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From iOS to Android – Week 3

28th October 2011 By 1 Comment

The third week of using Android instead of iPhone is over, and it’s been largely uneventful. I think it’s taken this long to settle into the Nexus S just being my phone and using it normally, rather than it feeling like an experiment all of the time. That’s really helped prove to me the value of doing this. The only way to really understand an alternative to your current platform of choice, is to use actually use it. This isn’t something that you can experience by playing with phones in the shop, or by reading about someone else’s experience (even mine!).

I started this experiment for a couple of very specific reasons. The first was so that I could understand the Android user experience so that I could better design apps for it as a platform. The second was to give some thought to whether iOS or Android had any intrinsic advantage when it came to learning specific activity. The first is still a work in progress, and I’ve already learned a great deal. The second question I think I’ve already answered for myself; much like the old adage about cameras, the best device for learning is the one you have with you. It needs a little more thought, and that’s another post to be written once this four week experiment is complete.

I did say it was a largely uneventful week, but that wasn’t to say there was nothing significant to report. This week, I had the opportunity (which I took) to buy an HP Touchpad; you may be familiar with this as the WebOS powered device that HP launched and quickly cancelled earlier this year. Some enterprising souls have ported Android to run on it, and although it’s only an early alpha, I’ve been surprised how stable it is. Watch this space for more updates on this too!

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From iOS to Android – Week 2

19th October 2011 By 7 Comments

My second week of Android usage is over, and it’s still a positive experience. Here are a few highlights.

I love the Share Menu! If you’ve never used Android, this is a global feature that allows you to share something from one app to another. It’s contextual, so only relevant apps show up in the menu. Selecting a link on a web page gives the option to share that link to my blog via the WordPress app, to Twitter using any of the Twitter apps I have installed, to my to do list in Remember the Milk, to email, Evernote or into a text message; and that’s just a few examples.

As a Google+ user, I like the fact that I can set that app to automatically upload all of my photos and videos as they’re taken. You can choose whether they’re automatically shared or not, and I’ve chosen the not option. This integration with Google’s services, like the interface differences between Android and iOS, is another topic that needs it’s own post to do it justice. I’ll cover them both when I get to the end of this four week experiment.

The biggest find of the last week for me has been Swype. It wouldn’t be exaggerating to say this has transformed the way I use a phone. Text input on mobile screens has always been painful, but Swype’s gesture recognition approach has completely changed that. I’m amazed by how quickly I can input big chunks of text, and suddenly my phone has become a useful note taking device! I did find that once you start to trust its ability to convert your gestures to text, you just relax and really pick up the pace. This was a similar experience to getting used to iOS’s automatic spell correction. Mind you, neither of them are perfect so proofreading is still required!

The most significant change in my own behaviour has been quite unexpected; I’ve almost completely stopped using my iPad. Previously, it was used daily for reading my RSS feeds, general surfing and anything internet related when I was sat on the couch after work. I’m now using the Nexus S instead. As I mentioned at the start of the four weeks, there is undoubtedly going to be some element of novelty and that may be a factor here, but there’s more to it than that. The large screen on the Nexus S and the easier input afforded by Swype make it, for me at least, a more usable all round device than the iPhone. It’s also fair to say that the iOS5 update seems to have made my iPad slower and buggy…

Regarding the phone itself – Battery life has been acceptable, but can’t compete with the iPhone 4. It does continue to outperform the iPhone in its ability to actually make and receive calls! I’ve also noticed that despite heavy usage, the screen on the Nexus S stays much cleaner than the iPhone. I probably wipe the Nexus screen one a day, whereas with the iPhone it was after almost every use. I don’t know if that’s to do with the quality of the screens or something to do with me!

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From iOS to Android – Week 1

10th October 2011 By 4 Comments

Last week I posted here about my plan to spend the month using an Android phone, a Nexus S, instead of my iPhone 4.

I’ve jotted down here my thoughts after the first week. Bear in mind that these are impressions after seven days of use, and it’s quite possible that these views may change over the coming weeks. This is about regular daily use, not side by side testing.

Set Up

Considering that this is a Google phone and I use a whole bunch of Google services, such as Gmail, Calendar and Docs it’s no surprise that getting them all set up was incredibly easy. A couple of minutes after entering my ID and password and all my important data was synced to the phone.

I then spent a couple of hours looking through the apps on my iPhone and finding suitable replacements on Android. This was a two part process, because I also took the time to remove what was installed on the iPhone that I hadn’t used for a long time. Once the cull of unused apps was complete, it was pretty straightforward to find what I needed. As expected, in most cases the app was available on Android anyway (Evernote, Twitter, BBC News, etc.) and where it wasn’t I was easily able to find a suitable replacement (such as a planner for the London Underground). The only app that I didn’t add to the Nexus S was Docs To Go, partly because I didn’t want to pay for something I may not use very long, but mostly because on iOS I use it with Google Docs and Android already has a Docs app that does a better job.

Finding my Way Around

Although iOS and Android are quite different in many ways, there are enough similarities to make getting around pretty easy. Elsewhere, it was intuitive enough to work out what to do.

The most notable difference to get used to is that iOS apps usually keep their navigation on screen all the time (back buttons in the header are the norm) whereas Android has a dedicated back button. I want to spend more time thinking about the differences in convention between the two OSs, so I’ll write more about this later in the month.

Flash

The decision to give Android a go hadn’t changed my general feeling that HTML5 should be preferred to Flash for video, so I was initially disappointed to find that the iPlayer app required Flash. Still, I decided to give it a go, and as I watched a couple of shows it almost felt like a guilty pleasure! Quality was excellent, there was no lag (for reference, I was on wifi) the phone didn’t overheat or crash and I’m fairly sure that god didn’t kill any kittens just because I used Flash.

The Handset

Most of the other comments I have it this point may be more related to the handset than the OS, although sometimes it’s hard to completely separate them.

Screen – When I told a friend of mine about this experiment, he said that he couldn’t use another handset because the screen always looked blurry compared to the iPhone 4′s retina display, and I was a little worried about this before the Nexus S arrived. I needn’t have worried though; side by side the iPhone screen is definitely crisper, but in regular use I have no complaints about the screen on the Nexus S. In fact the extra real estate (4″ against the iPhone’s 3.5″) more than makes up for any difference in resolution.

Build Quality and Design – There’s no denying that the iPhone 4 is a thing of beauty, but the Nexus S is no ugly duckling either. I guess that really comes down to personal taste, so I’m not going to dwell on it now. One thing I must mention is that the iPhone 4 seems to be built like a tank; it’s been in my pocket or bag without a case for a year, been dropped about a dozen times and it doesn’t have a mark on it. The Nexus S doesn’t feel as robust to me, probably because it’s bodywork is plastic, but I guess the flip side is that any damage is easier and cheaper to repair! At the moment I’m waiting for a decent case.

Calls and Coverage – Without a doubt the Nexus S wins here. Despite all of the other things it does so well, for me the iPhone 4 has always been terrible as a phone. The Nexus S picks up a signal where the iPhone can’t, and I actually receive calls. One problem I’ve had with the iPhone from day one is that even when I do appear to have a signal, it often didn’t ring when people called, and I would then get a voicemail notification followed by a missed call message! It’s worth noting that the SIM card in the Nexus S is the one from my iPhone (in an adaptor to make it fit).

Battery Life – I’m reserving judgement on this for now, although I think the iPhone may be better. The reason I’m leaving this for the moment is that the Nexus S is my new toy, so it is getting used more than it would usually. It’s also worth noting that the iPhone does have a great battery, but I was only able to get the calendar app to work with Google Calendar by switching on push notifications, so it wasn’t that great.

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Here’s to Steve

6th October 2011 By Leave a Comment

 

Until today I’ve never seen this version, narrated by Steve Jobs himself.

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The Best Collaboration Tool You’ve Never Heard Of

5th October 2011 By Leave a Comment

A little while back I had the opportunity to get a sneak preview of Noddlepod, a platform with a unique take on co-working and collaboration. They’ve just released a cool new promotional animation, and that reminded me that I hadn’t mentioned them for a while.

Just to be clear; I don’t have any connection with them, I just think it’s a great tool. I was so impressed with what I saw, that I gave them a nice big endorsement to go on the front page of their site.

One of the problems with online collaboration platforms, is that they often give you a very narrow and isolated view of your contribution. One of the things I most like about Noddlepod is that it gives you a clear sense of how what you’re doing fits in with the wider project. When you want to focus, you can also drill down to just the things you’re working on.

It also uses what are called ‘pinned items’ to add a structure that is visible to everyone in the project, ensuring that the activity always has a context.

If you’ve never seen it before (which as the title of this post suggests, I doubt you have) take the tour, visit their blog and why not give the free trial a go?

It would be great to know what you think of it.

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Considerations of Online Assessment in the Workplace

26th May 2011 By Leave a Comment

Sponsored Post

With the current unforgiving economic climate and the budget cuts it brings, companies are increasingly looking for ways to reduce costs. The use of online assessments is one such method; providing a valuable and cost-effective way of carrying out many business functions including hiring, inducting, training and developing staff. The two most common uses of online assessment are considered below:

In recruitment

Online assessments can save huge amounts of time and money in the recruitment of new staff. In the initial stages of recruitment, they can be carried out anywhere from a recruitment agency to an applicants’ home, the results can be calculated immediately, and then delivered straight to the employer’s inbox. This provides a very easy way of sifting out unsuitable applicants without the need to see them face to face and is particularly useful for roles where there are numerous applicants, such as graduate training courses.

Online assessments can also be used within recruitment for carrying out aptitude tests (designed to assess a candidate’s intellectual performance) and personality or psychometric tests (used to determine a candidate’s typical reactions and attitudes to various situations). The use of these tests can prove essential in choosing the right person for the job and ensuring they have the relevant personality and skill set for the role. In turn, this should ensure that they stay and grow with the company.

Recruiting using online assessments should by no means (and indeed, is unlikely to) replace face-to-face recruitment altogether, but, used correctly, can complement and enhance the more traditional recruitment process by making it quicker, more efficient and more economical.

In evaluating employee understanding pre- and post-training

E-learning or online training has also become a common way to train staff, and provides a cost-effective solution to what can be an expensive and sometimes logistically difficult activity for a business. One of the main strengths of e-learning is that it can include both pre- and post-training online assessments, which help to determine the effectiveness of the training by providing an objective measurement of the amount of knowledge gained and retained by the employee.

For example, for competency based training, pre-training online assessments can determine what an employee knows and would do in a situation involving certain areas of competency. When the results are analysed they show the employee’s strengths and weaknesses and a personalised training plan can then be customised to help focus the training on their specific needs rather than a ‘one size fits all’ approach. After the training has been delivered, employees can be evaluated using post-training online assessments where the same key competencies are measured, echoing the initial pre-training assessment. Improvement is measured by comparing the scores from the pre- and post-training online assessments. The results highlight certain areas which still require further training and also prove that learning has been achieved, boosting morale and confidence for the employee.

Of course, the real measure of any kind of training is the ability to apply what has been learned in the workplace. However, for developing a customised training session and providing an initial assessment of the success of the training, pre- and post-training online assessments can be an extremely beneficial tool.

The Test Factory are specialist providers of such online assessment, and can build bespoke online assessment solutions to suit your company’s requirements and business goals.

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How Far Would You Walk for Water?

22nd March 2011 By Leave a Comment

Mariama collecting water

Mariama carries the orange and yellow bucket

Photo credit: WaterAid/Layton Thompson

“Mariama Oumara Dicko lives in an isolated village in Mali. Scarce water supplies during the dry season forces her to go out three times a day, every day, to collect dirty water from manmade ponds. Each journey takes three hours.”

March 22nd is World Water Day 2011. Across Africa, people spend between 3 and 10 hours a day collecting water. It is usually down to women and children to collect water, stopping them from gaining an education or earning a living and taking precious time that could be spent making permanent improvements to their circumstances.

What would you rather be doing?

WaterAid have put together a list that compares the time spent on typical activities in the UK to the time spent collecting water in developing countries:

  • Let’s get social: In the UK, people spend an average of five hours 48 minutes on social networking sites per week (comScore). In Sub-Saharan Africa, that’s two trips to collect water. What would you rather be doing?
  • I say! The average man will spend five hours a week staring at different women (Kodak Lens Vision Centres). In one week, the average woman in a developing country would have spent 21 hours collecting water.
  • Wedding bells: A bride-to-be spends an average of 250 hours preparing for a wedding. For a woman in Africa, that time could be spent making 83 trips to collect water. You can bet she’d rather be planning her big day!
  • Goal! Mr Average in Britain spends six hours and 12 minutes a week watching, talking about and keeping up-to-date on football (BT Vision). After that amount of time, a woman in the developing world could be making her third trip in one day to collect water.
  • Break a sweat: The average adult exercises just 50 minutes a week (WeightWatchers) – less than a third of one trip to collect 20kg of water.
  • Off to the shops: The average British woman spends 94 hours and 55 minutes shopping for food over one year, and more than 100 hours shopping for clothes (OnePoll). Women in sub-Saharan Africa spend the same amount of time collecting water in just one month. This time could be much better spent growing or selling their own food.
  • School’s out: It takes a mighty 3,600 study hours to complete an Open University Honours degree. That’s little more than three years spent fetching water – time better spent on education.
  • Beep, beep! It takes, on average, 47 hours of driving lessons to pass a driving test in the UK (DirectGov). In the same amount of time, millions in Africa will have made just 15 trips to collect water – and they won’t be making those journeys by car.
  • On track: The average daily commute in the UK takes 47 minutes and 48 seconds (TUC). It might feel like 47 minutes too many, but it’s still less than a third of the time it takes to collect water in sub-Saharan Africa.
  • A nice cuppa: We spend about six hours a week drinking tea and coffee (LearnDirect). That’s two trips to collect water, with no coffee break.

Call To Action

Access to clean, safe water doesn’t just save lives. It is essential to improving education, health, gender equality and economic growth.

Please take the time to sign WaterAid’s petition urging Government to take action to stop the water crisis.

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Dig Toilets Not Graves

15th October 2010 By 2 Comments


Barry with WaterAid tattoo at Glastonbury

Today is Blog Action Day 2010, and the subject which was chosen by popular vote, is water.

I’d like to talk about WaterAid, a charity that I first heard of through the Glastonbury Festival, where they are one of the three ‘Worthy causes’ alongside Oxfam and Greenpeace (hence the accompanying picture of me in silly hat from this year’s festival). You can read more about WaterAid at Glastonbury here.

What’s the problem?

Nearly a billion people around the world have no access to safe drinking water.

4500 children die every day because they lack safe drinking water and basic sanitation.

Many children, particularly girls, get little or no education because they are often expected to collect water for the family.

Ensuring that everyone has access to safe water and sanitation is the first step to eliminating global poverty and social exclusion.

What does WaterAid do?

WaterAid works with partners around the world to provide practical solutions to provide safe water and effective sanitation to the poorest people around the world.

They also provide hygiene education and follow a community led approach that ensures that they work with the people they are helping, to provide sustainable solutions that belong to the community.

They publish research and policy guidance as well as developing standards of governance and accountability.

The Dig Toilets Not Graves Campaign

Have you ever been caught out, away from home and needed the loo? The chances are you have, but that you very quickly found a toilet somewhere nearby. In fact, there are so many toilets in the UK that you can even load up a free iPhone app from WaterAid that will locate your nearest public toilet.

Contrast this with the 1,500,000 children who die each year through lack of sanitation. In areas without toilets, human faeces contaminates water and food and leads to the spread of deadly diseases.

The tools and education provided by the The Dig Toilets Not Graves campaign can help to stop this situation. You can find out more here.

How can you help?

There are many ways that you help WaterAid to achieve their goals.

  • Look for them at events from Glastonbury to the Great North Run
  • Take part in their campaigns and offer your support as they lobby decision makers across the world
  • Get involved as a volunteer, organising events or fundraising
  • Or simply make a donation

If you’re a large organisation, please think about the opportunities for corporate sponsorship and partnering.

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The Threat of New Technology

10th June 2010 By 2 Comments

I’m taking the liberty of reposting Norman Lamont’s superb slideshare presentation on the use of new technology in the workplace.

I do so a) because it’s probably the one piece of content I’ve recommended to more people than any other, b) because it gets the message across more powerfully than any academic treatise on the subject and c) because it should be required reading for anyone responsible for learning and communication in the workplace.

New technology – the threat to our information
View more presentations from normanlamont.
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Seesmic for Windows – Installation Issues Solved

11th January 2010 By Leave a Comment
seesmic.png

I generally use the Seesmic web app to access Twitter on my Macs, but as I’ve been using my netbook more frequently I was keen to try Seesmic for Windows. Unfortunately it didn’t go as smoothly as I would have liked.

When running the setup file I was faced with an error because the installer was trying, but failing, to connect to http://d.seesmic.com/swin/SWin.application. After a fruitless search on the Seesmic Web site and across Google in general, I finally found a solution myself by trial and error. I’m posting this here in the hope that anyone else searching for a solution is able to find it.

My searching suggested that this problem mainly affects users of Windows 7 and some users of Vista, although advice that this may be related to an inability to connect via a proxy weren’t relevant in my case.

The solution was remarkably simple; right click on setup.exe, select Troubleshoot Compatibility and accept the recommended options, which in my case was to run as compatible with Windows XP SP3. I clicked on run, the installer did its job and the app runs without issues (so far at least).

I’ll post more about the app once I’ve had time to use it, but in the meantime I hope this post helps some people who are having issues installing it.

Image source seesmic.com

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