Feed Stuff we're reading, watching, learning, enjoying etc.

We’re running another installation of Five Trees Forest - our RFID/SMS  interactive mobile story this week at the Showcomotion Conference in Sheffield. Created with Blink, we’ve had to redevelop the mobile interaction this time round so that the game is played purely by SMS rather than RFID due to there being up to 400 players potentially taking part! It’ll be interesting to see how the story develops amidst the context of a conference and whether the players are as engaged using SMS as they have been with the physical interaction of using RFID.

It seems the iPhone has an answer to everything. Or at least iPhone developers/marketers do. I can’t pretend to have tried out the TentFinder App so please do download it and give it a go rather than considering this a review but hasn’t anyone realised a] there’ll be a lot of tears when a lot iPhones go missing or get waterlogged at this years festivals and b] after using GPS, making some calls and recording some ‘amusing’ festival videos, the chances of the iPhone battery lasting long enough to help you find your tent on day 2 would be a miracle! Call me old school but personally I’ll be digging out an old robust Nokia with a black-and-white [black-and-green] screen, two weeks battery life and the kind of casing that you can drive a bus over, and then tieing a flag to the top of our tent.

The Guardian’s recent availability of most it’s data via API was a pretty big announcement and is in itself an excellent demonstration of a on a large media entity embracing future platforms. Even better, in a matter of weeks it seems that the examples and tools to help you get up and running have been vastly developed and the Guardian Data Store is now an amazing resource even just to browse or to get tips from, let alone to actually use their data.

Having just been working on a concept with a more dark theme than my instinctive slant towards light/spacious/clean web design, I can across this collection of inspirational black websites. Whether you find the collection inspirational or not, webdesign.fm have a range of colour-theme comparisons of websites which can offer inpiration in when you’re scratching your head. Though there’s nothing like getting up from your desk and getting some fresh air to help on that front.

Web usage has changed dramatically over the past couple of years, with even the average user now utilising web services alongside informational resources. As most of the major browsers have moved towards tabbed browsing, many web sessions now involve hopping between your ‘web service’ tabs such as rich email client, project management service, image manager, etc and other websites. Well, if you’ve ever found yourself thinking “I wish I could just run my web services as an application and separate them from this tabbed browser model”, you actually can. [Of course you always could just by running them in a separate browser window but that often results in even more confusion].

Fluid is an excellent little freeware app for Mac OS X that enables websites to be run as applications. The site is shown without the usual browser clutter around the edges and is presented as a standalone application in your App menu. The execution has been thought through excellently - such as web links to other sites being launched in your preferred browser, rather than the ‘app window’ losing the original app. For instance, I run the project management web service Basecamp as a Fluid app. This means that I can flick back and forth to it with ease, it never gets lost amongst other tabs in a browser, links to client sites/resources open appropriately in my browser, etc. Give it a try!

There’s been a fair bit of fuss recently about the launch of a new Facebook feature which by all accounts is a standard part of pretty much every other well known web service [Myspace, Flickr, Twitter, etc]. From tomorrow [June 12th] Facebook will be allowing users to create usernames, and hence a more friendly url to their page. For instance, where a facebook page used to be accessed at facebook.com/profile.php?id=xxxxx it will now be accessible at facebook.com/username. This is clearly of high value to the increasing number of businesses and marketeers using Facebook as a primary communication channel, and is also a much nicer method for those of us used to one identity online. Recognising the issues of squatting and trademarking by introducing such a feature after launch, Facebook have also taken steps to add trade mark protection, further acknowledging the growing value of Facebook as a commercial tool.

Looking forward to seeing whether the Adobe® BrowserLab cross browser testing solution works in real-time. Browsershots is an excellent tool for final browser checks before roll-out but tends to be a “last minute check” due to the time delay before seeing the results. BrowserLab could potentially fill this gap if it’s real time.

A piece of work created at the MEX Conference in May shows the interesting, if unsurprising, disconnect between what mobile operators and the end consumer see as key elements of the mobile user experience. The mobile user experience is intricately complex… hardware/devices, network connectivity, differing usage requirements between users, content and services, billing, enablers, marketing/branding, etc. Whilst it seems unlikely that the ‘building blocks’ in the MEX diagram would ever be identical on both sides, it is hoped that they might one day be complimentary. Until the mobile industry adapts and recognises this it appears that mobile user experience will continue to disappoint many consumers for a variety of reasons.

NOTE: If the title to this piece, and perhaps that of the original MEX content, seem familiar then you’re probably thinking of the excellent book by Jesse James Garrett, The Elements of User Experience.

The Google I/O conference this week in San Francisco is a chance for the outside world to see some of the exciting stuff that Google has on the horizon. Google’s reach is so broad that there will be something to excite everyone, but two notable developments that caught our eye are Google Wave and Google’s increasing support for HTML5.

Google Wave is an attempt to unify communication and collaboration on the web, and has been created by the original team behind Google Maps, as described in this Mashable article.

HTML5 on the other hand is clearly not a Google product but something that’s been on the horizon for web developers for sometime. Personally I’d prioritise cross-browser support for CSS3 over implementation of HTML5 support, but it’s clear that HTML5 does offer greater flexibility and power to web developers. The current example demo’ed by Google is the use of HTML5 to render video directly in the browser using the new <pre><video></pre> tag as opposed to needing an intermediary plugin [usually Flash]. You’ll need an HTML 5 capable browser to get the full benefit of this demo page on Youtube, though viewing the source [in any browser] demonstrates the different approach of using HTML5 markup.

Spotify are apparently working on an application which would enable you to listen to their streaming music service via your mobile phone. The killer aspect is that a playlist prepared whilst you have an internet connection can then be cached on your phone for playback when you don’t. The demo is currently on Android, with an iPhone version promised soon.