Mobile Campus Assistant – project welcome
Welcome to the Mobile Campus Assistant project, funded by the JISC as part of the Rapid Innovations Programme in 2009. The Mobile Campus Assistant project will make existing campus-related information...
View ArticleIntroducing the Project Team
The Mobile Campus Assistant project is fully underway and I thought now would be a good time to introduce the project team. The core of the project management and development will be undertaken by...
View ArticleFull Steam Ahead!
After a slow start due to numerous commitments and excuses I’m now working full-time on the Mobile Campus Assistant project. With an iPhone in one hand and a coffee in the other I’m really excited...
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UI Design
A little later in the project we should have some help from a designer from the Internet Development (ID) team of the Institute for Learning and Teaching (ILRT). However, I’m pretty keen that the...
View ArticleTime for some REST
I’m currently prototyping a basic RESTful architecture that can form part of the discussion in next weeks technical planning meeting. In the project we want the ability to return different content...
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Actually, that isn’t my current location!
I’ve now deployed an initial version of Mobile Campus Assistant that displays the location of University of Bristol wireless hotspots in relation to your current location using the W3C Geolocation...
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Yes, that is my position!
After further playing development and testing it is clear that the iPhone can’t get an accurate position based on a one-shot position request, even if the enableHighAccuracy property is set to true:...
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Project Buddy
In the Web Futures group we have adopted a buddy system to help support our development efforts. Each member of the team is currently the primary or solo developer on a project and, being a solo...
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The Bees are the Stingiest
Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to attend the Rapid Innovation Programme Meeting that was held in Manchester on 3-4 September. Luckily, Jasper Tredgold was able to represent the project. I created a...
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Maps Revisited – Expectations and Usability
I had a meeting last week with Ben Hayes, our designer and usability consultant. Ben has also been an iPhone owner for a while. He pointed out that there is probably an expectation from iPhone users...
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News and Feeds
The next task is related to presenting time and location sensitive news to students within the MCA application. I thought the easiest way would be to cache and aggregate existing news feeds. This would...
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Semantic intentions with Google Calendar
In the spirit of the mobile campus assistant blog, I thought I’d add my own entry about some of the work I’ve been doing. I’ve been looking into integrating calendar information into the MCA...
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Meeting with Erewhon
Last week members of the MCA team met Tim Fernando and Alex Dutton from the Erewhon project. It was really good of Tim and Alex to travel to Bristol, especially since they were launching their mobile...
View ArticleMobile Usage Statistics
We haven’t collected any statistics on what devices visit the MCA website – because its still in beta and hasn’t been circulated to the student population. However, we have got access to statistics on...
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DevDays, London
Last week I attended the StackOverflow DevDays event that was being held in London. It is of particular interest to this project since there were talks that covered Android, Nokia (Qt) and iPhone...
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When URIs go bad …
In MCA we try and harvest University content and then store it locally as RDF. One harvester implementation harvests RSS and Atom feeds and converts them as RSS 1.0 (RDF). We can then, in theory, fire...
View ArticleMobile OS Statistics
When I posted about Mobile Usage Statistics, David Flanders of JISC asked if there was any data about mobile operating systems, especially with regard to Android. Urfan Ali of the Public Relations...
View ArticleMCA at the next Futures Cafe event
Nikki Rogers and myself will give a presentation on the Mobile Campus Assistant project at the next Futures Cafe event, entitled “Mobile Computing”, on Wednesday 2nd December. Nick Skelton, who is also...
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On the final leg …
The project officially ends on the 30th November and the project team have plenty of work to fill in the next few days, including … Applying the design (created by Ben Hayes) to the web application...
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The New Look and Feel
Here are some screenshots for the Bristol instance of Mobile Campus Assistant. The homepage: Information relevant to “Today”: Maps: The design is nice, clean and professional. However, there are a...
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