David Herrold

BarCampHouston3 recap

Posted by Dave | Filed under Design, Development, Marketing, Mobile, Networking, Social Networking, Software, Technology

Photo - Best name tag I saw at BarCampHouston.

Justine and I attended BarCamp Houston at the Houston Technology Center yesterday and had a great time. A big thanks to all the organizers (Marc Nathan, Kelsey Ruger, Josh Tabin, Scott Stolz). You guys made the event a smashing success for everyone. And thanks to all the sponsors for helping to make BarCamp Houston possible.

For those who don’t know what BarCamp is, here is a brief explanation:

BarCamp is an international network of user generated conferences — open, participatory workshop-events, whose content is provided by participants — often focusing on early-stage web applications, and related open source technologies, social protocols, and open data formats. - Wikipedia

This can be simplified to “day camp for nerds.”

I watched some great presentations and participated in some interesting discussions throughout the day. BarCamps are only as great as their participants, and we had some great participants this year.

Ed Schipul’s presentation on PR and social media was sharp. His creative use of a green laser pointer kept the crowd in line (as much as possible) as he explained how to “put the relations back in public relations” using social media. It’s a pleasure to watch a pro on stage engage the audience as well as Ed does.

Josh Tabin spoke about how start-up funding works. I found his discussion about the ins and outs of financing to be pretty enlightening. I left the discussion knowing a lot more about how start-ups make that initial leap into businesses.

Tracy and Imelda whipped up an impromptu discussion on digital photography and social media. I’m pretty sure there should have been a cover charge for the room and IDs checked at the door. Tracy had the room in stitches for a solid 30 minutes, while feeding them great advice for managing their photos in Flickr.

Katherine Druckman also jumped into the mix with an impromptu presentation about Drupal, the open source content management system. The crowd had lots of questions and she fielded them like a pro.

Wynn Netherland and Jim Mulholland from Squeejee.com gave a great presentation on virtual collaboration tools. I’ve gotten used to keeping much of my work “in the cloud” and Wynn and Jim did a nice job of rounding up the most useful tools for working with teams spread across the globe (they even did their presentation live on Google Docs. Cool.)

Here’s a photo of the schedule board in the lobby. A little something for everyone.

My own presentation about mobile web design & SMS went pretty well (at least I think so…it’s hard to gauge while standing behind a podium). I used a live SMS poll to determine how the crowd used their phones the most (talking, email, text messaging or mobile internet). Email and WAP came out on top, which isn’t surprising given the technologically savvy crowd at BarCampHouston. (Screenshot of the BarCampHouston3 mobile poll results.) I also posted some photos on Flickr yesterday.

(Update: I just found out my presentation deck was featured on the homepage of Slideshare today! Woot! Here’s the screenshot.)

Have a great Sunday, everyone!

P.S. - Bill Shirley posted a nice BarCampHouston update, too. Check it out.

P.P.S - Steve Evatt also recapped BarCamp Houston and took some cool photos as well.

Tags: barcamp, barcamphouston3, conference, houston, Technology

A List Apart industry survey

Posted by Dave | Filed under Design, Development, Software, Technology, Usability, Web design, Writing

A List Apart is posting their second annual survey for “people who make websites.”  The results from last year were very interesting.  If you are somehow involved in designing, developing, writing, producing, or managing websites, I encourage you to participate in this anonymous survey to help better understand the industry.

A List Apart article explaining the survey.
Link to the 2008 survey.
Results of the 2007 survey.

Thanks!

Tags: a list apart, survey, web survey

Mobile search

Posted by Dave | Filed under Apple, Hardware, Mobile, Software, Usability

We’ve gotten very good at finding what we’re looking for online. Ever since the early days of AltaVista, Lycos and DogPile we’ve become experts at finding Thai restaurants in Hoboken, NJ and singing telegrams in Anchorage, AK. Just type a few keywords into the search box and click the go button. Your best result will be on the first page, right? Pretty easy.

Fast forward to 2008 - and the proliferation of mobile phones, PDAs and palmtop computers that can access the web. Things become much more interesting.

There is an increased sense of immediacy based upon our physical location and actions. In the old world, we designed sites for users who were typically sitting at a desk with a keyboard and mouse. Today we design sites for people who are surfing the internet while walking the dog, boarding a plane, driving to work and cheering for the home team during the playoffs.  Mobile devices are with us all the time.

Good-bye keyboard.  Good-bye mouse.  We’ll miss you.

We are using our thumbs to type now. We are scrolling down our tiny screens with trackballs, slide-wheels and pencil-thin styli. We are clicking with phone keys, tiny buttons, pens and our fingers. We need results need to be simple, easy to read, accurate and light weight. And we need it now.

Mobile platforms need to distill web content down to the bare essentials, trimming away unnecessary page clutter while pushing relevant content to the top of the page.

John Markoff’s New York Times article sums this up more eloquently than I.

“The small screen forces you to be even more ruthless and focus on usability almost like a haiku,” said Barney Pell, Powerset’s founder and chief executive. “That’s what happens with design for the small screen. You have to think about what the most important thing the user is doing is.”

There are currently only a few methods of searching the web on a mobile device (although, there SHOULD be more, in my opinion*.)

The first method is the one we’re most familiar with.  We type search terms into a little box and hit submit for results. As long as the web server produces valid XHTML and mobile friendly CSS, most phones will display results without too much trouble. Many mobile sites that offer search, offer this method.

Another method uses SMS and allows users to search via text message instead of using web forms. This can be a faster way of getting results in some cases if you have little or no access to a strong mobile signal for WAP searches. Depending upon your carrier’s packages, SMS can also be used without a data plan (which is usually much cheaper than a full data plan).

A good example of this is Google’s SMS service. If you happen to have a text message plan for your mobile device, try this. Send a text message to 466453 (GOOGLE) with the message of “pizza and [your zipcode]“. You should get a text message back from Google with 3-4 of the highest ranking listings along with click-to-call links to contact the restaurant.

You can also send links to your users within the text message. A good example of this is our own classified ad platform on the Houston Chronicle’s mobile site. For another interesting test, try sending a text message to 24766 (CHRON) with a message of “ford mustang”. You will get a text message back informing you how many results this search produced and a link to the mobile search results (if you have a WAP access).

This is pretty useful, but still not perfect.

Within the last year location-based services have grown quickly in popularity. Mobile platforms like Brightkite, Google Maps and Fire Eagle are gaining ground with many mobile users. Using a mobile device’s internal GPS (or triangulation from cell towers if your device doesn’t have a GPS), the device determines your location and allows you to simply search for the word “pizza” to produce local results for you (since it already knows your location).

We will begin to see more of these services over the next few years. However, I think we can do even better than that.

As I’ve said in the past, our mobile phones are audio devices first and foremost. Let’s put that audio technology to good use.

* Allow me to speak “Find Starbucks” into my phone to trigger a Google Maps search or speak “Browse CNN” to auto-dial a browser bookmark. Surfing the internet hands-free might be extremely useful if I were driving a car, walking the dog or even peddling a bicycle.

With devices like Apple’s iPhone and Google’s upcoming Android platform the possibilities are nearly endless.

Let’s push the limits.

————————

Some resources that can help you get started with mobile web development:

Dev.Mobi - A website dedicated to mobile web development
Blue Flavor’s web development guide is a good start - and they’re nice folks too.
Mobile Web Development - by Nirav Mehta a more in-depth look at mobile development
Mobile Web Design - by Cameron Moll - a great introduction to the mobile web

Tags: Google, iPhone, Mobile, search, sms

Firefox 3 “find” UI blunder?

Posted by Dave | Filed under Browsers, Software, Usability

I was searching for words within a page today using the new Firefox 3 on a Mac when I ran into what looks like a bizarre user interface blunder.  The “Next” and “Previous” buttons to find your search term on the page appear to be switched from the standard left=back and right=forward configuration.

I think it would be OK in the Japanese version of the browser (because Japanese is read right to left).  However, on all English versions of the browser the buttons should be swapped.

(Now that I think about it, the same goes for Spanish, French, German, etc…)

Am I crazy or is this really odd?

Tags: browser, Design, firefox3, mozilla, Software, UI, user interface

FireFox 3 upgrade for Mac

Posted by Dave | Filed under Browsers, Software, Usability

I just finished upgrading to FireFox 3.0 and so far the good outweighs the bad. Some things I noticed immediately are the bookmarks in my toolbar are completely rearranged and outdated.

Several of my bookmark folders were simply replaced by two folders called “Most Visited” and “Places.” It’s almost as if the installation grabbed an old copy of my bookmarks as it upgraded.

That is forcing me to scramble to find some old back-up copies of my bookmarks. And that is a pain. About half my add-ons are working correctly. I consider the following add-ons to be essential for any installation of FireFox: Web Developer toolbar, FireBug, TabMix Plus. TabMix Plus isn’t compatible with FireFox 3.0 yet; nor is Mr. UpTime, TinyURL creator and view source chart. But I can live without those for a while (until the developers update them…hint, hint).

The good news.

The speed is fantastic. The startup and shutdown times for FireFox 3.0 seems at least 3 times faster than FireFox 2.0. Even faster than I expected.

FireFox 3.0 appears to be using less memory (RAM) than FireFox 2.0 used on a regular basis. This frees up more memory for other apps to be open at the same time.

The navigation bar has been slightly redesigned, making the back button (pictured above) larger than the forward button (and also graying out the forward button when it is not needed). This is an excellent example of Fitt’s Law (the time to acquire a target is directly related to the size and distance of the target) in action. Mozilla’s interaction designer probably noted that most people use the back button far more than they use the forward button and adjusted the size to reflect that. Pretty sharp.

Overall, I’d say the upgrade was pretty positive with a few hiccups.

Take my advice and back up your entire machine (on an external source) before upgrading. That way you can simply copy over anything you may be missing (or back out of the upgrade gracefully if something goes awry).

Speaking of Firefox add-ons…what are some of your favorites?

Tags: browser, FireFox, firefox3, mozilla

Gmail labs

Posted by Dave | Filed under Communication, Google, Software

I’m checking out Gmail labs. Has anyone started to play around with the new features?

- Dave

Tags: gmail, gmail labs, Google

Dropbox - remote backup with version control

Posted by Dave | Filed under Apple, Productivity, Software, Technology

Dropbox is a remote back-up service that provides a very simple way to store files in a version-controlled environment. I’ve been using Dropbox to synch and provide back-ups for some test files on several computers at home.

How does it work?

Click here to read more…

Tags: Apple, back-up, backup, dropbox, pc, remote, version, versioning

Adobe launches web-based Photoshop Express

Posted by Dave | Filed under Design, Photography, Software, Web design

Adobe launched the web-based Photoshop Express recently and I’m trying to figure out if it’s any better or worse than Flickr’s  (picnik.com) web-based image editing tool.  Adobe offers 2GB of storage, which is better storage than the free Flickr account, however, Express isn’t meant to be a photo sharing site like Flickr.

The functionality isn’t terribly interesting yet, but image editing is Adobe’s bread and butter, so I would expect the functionality to grow in the coming months.

The one immediate limitation I noticed is the requirement of Flash Player 9 to run the Express.  I tried visiting the site with my current version of FireFox  and got a blank screen.  I suspected it was a problem with my version of Flash player.  When I upgraded my Flash Player to the current version (9), it worked fine.

I hope Adobe continues to build on this platform.  It’s an interesting idea and this space could use some decent competition.

Photoshop Express (via Bittbox)

Tags: adobe, express, image editing, photoshop, Software, web-based

Mozilla mobile browser on horizon

Posted by Dave | Filed under Browsers, Mobile, Software, Usability

Mozilla community (makers of FireFox, Thunderbird, Bugzilla, Camino and other fine applications) have announced their intension to build mobile browsers for both touch screens & non-touch screen phones.

I think they have a great shot at competing directly with the likes of Apple, Palm, Nokia, RIM, Microsoft, etc in the mobile browser market.  Most mobile browsers are lacking in basic functionality of some sort.

• iPhones can’t copy & paste.  It.  Can’t.  Copy.  And.  Paste.  Think about that for a minute.  Palm Treos over 6 years ago could copy and paste.
• Blackberry browser laughs heartily at your mobile CSS while slapping its knee.
• Internet Explorer Mobile is almost as fantastic as Internet Explorer’s desktop version.  D’oh.
• Opera Mini, god bless them, are trying, but not much better than the rest (frequent connection errors have tainted my once-cheery opinion of Opera Mini.)

Most mobile browsers have serious issues supporting JavaScript, CSS, AJAX, Flash, audio, video, etc.  None offer developers tools or plugins to allow any real dissection of a page.  I would LOVE some sort of “Email me page source” and “Email me screenshot” tools.  For that matter, many phones are capable of voice-dialing.

Why not use voice browsing to automatically open a browser and navigate to a preset audio bookmark?

1. “Find Starbucks” - could trigger google maps search
2. “Browse CNN” - open CNN mobile homepage in your browser
3. “Wiki Ben Franklin” - searched Wapedia for Ben Franklin references

There are infinite possibilities when you ponder all the available functionality of a mobile phone.  They are, after all, audio devices first and foremost.  Let’s put the audio to good use.

Speaking of functionality, Google is beginning to use a combination of GPS and cell tower pings to determine where a user is located for their mobile maps product.  It’s not perfect, but pretty accurate and more importantly, it’s combining interesting features of the phone (WAP & GPS) to create an application that is greater than the sum of its parts.

I hope Mozilla pushes the envelope and begins utilizing more of the phone’s capabilities than just a simple browser.

Track the progress of the browser development on Mozilla’s wiki pages:

Touch screen browser wiki
Non-touch screen browser wiki

Location-based preferences for Macs

Posted by Dave | Filed under Software, Usability

Dear Steve Jobs,

It would be really cool if I could make certain preferences location-based on my Mac just like my network settings. You see, Mr. Jobs, I use my laptop in two distinctly different ways.

• At home I use an external monitor to give myself a little more space to work.
• At work I do not use an external monitor.

I enjoy using Leopard’s Spaces to give me a bit more room to breath at work with several applications running at the same time. However, when I am at home, I don’t need to use Spaces because I have more screen space to work with.

I find myself changing my Spaces settings nearly every day when I get home. I put my email, iTunes, Adium, etc in my laptop’s screen and use my external window for FireFox, Coda, Photoshop, etc.

It would be fantastic for my Mac to “know” it was home, just like it does with my network settings, and change my Spaces to my preferred setting while at home. For that matter, it would be great if all my applications had location-based preferences.

iTunes at home uses Airtunes and some external speakers. iTunes at work uses the built-in speakers.

Mr. Jobs, you could make the world a better place and save thousands of man-hours by allowing preferences to be location based. Thank you, and good night.

Tags: Apple, mac, network settings, preferences, Spaces