Five for Friday (23/6/17)

At some point I will post something other than links to this blog. But for now, this is it. Five more for you to enjoy this week:

1. Standard Ebooks – There are lots of free and public domain ebooks about – try looking at Project Gutenberg for example. The problem is that they aren’t always of great quality – because they are often scanned in and OCRd, there are mistakes and janky formatting, amongst other issues. Standard Ebooks is taking these base metals and turning them into gold by checking them, cleaning them up and packaging them nicely – and they’re still free. What’s not to like?
2. Strategic Reading – just in case five links a week aren’t enough for you, Stefan Czerniawski has started a new thing in the form of a link blog – lots of links to articles with a bit of commentary. Consumable on the website, via RSS or email and highly recommended.
3. Amazon’s New Customer – I linked last week to rumours that Amazon might be interested in buying Slack. Not sure whether that was just a red herring or not, because it turned out that the big acquisition that Amazon made was Whole Foods, a chain of grocery stores in the US. This analysis by Ben Thompson of what is – on the face of it – an incomprehensible deal for an e-commerce company (clue: Amazon is not an e-commerce company) is excellent and very insightful when it comes to Amazon’s operating model and long term strategy.
4. Background reading list for government policy people interested in digital – a useful collection of bits and pieces to read to get a good primer in what ‘digital’ means in the context of government services, curated by Paul Maltby. Am tempted to pull a list of my own together at some point.
5. A great interview by John Markoff with various folk involved in the creation of the iPhone. Incidentally, Markoff’s book What the Doormouse Said would definitely be on any reading list I produce – it’s a fantastic and entertaining history of the birth of the personal computer.

These have mostly all been tweeted during the week, and you can find everything I’ve found interesting and bookmarked here.

The soul of a new iPhone

So I got my new iPhone 6 on Friday – don’t judge me, I was due an upgrade anyway – and have been using it all weekend.

Here are some early thoughts.

1. The size – it’s a bit too big. I didn’t go for the ludicrously sized plus model, but even so. This thing is a lot bigger than the iPhone 5 I upgraded from and it’s just – just – slightly too big.

I have to stretch my thumb to reach the top layer of icons and it isn’t comfy. I know I can double tap the home button to bring them down, but at the moment this isn’t coming naturally to me.

Also it’s too big to fit comfortably in the breast pocket of a shirt, every time i move, it threatens to fall out. Annoying.

Another factor with the size is that there is no way I can put one of those oversize cases that double as an extra battery on this thing, so will need to find a new way of carrying emergency charge around with me.

2. The camera – is excellent, but I cannot believe they have released it with the lens poking out of the back of the phone like it does.

There’s a lot of nonsense written about post-Jobs Apple, but this is one of those things that would never have been released while Steve was in charge. It’s ugly and means you absolutely have to put a case on this thing if you don’t want to knacker it.

3. The storage – I went a bit mad and ordered the top storage option of 128gb. When I found out everyone else was getting the 64gb model I felt a bit daft, but not now.

It holds pretty much my whole iTunes library, as well as every app I would ever want, plus a load of podcasts, and a few downloaded episodes of Peppa Pig for those moments – and I still have 30 odd gigs free. Love it!

4. Some apps aren’t working – am finding I am having a lot of trouble with quite a few apps. Is this an iPhone 6 thing or an iOS 8 thing? I don’t know.

I restored the phone from an iCloud backup of my previous one, and a fair few apps either didn’t download properly at all or crashed when I tried to open them. Deleting them and reinstalling fixed most but not all.

The Chrome browser, for instance, refuses to work for me. Hopefully they will update it soon.

5. Touch ID is something I love, and I’m surprised by that. This is where you can unlock your phone by just holding your thumb over the home button to identify yourself.

My previous iPhone didn’t have it and I was always a bit sniffy. But it seems to work really well, really quickly, and I’ve got used to it right away.

What next?

Those are just my initial thoughts and I am sure I will be able to add more about how I end up using this phone differently to my previous one.

It would be great to hear how others are getting on with theirs in the comments!

Link roundup

I find this stuff so you don’t have to:

• The History of Programming Languages
• Nextdoor Brings Its Neighborhood-Focused Social Network To The iPhone With Debut Of Native iOS App | TechCrunch
• Fedora Project Announces Pidora Remix for Raspberry Pi
• Doctors 3D-Print An Emergency Airway Tube To Save A Child’s Life
• Time to stop kidding ourselves about Government policy on Tech City
• Lessons from the ‘One Norbiton Neighbourhood Community Budget’ pilot
• M.I.T. Scholar’s 1949 Essay on Machine Age Is Found
• Build your own supercomputer out of Raspberry Pi boards
• The Google Cloud Platform Q&A – tecosystems
• What kit do you take for a live-blogging expedition? | Jon Worth
• Hadoop: What It Is And How It Works – ReadWrite
• Jaron Lanier: Information doesn’t want to be free, and ads are screwed
• Startup Engineering Cookbook
• Designing blogs for readers – Matt Gemmell

Phones, phones, phones

To probably misquote Stephen Fry: “Was there ever a smartphone that I didn’t buy?”

As I posted a little while ago, I’m pretty happy with the Nexus One. Android is a nice, feature rich, open operating system, and the hardware isn’t bad. However, the one major drawback is the keyboard, which is at times incredibly frustrating.

As well as the Nexus One, at home I have an iPhone 3gs and a Blackberry Bold 9700. Each has its ups and downs, and I thought it might be worthwhile writing them up here. It would be great to hear what others think in the comments, too!

Google/HTC Nexus One

Pros:

• Integrates beautifully with both Google and third party services
• Email application is a delight
• Decent browser
• Plugs straight into a computer to manage files etc – no messing about with iTunes or other software

Cons:

• Touchscreen not always brilliant, and the keyboard can be appalling at times
• Not as many high quality apps as the iPhone
• Hardly any games

Apple iPhone 3gs

Pros:

• Lovely user experience
• Great on screen keyboard
• Mail application is OK
• Web browser is excellent
• Lots of great apps

Cons:

• Lack of sharing options – eg with photos etc
• Reliance on iTunes
• Not great as a phone

Blackberry Bold 9700

Pros:

• Physical keyboard is great
• Small and light
• Phone is very reliable

Cons:

• Mail application is surprisingly rubbish
• Doesn’t really work at all well with Gmail (whether consumer or enterprise editions)
• Terrible web browser
• Few apps

So there we are. The iPhone is probably overall the best, but because of my reliance on Google, I’ll stick with the Nexus One for now.

Perhaps the way forward would be an Android phone with a physical Blackberry-like keyboard?

Bookmarks for August 5th through August 11th

EAVB_CFHFXKJFDR

I find this stuff so that you don’t have to.

• Splashpath – “Splashpath is a free service for Leisure Operators to create, update and communicate swimming pool timetables”
• The Value of Transparency Is At The Boundary between Government and Society – “Open government is not a way to outsource problem solutions to others.”
• More on Apps for Elephants | Public Strategist – Further exposition from Stefan on the ‘should gov develop mobile apps?’ debate.
• Devour – “Devour sifts out the best videos and posts the well-curated collection every weekday. Fewer cute kittens, fewer skateboarding nutshots, fewer tween heart throbs, and lots more awesome.”
• Don’t Get Fireballed | brown blog – Nice guide to protecting a WordPress site from traffic overload.
• Dig Up Political Influence | Poligraft – Looks interesting and cool, though not sure I fully understand it
• Early History of HTML – 1990 to 1992 – “HTML is the language that powers the Web in many respects, as the lingua franca that Web browsers are expected to be able to render. HTML has had unprecedented levels of success, and the uptake is all the more surprising when you realise that it was only invented in 1990, and few people knew about it before 1993.”
• 10 Reasons NOT to Ban Social Media in Your Organization – Handy list.
• UK ICT classes killing kids’ interest in tech – “The Royal Society is to investigate why British schools are failing to interest children in information technology – and why numbers taking classes are falling so fast.”
• Crowdsourcing Is Far From Easy for Government – “Once again, this case proves the disconnect between engaging citizens (and voters) and engaging government employees. For open government to work, both aspects need to be addressed and possibly synchronized.”

You can find all my bookmarks on Delicious. There is also even more stuff on my shared Google Reader page.

You can also see all the videos I think are worth watching at my video scrapbook.

Bookmarks for July 11th through July 16th

I find this stuff so that you don’t have to.

• How to work with online communities at Helpful Technology – "But there are many other ways to build relationships, and lots more experience to share. To help explore this further, I’m helping to convene Meet The Communities, a free, one-off event probably in Central London during September, bringing together some of the leading online communities with the government clients, PR & digital agencies for an afternoon of storytelling and speednetworking."
• App Inventor and the culture wars – O’Reilly Radar – "Creativity–whether the creativity of others or your own–is what makes life worthwhile, and enabling creativity is a heroic act. Google has built a culture around enabling others' creativity, and that's worth celebrating. "
• The Big Society – the evidence base – "Building on David Kane’s blog-post on the numbers behind the Big Society, the NCVO research team is keen to explore in greater depth the evidence behind this important policy agenda which emphasises the need to transform the relationship between citizens and the state."
• Should Governments Develop iPhone Apps? – "No, governments should not develop iPhone apps, the community should."
• Why Google Cannot Build Social Applications – "With Google applications we return to the app to do something specific and then go on to something else, whereas great social applications are designed to lure us back and make us never want to leave."
• WordPress Plugins to Reduce Load-time : Performancing – Doubt my blog will ever run into performance problems due to traffic, but some interesting stuff here nonetheless.
• BBC – dot.Rory: Martha’s manifesto – "But it's hard to see how the pledge of universal web access for the UK workforce – which may well be backed by the prime minister later today – can be fulfilled without some government money."
• UK Government Goes Social for Budget Cuts: Do Not Hold Your Breath – "Once again, this is the unavoidable asymmetry of government 2.0 in action: it is easier (and certainly more pressworthy) to call for ideas on channels that government controls, rather than to gather them where they already are."
• How Local Government can do Facebook « The Dan Slee Blog – Great roundup and hints and tips from Dan.
• CycleStreets: UK-wide Cycle Journey Planner and Photomap – "CycleStreets is a UK-wide cycle journey planner system, which lets you plan routes from A to B by bike. It is designed by cyclists, for cyclists, and caters for the needs of both confident and less confident cyclists."

You can find all my bookmarks on Delicious. There is also even more stuff on my shared Google Reader page.

You can also see all the videos I think are worth watching at my video scrapbook.

Bookmarks for July 3rd through July 7th

I find this stuff so that you don’t have to.

• Government Reservists 2 – an idea for the Big Society? | Podnosh – "We do need government to change itself and fast.  Might government reservists now be a way for active citizens and government staff to understand each other better, work together more closely and wrought change?"
• Open Data: Challenges & Opportunities « West Midlands Regional Observatory – Interesting event in Brum on 15th July.
• Swansea Scrutiny – Great WordPress based blog site for Scrutiny in Swansea.
• Open Source: Give as well as take – "To this end, I will be encouraging all new WCC application development projects to distribute their source code and documentation under an open source license. The first example of this is the application that drives our open data catalogue, developed using Ruby on Rails and hosted on Heroku."
• Easy Business Finance Software, Simplified Small Business Accounting and Cashflow Planning | inDinero.com – A SaaS accounting package for small businesses. See Kashflow, Freshbooks etc
• How to Build Engaging One-of-Kind Facebook Fan Pages – "Don’t let anyone tell you it is easy to create a successfully engaging Facebook Fan Page. It is not."
• Will the iPhone and iPad finally kill off the Mac? – "Until recently, I would have said that the (open, permissive) Google/Android system would win out over the (closed, tightly controlled) Apple device. But sales of the new iPhone lead one to wonder if it will be Apple, and not Google, which replaces Microsoft as the company we love to hate."
• The Big Society #2: Strengthening local leadership – "Whether they’re called community leaders or organisers, local champions, or bastions of grass roots democracy doesn’t really matter; current and future councillors play a big role in supporting the Big Society."
• 10 Do’s and Don’ts of Opening Up Public Data – 100% Open – "What economic and social value can be generated with all this data?  How can we make more innovative products and services for less?"
• Guest Post: A Developers’ Guide to the Linked Data APIs – Jeni Tennison | data.gov.uk – "Linked data offers some great advantages for publishing government data. The approach makes it easy to publish information in a way that allows it to be combined with other sets of data, without an up-front agreement about exactly what information should be published."

You can find all my bookmarks on Delicious. There is also even more stuff on my shared Google Reader page.

You can also see all the videos I think are worth watching at my video scrapbook.

Bookmarks for June 7th through June 17th

I find this stuff so that you don’t have to.

• What Does Government Transformation Mean, Exactly? – "Rather than fantasizing about the myth of transformation, governments have to accept that future is no longer predictable and focus on what changes are necessary to make them more flexible and nimble to adapt to uncertainty."
• open data doesn’t empower communities | internet.artizans – "Open data doesn't empower communities. I'm not saying open data is a bad thing, but we need to highlight the gap between the semantic web and social impact."
• The battle for data, the battle for design | Public Strategist – "The availability of data is a critical enabler, but what matters in the end is what it enables."
• Re-use of open data and applying the same idea within WCC – "…the beginning of a universal API for the organisation." Wowza.
• Better Junk Mail – Quick Analysis from the Enterprise 2.0 World – "The positive side is more along the lines of companies realizing the smarts they have in their employees heads and the horizontal connections – and then, of course, re-orienting work to take advantage of them and (we’d hope) figure out compensating employees beyond the org. tree."
• Government 2.0: If Engaging is Difficult, Keeping Engaged is More So – "What keeps me going is the use of my blog as my personal knowledge base. Many times, when I prepare a client inquiry, a presentation or a research note, I can go back to the blog and find an example, a nugget, a pesky comment that help me do the job I am measured and paid for."
• Empire Disruption – BankerVision – "My experience is that big organsiations create situations where the politics of success dictate you grow your control of people and resources, even when that is counterproductive to the task you're actually supposed to be achieving. "
• Lists made easy + social + fun! – twtPickin – Nice tool for collaborating on lists with twitter buddies
• Diplodocus – A community for international digital government people – "…a community of people doing international facing digital work for governments"
• iAnnotate for iPad – "iAnnotate is both an elegant PDF reader and a powerful annotation tool that finally lets you work with your PDFs. You can open documents from email, sign and send out contracts fast, enter notes for edits, sketch diagrams, copy text, and add highlights or underline with the drag of a finger!"

You can find all my bookmarks on Delicious. There is also even more stuff on my shared Google Reader page.

You can also see all the videos I think are worth watching at my video scrapbook.

Bookmarks for June 3rd through June 7th

I find this stuff so that you don’t have to.

• Armchair Auditor – Nice clean and simple example of what can be done with open government spending data by @adrianshort
• Supreme Court’s untendered website cost revealed – "You need to ask yourself whether £360,000 seems like a fair price for such a website. I'd suggest it isn't. Even with a significant allocation for design, I'd have thought you could produce a similar result – with better functionality – for 95% less."
• Why I’m fed up of talking about social media, really – "Sure it’s great that lots of councils are interested in social media and what it can do for their communications. But what is really starting to annoy me is that too many councils are asking the wrong questions."
• Zotero | Home – "Zotero is a free, easy-to-use Firefox extension to help you collect, manage, cite, and share your research sources." – via @jjn1
• Local Data wiki – Great idea to create a wiki explaining opendata to local government types.
• Centre for Digital Citizenship – "The CdC’s mission is to promote outstanding research on the changing nature of citizenship in a digitally networked society and to contribute to the analysis and development of policy in this area."
• Yammer Introduces Microsoft SharePoint 2007 Integration – Potentially significant move.
• So You Want to Switch to Android…One Man’s iPhone to Nexus One Migration – "Android is ready for prime time. It’s not going to beat the iPhone – not yet – but it’s ready for mainstream users."
• Publishing itemised local authority expenditure – advice for comment | data.gov.uk – "The Prime Minister has made a specific commitment that new items of local government spending over £500 be published on a council-by-council basis from January 2011" – and here's how to do it.
• Good and bad transparency – Great post from Steph on the implications of opening up government data.

You can find all my bookmarks on Delicious. There is also even more stuff on my shared Google Reader page.

You can also see all the videos I think are worth watching at my video scrapbook.

Mobile opportunities

I had an enjoyable day yesterday at TechCrunch Europe‘s GeeknRolla event – a conference for techy startups. There was lots of discussion about what the next big thing might be (no-one really knows) and how to get funding from venture capitalists (it’s really hard).

One of the most interesting and useful sessions from my perspective was the one on mobile platforms, by Ewan McLeod of Mobile Industry Review.

Ewan really put into perspective the mobile landscape in terms of who is using what – with an emphasis on the fact that the iPhone isn’t the only platform developers should be concentrating on. Nokia, and their Symbian operating system, dominates. The problem is that it’s harder and more expensive to develop for, and doesn’t offer the great user experience that the iPhone offers.

For public services, where accessing as many people as possible is the major issue, platforms other than the fashionable ones need to be seriously considered when developing native mobile applications.

I took some rough notes during the talk, which I have reproduced below with some minor edits for spelling and tidiness. A much better written summary of the session is on TechCrunch itself, and I have embedded the slides too, which are full of goodness.

Ewan’s Presentation for TechCrunch’s GeeknRolla

View more presentations from Mobile Industry Review.

My notes

• 4.6 billion mobile subscribers on earth (1.6 billion tvs for instance)
• Nokia 36%, Samsung 19% of total sales
• Smartphone OSs: Symbian 47%, RIM 20%, iPhone 14%, Windows 9%, Android 4% (last year)
• UK – 19 million handsets sold last year
• Only iphone and android seems to have most developer interest. Symbian etc less elegant but popular with consumers!
• Is developing on iphone the new “buying IBM”?
• Do a deal with a handset manufacturer – great way to get succeed. Alternatively the mobile operators.
• Get a trad. media conglomerate onboard
• Build on an existing brand – whatever it is, as long as it appeals to consumers
• Advertise on admob and getjar – v popular tho there are others
• A mention in the Times is good for 10k downloads or more
• QT new nokia development platform
• iPhone devleopment is easier than android.
• Clients only ask for iphone and brands want consumers to have a great experience
• Other platforms are more difficult and possibly expensive to develop for. User experience can be mixed. But the numbers! The numbers!