November 2007 Archives

The Blogs at Penn State includes an rss feed for comments for each blog by default. Does anyone actually use these? I find them pretty important for certain blogs that tend to generate a lot of discussion. I also see blogs where the first step to what should be a ongoing discussion is taken, then never quite gets off the ground. I assume this is because after leaving a comment, most people don't bother to go back to see what further discussion may have taken place. Would it be useful to you if you could opt in to receive email alerts when additional comments are placed on an entry on which you commented?

I just realized, about 29 todays too late, that November was national blog posting month. NaBloPoMo

Would there be any value in perhaps having an Penn State or ITS blog posting week? A little forced creativity never hurt anyone.

I just watched a screencast showing off Movable Type's Community Solution. It adds community features to Movable Type such as forums, community blogs, social voting(!), user profiles.

I am not sure how this would play if we were to incorporate this with the blogs@PSU. Would we allow users to great their own communities in their personal web space? Would we use this to power a content hub that would integrate individual's personal blog posts? The screencast made it seem like a user's profile page could contain links to all their posts, comments, and forum activity.

Another feature of the community pack is the ability to add custom fields to blog/forum posts, pages, assets, etc. This could add some additional structure to blog posts being used as part of a class - The instructor could guide the students' blogging by creating some custom fields. Right now I am thinking that it might be too much overhead. Keeping things really simple is key, I think. I have learned that lesson several times over.

If you are wondering what I am going on about, just check out the screencast.

People tend to look at me with a hint of distrust in their eye when I say that Gmail's web-based email app might be my favorite email client. Web-based mail? Better than a desktop app? Yup, it just might be so. At least for my mileage.

I just discovered another feature that I haven't noticed on other email apps, a mute button. Turn off getting notified of new messages that belong to a certain thread.

Came across this and thought it could be relevant to your interests.

Two weeks ago (multiple epochs in blog time, I know), I had the opportunity to visit Seattle for an Apple tech talk on the iPhone and education. From what I can gather, this was pretty much the same as the basic iPhone tech talks that Apple has been running, with the possible exception that there were less attendees.

The session didn't just focus on the purely technical aspect of creating an iPhone web app. A user experience evangelist talked about designing an iPhone experience for your web site - making it easy to use on the go, require less text input, etc. The on thing that the presenter said that really struck me was that you should optimize for user's time - Obvious once you bother to write it down, but easy to forget when designing.

More user experience tips: Think about allowing users to do something valuable before requiring input. For example, if you have a directory of protected videos, consider allowing the user to browse the directory immediately, and only ask for authentication to actually watch the video. Consider having a list of the most popular content right up front, this can keep most users having to enter data to get at what they want. Sounds pretty basic, and probably sound advice in most cases, not just the iPhone, but sometimes you need to reminded of the simple things to maintain your focus.

There was also some info that was new to me.

• Safari on iPhone supports viewing excel documents, pdf, word, text, quicktime audio and video. No java, flash, or SVG though.
• iTunes music store URLs work on safari on the iPhone. (though not iTunes U, yet)
• iframes are scrollable with 2 fingers, no scrollbars are visible, though.
• Finger gestures can be handled with javascript, as well as the screen rotation.
• Quicktime on iPhone supports "Execute jump" - Uses http 1.1 byte-range request. You can jump forward in a quicktime file without having to DL whole file. Apache supports this.
• You can write to console.log with Javascript. You can view the log if you turn on developer mode in the safari settings.
• Safari on iPhone does support canvas element. Canvas element is what gives us vector animations in OS X's dashboard. Actually, you can open up the html of a dashboard widget with iPhone safari and it will run just as it does on OS X.

You can find lots of demo code for iPhone features at the this website. Visit it with your iPhone. Lots of good design patterns for making your web app fit in with the iPhone interface.

If you are interested in more of the content of the tech talk, Apple recently lauched the iPhone dev center. You'll need to log in with your ADC membership to actually get at the meat of the content.