As a regular tweeter, I’m always wondering how people view my tweets. Communicating in 140 characters is quite a thing, and I’m not sure I always get it right. Here are my top suggestions for things to avoid, based on how my approach has changed over time. (I’ve broken nearly all of them.)
iBooks Author wasn’t the only digital textbook announced this week. Just one day earlier, Wolfram Research announced a beta of its upcoming Wolfram Education Portal.
You might have missed the announcement; I certainly had, until Amy Worrall pointed it out. Wolfram’s Education Portal is like a more technical amalgam of iBooks textbooks and iTunes U, through which educators can create interactive digital textbooks and manage course plans and feedback. Or at least, that’s what it looks like from the beta.
I’m surprised by the fuss about Apple’s iBooks Author licensing terms. The terms prevent you from selling your iBooks Author-created works outside of the iBooks Store (although they can be distributed for free). You can still export and repurpose the content therein, but you can’t sell the complete, packaged layout file created by iBooks Author in another store.
This seems perfectly reasonable to me, for three reasons.
The iPad has a reputation for being difficult to type on. It’s generally accepted that the iPad is okay for short emails and notes, but is not suited to longer documents. The anecdotal consensus seems to be that an on-screen keyboard, with no tactile feedback, leads to more errors than a physical keyboard with real keys. Based on my research today, this simply isn’t the case. Instead, it’s the iPad’s software that’s causing the majority of typing errors.
As a web or app developer, it can be tempting to use Facebook as the default sign-in method for your service. High-profile examples of this include Spotify, which recently went Facebook-only for new users, and the Daring Fireball-featured Mixel, which requires a Facebook login before using the service at all.
One of our clients came across this yesterday: Bill Gates predicting the future, in a 2005 edition of The Guardian.
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Today is Ada Lovelace Day, an international day to celebrate inspirational women in technology. Part of the day’s aim is to encourage people to blog about the women who have inspired them. This is my contribution.
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++[[]][+[]]+[+[]] evaluates to “10″ in JavaScriptThis comes from a popular question on Stack Overflow. Given the popularity of the question, the fact that it is now closed and the fact that the highest-ranked answer there is a little imprecise, I’ve decided to write up an explanation here.
I run an app development company. Hardly a day goes by without someone telling me they’ve had “a good idea for an app” – usually just before asking me to develop it for them.
Publishing has had many saviours in recent years. Apple, Amazon and Google have all been touted as potential messiahs by an industry desperate to work out its role in an uncharted digital world.
Big technology companies haven’t been the only saviours. Small independent producers such as Touch Press and Inkling have experimented with the boundaries between books and apps, with interesting results.
Today sees another entry into the Future of Publishing, launched with considerable fanfare by Al Gore and Push Pop Press. Our Choice, the sequel to 2006’s An Inconvenient Truth, claims it will “change the way we read books, and quite possibly change the world.”
Yesterday I attended the NESTA / Rewired State Make It Local hack day. Myself and five other developers were challenged to create something useful with local data in six hours. My contribution was “My Commute”, a travel planning web site for your daily commute to work.
What do I mean by “apps that work”? Well, the most successful apps – those that really work for users, those that are used time and time again – are apps that make the best of what a mobile device can do.
We’ve updated our National Rail Enquiries app ready for iPhone 4, and have converted all of the app’s assets into beautiful high-definition format. We’re really pleased with the results, so I thought I’d post some screenshots as a sneak preview of how the app will look.
Even though the BBC’s planned iPhone apps have been postponed for a review, it’s still possible to get full-screen iPlayer video on your iPad, thanks to a neat web app workaround by the BBC. Here’s how to do so.
I run an iPhone development company. We’re currently making our UK train times app fully compatible with VoiceOver. We’re being helped by users of the ViPhone Google Group, which is a forum for discussing the iPhone 3GS and its support for visually-impaired users.
I saw a comment from a member of the group the other day, shortly after Section 3.3.1 went mainstream:
Could this mean more accessible apps for VO users?
Note the meaning behind the comment. Not “how dare they”, or “shame on you”, but “hurrah – this will mean that apps are more likely to be accessible via VoiceOver.”
Making better quality iPhone apps isn’t just about how they look – it’s about how they sound. And that’s another reason to develop your apps in Xcode.
I’m an iPhone app developer. I’m interested in new apps that do interesting things. I also have an interest in data privacy. So when I heard that the Conservative Party had launched an app with a canvassing feature, I thought I should try it out.
We’re just putting the finishing touches to VoiceOver accessibility support for our National Rail Enquiries iPhone app. When adapting the app for VoiceOver, we found that Apple’s developer documentation for accessibility was pretty good, but there were still several questions we couldn’t answer. After some help from Apple, and some experimentation and research, we’ve managed to answer most of our queries. I thought it might be useful to share what we discovered, in case other developers have run into the same problems. Here are our questions and findings.
Apple is the world leader in digital music sales, and is making big inroads into digital video and TV. The iPad completes the deal, bringing Apple’s magic to the world of eBook sales.
Lots of suggested iPad downsides on the Internet this morning. Thought I’d tackle a few.
Here’s the problem: HTML and XHTML pages containing empty elements with no end tag such as <span /> break JavaScript DOM traversal methods in Internet Explorer 6, 7 and 8, resulting in nodes after such an element showing up in more than one node’s childNodes collection. Continue reading