Simon G's Blog

I attended the inspirational  Gather 2015 unconference today. As described on the website for the event “It is the digital, technical and creative community’s big day out”. There were several sessions running simultaneously and it was hard to choose what to go to since there were so many interesting topics. Below is a summary of my key takeaways (or interpretations thereof) from the sessions I attended. UAVs, Internet of Things, 3DVR: What are we going to do with these things? How do we get us/our companies/NZ to lead the way? What can we do to take advantage? These are the questions - does the room have the answers? MAKER CHANGE BUSINESS @lancewiggs Future Skynet Remote Monitoring UAV Tour - e.g. rent a UAV and do tour of Egypt Auto-herding GPS in humans Better battery life Sensors inc. in building beams to say if leak problem Track robber Traffic control Drone based terror Evidence-based thinking Data —> Interpretation Auto milk ordering fro...

With 300 attendees registered for this year, there were a lot of Web developers, designers, lawyers, investors and others in one place with several un-conference sessions running in parallel at Barcamp Auckland 5. A summary of my interpretation of key points from sessions I attended is below. Write once, run everywhere HTML 5 applications SmartBiller HTML 5 based desktop/iPhoneAndroid app. Used jQTouch as a framework; supports Webkit only. jQuery Mobile wasn’t ready at time, but this would be preference if rebuilding (better support). Sync driven from server. Device detection being done adhoc on client & server side. Would use MVC if writing again. fluidapp.com for Mac wraps any website and makes it appear like an application. Need to consider how to handle multiple open windows Check instancecount then “ping” other instance may be an option. Screen size, browser quirks / CSS, Intera...

We were in Europcar the other day to rent a car and a gentleman who was probably in his late 40’s was being explained the options of how to pay for road tolls.  The first option mentioned was that he could simply go to the tolls website to pay.  He threw his hands in the air and expressed that he knows nothing about websites.  The option presented next was thankfully a lot more palatable, paying via entering credit card information over the phone. Just over a year ago I was involved in putting a site together for a closed group of invitees and we thought it was reasonably intuitive to use.  What we didn’t consider though was that some of our invitees were not used to signing up to websites and consequently they had never had to think about what their username would be or what picture they would use for an avatar (not to mention the process for how to get it onto their computer and then onto the website).  For a subsequent event, we took this onboard and genera...