appeared after the last timestamp to my Instapaper account – all via the appropriate api’s. Now I know that some Twitter clients, such as Twitteriffic have this option baked in but most don’t. This is certainly the case with the Twitter site itself, so to cover all outcomes this works best for me. The script then goes on and extracts the link from each tweet, follows it, examines the details of the page – title, word count etc etc and compiles them all into a nicely formatted html email – stuffing the full text and other metadata into a local datastore just in case i need it again. This then gets posted to my work’s link share email list for everyone else to see. I do this as it helps with context of things I talk about in meetings and brain storms (yes we still do brain storms at work).

Once in Instapaper, I read at my leisure whenever I get a moment.

The next bit is a new edition. Until now the link data just exists in my local DB on my script server. Thanks to a post by Frasier Speirs on a very similar subject I can now archive all items and the Instapaper formatted full text of note into an Evernote account. This is done by simply sharing the link to my Evernote account from within the Instapaper app on my iPad. So the end result is a hassle free three tier filter of the content into a searchable permanent archive in Evernote and I can do this on whatever machine I happen to be on at the time! Sorted!