Tech

My opinions on all things tech related

There are 271 posts filed in Tech (this is page 9 of 28).

UNC Libraries’ mobile site

The summer is often my most productive time of year, especially when it comes to special projects. This summer I put my time into developing a mobile version of our website. I’m excited to announce that it went live last week, and I’m extremely happy with the results.

The mobile site is at www.lib.unc.edu/m

First, please note that it may or may not work quite right on standard desktop browsers. But take a look at it on an iPhone/iPod touch, Android phone, or Palm Pre. Any of those should work just fine, though some bits & pieces are optimized for apple’s devices. There’s also a plain text version at www.lib.unc.edu/m/plain, which any mobile device anywhere should be able to process in some fashion.

The fancier version was built with the iUI framework I mentioned previously. I’m amazed by how easy it was to develop with the framework – it really did all the heavy lifting of formatting and animation, leaving me to merely write the content.

But it wasn’t quite so easy to get what I consider the centerpiece of our mobile effort up and running: our mobile catalog. That was actually the whole reason I started a mobile site plan in the first place – I (and a number of users I informally talked to) wanted to be able to look up books while wandering the stacks. Our non-mobile catalog functions on a small mobile screen, but it was very much less than ideal and a bit tough to navigate. After exploring a few dead end avenues, I got lucky and discovered that our Endeca-based catalog has a built-in method for returning search results in XML. Using php I recrafted that XML into a mobile-appropriate page.

I’d like to particularly note that a mobile catalog would be impossible if we didn’t have Endeca as our catalog front end. III/Millennium, our underlying ILS, locks up our catalog and provides no easy way to get at the underlying data. And on a related note, while compiling a list of mobile-friendly database/article interfaces from vendors themselves I was appalled at how few exist. Ingenta, IEEE, and Refworks were the only three major ones I found. This is a plea for openness to ILS providers and other library vendors – if you’re not going to build these things yourself, please give us data-level or API access to the sources we’re paying you for. We can build some pretty cool stuff, if only you’ll let us.

Sony Reader PRS-505 vs the Kindle 2

06/19/09

Back in June I picked up a Sony e-book reader when Borders had a sale too good to pass up. It ended up being about half the price of a Kindle (at the time – the Kindle is a bit cheaper now). I don’t regret the purchase one bit! I’ve had a bunch of hands-on experience with a Kindle 2 at work lately, and in many ways I think the PRS-505 outdoes the Kindle.

Screen contrast is comparable to the Kindle, if not slightly better. The 505 supports many more formats than the Kindle, including the one most popular to me – epub. Epub has been growing in popularity lately for authors who like to give away their work (or samples of their work) online. So there’s plenty of free content out there for me to read! It’s an open standard too, which is a nice bonus. The Kindle 2 can read epub files after a conversion, but in my experience that conversion is imperfect and introduces a number of formatting errors to the text. The 505 also reads PDFs without any conversion, which is a MAJOR boon for any researcher who finds themself awash in a pile of journal articles from library databases.

Of course, the 505 lacks one major feature of the Kindle: wireless web and book store access. The 505 requires a USB connection to a computer or memory card to add new books. I don’t miss the wireless connection though – if anything the lack of distraction helps me focus on actually reading! And considering that I saved so much money over a Kindle, I don’t mind the absence one bit.

The 505 is missing one feature that I dearly wish it had – built-in search. I can’t search through the text of a book on the 505 for some reason, which to me is a primary advantage of having text in electronic format to begin with. I can search in a book via Sony’s desktop software, then bookmark a location to load up on the reader, but that doesn’t help me when I don’t have access to a desktop PC. However, this lack bugs me less than I thought it would. In 6 weeks of frequent use, only once have I wished I could search for something. I guess the lack of this feature is because the 505 lacks the keyboard of the Kindle 2. But I still think some sort of text entry via a toggle button would have been better than none at all. Incidently Sony’s newer model, the PRS-700, adds search via a touch-screen keyboard. But I saw a 700 in a store recently, and wasn’t impressed at all. Adding a touchscreen overlay to the display makes it appear muddled and blurry.

And both readers are hobbled by official book stores which only sell books locked down with DRM. I say this a lot, but: I won’t buy any books from Amazon or Sony’s stores until I know that I can at the very least loan them to friends or donate them to a good cause when I’m done reading. Both stores’ prices are currently far too high, often equivalent to or nonsensically more than the print version, to justify the tradeoff of losing those ‘features’ of a book.

And there’s one final, less concrete reason I prefer the 505 over a Kindle 2 – the 505 doesn’t feel like it’ll fall apart in my hands. It’s made of metal, and feels much more solidly built than the plasticy Kindle. I actually dropped the 505 once, pretty severely. I had to snap the power button back on, but otherwise there was absolutely no sign of injury. I’m very confident that a similar fall would have killed off a Kindle 2.

Incidentally, check out Calibre! It’s a great piece of software designed to manage eBook collections on a reader. http://calibre.kovidgoyal.net/

Low Effort, High Impact Mobile Web Development

A little over a week ago I presented on “Low Effort, High Impact Mobile Web Development” at the Triangle Research Library Network’s annual meeting. I had a lot of fun putting it together and presenting, particularly because I got to highlight the really cool iUI framework. iUI is a nifty set of CSS and javascript files that do the heavy lifting of coding a website designed for an iphone. You get snappy animations and a nice emulation of standard iPhone navigational elements from writing little more than standard HTML list tags.

My other favorite thing about iUI is that it degrades pretty nicely into a format that’s more generic and not tailored to an iPhone – simply by removing the CSS and javascript links. So any mobile device can use it, and we don’t have to duplicate development efforts!

We’ll be using iUI to launch a mobile site for the library pretty soon, hopefully before the fall semester kicks in. I’m not sure how valuable my presentation slides are without my accompanying narration, but here it is just in case:

http://www.slideshare.net/chaefele/low-effort-high-impact-mobile-web-development

B&N enters the eBook arena. With more e-Babel.

Today Barnes & Noble entered the eBook selling fray. For now they’re not launching a dedicated hardware device like the Kindle. Instead, they’re focusing on providing content for devices (some) people already own – iPhone/iPods, Blackberries, PC and Mac. Sometime later their books will be compatible with the forthcoming Plastic Logic reader too, but for now they’re piggybacking on existing hardware.

At first I was glad to see some competition at B&N’s level enter the eBook sphere. Amazon’s been throwing their weight around to the point that other players like Sony’s eBook store have been almost entirely forgotten. I recently picked up a Sony Reader PRS-505 at discount (review forthcoming, mostly positive!); I’ve lost track of the number of times I’ve been asked while reading on the bus how I like my Kindle. Amazon has mindshare with the Kindle, just like the iPod brand does among portable audio players, and B&N seemed like the most likely realistic competitor with their considerable clout as an established bookseller. And I don’t like seeing something so fundamental as the (potential) future of reading get locked up by a lone corporation like Amazon. So hooray, we’re saved, right?

Not quite. I’m dismayed and annoyed to see yet another DRM scheme come into play. B&N’s books won’t work on the Kindle or Sony Reader, nor will their competitors’ books work on the Plastic Logic reader. Readers who want to purchase an eBook from any major e-bookstore will be locked into the silo of their device’s manufacturer. So we have an alternative, but not an answer.

I’ll give Barnes & Noble credit where its due – their books will at least be readable on a PC or Mac. If I buy a Kindle book and then lose my Kindle, I’m completely cut off from my texts. If I lose a Plastic Logic reader I can at least still access my books on a computer. Reading on a desktop or laptop screen is less than ideal, but I’ll take that over no access at all any day. That’s a step in the right direction.

But B&N’s scheme still isn’t the answer! All purchased e-books need to be readable on any and all devices before I’ll even consider purchasing my books that way.

What’s next: eBook readers

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about eBook readers and their place in a learning environment. We’re at an interesting point in their adoption right now, with the technology not quite mature. Libraries (and educators in general) need to be taking a look at currently available devices and thinking about what’s coming next.

I’ll be the first to admit that students aren’t using eBook readers en masse yet. In fact I can count the number of eReader devices I’ve seen used in public on one hand. And while I definitely don’t think the printed paper page will ever disappear completely, I do believe that someday eReaders will play a substantial role in students’ lives.

Today’s students are the so-called ‘digital natives’, those who grew up with computers and related technology embedded throughout their lives. As a result they have very different expectations and competencies than previous generations. When it comes to eReaders, today’s students are that previous generation. Tomorrow’s students will be the eReader literate crowd. Ideally we’d take an active role in creating publishing standards and devices while that generation comes of age, but I’m not sure that’s realistically possible. At the very least we need to keep a sharp eye on what’s coming and make our concerns and best practices known.

Meanwhile I’m deeply concerned by a lot of what I see happening in the arena of DRM and eBook readers. But that’s a topic for another post.

Ride The City

Ridethecity.com is one of the coolest Google maps mashups I’ve seen lately. It centers on NYC, and is dedicated to finding bike routes around the city. It combines Google’s automatic pathfinding routines with the site’s creators’ personal knowledge of biking around the city. There are three options for planning a route: safest route, safe route, and most direct route. Direct will stick you mostly on roads, while safe and safest stick with varying degrees to bike paths and greenways. The safest selection will often take riders out of their way to find bike-friendly routes. I wonder – with topographic data now in Google maps, could a site like this also calculate bike routes with the least uphill distance possible? I’ve been riding my bike around Chapel Hill quite a bit, and Ridethecity makes me wish there was a similar site for my area.

This is a great example of making refined automatic routines even more useful by injecting a heavy dose of personal human expertise. It makes me wish we could get more open access to the inner workings of the databases that libraries pay so much for. What fun and useful mods would result?

iPod Touch: Better than cargo pants

Way back in 2005, I made sure to jokingly praise my cargo pants for being “perhaps the most underappreciated tech accessory on the market today” after going to a conference and noting how much stuff I could haul in them. For every conference between then and now, I wore cargos daily and got similar use.

But then this year at ALA I simply didn’t need them – thanks to my iPod touch, a device I’m completely enamored with. It represents a nice compromise for someone like myself who wants an iPhone but doesn’t want to pay the high monthly contract fee for one.

The Touch is missing two main features of the iPhone: internet connectivity via cell network, and GPS. The Touch does get internet access via wifi. I spend about 80% of my day within wifi coverage, thanks to the Chapel Hill campus and municipal networks, so that’s one problem overcome. And I really don’t have a huge desire for ubiquitous GPS access.

For conferencing it let me carry in one compact device: my calendar/schedule, my e-mail, my web access, my address book, and some basic notes. I was able to leave my laptop in the hotel room, which was extremely nice.

This is a wonderful little device, and I highly recommend it.

ALA 2008: Twitter’s killer app

I’m now convinced that Twitter’s killer app is conferences and other large scale in-person gatherings.

In Anaheim we organized meetups, kept tabs on concurrent sessions we couldn’t all attend, helped each other navigate the buildings, pointed out overlooked sessions, discussed sessions while they were going on, and even played a game.

I’ve conversed with a lot of the people I saw at ALA via twitter for a while now, and it was wonderful to put faces with names! And having a pre-formed group of people to coordinate with took a lot of the stress out of the conference for me. I spent less time wandering aimlessly and more time being productive.

The coolest example, for sheer scale, was when we organized a 10 person meetup at Disneyland on the fly, converging from tons of different locations, using nothing but twitter.

If twitter can get their stability issues under control before everybody jumps ship (which could unfortunately be any day now), it’ll be a wonderful thing. None of the replacement options out there seem to be quite as right for this kind of environment. So I’m crossing my fingers that we’ll be using twitter at ALA ’09.