Buffer allows you to add Tweets & Facebook statuses in one go and then schedule them to be posted out at allotted times. Buffer app, whose team were based in California last year and have recently relocated to Hong Kong, has also just been named the Best Twitter App of 2011 by Wall Street Journal.

The iPhone app allows you to keep your Buffer topped up on the go. The app also includes a bookmarklet which you can add to Mobile Safari to make it even easier to share content you find on the web.

In the near future the app will become a universal iOS app allowing users to keep their Buffer topped up from their iPhone & iPad. An update to the app is currently in review that adds URL shortening, Post Now options & iOS 4.3 support.

Register for Buffer and schedule your future Twitter & Facebook statuses and grab the iPhone app by searching the App Store for “Buffer”.

You can see our progress (if you can call it that for some of us) over on our Movember micro site  here.

The game is the result of a competition involving over 600 primary school children. The children turned up armed with ideas & sketches of games they wanted to see built. The winning concept was “Whack a cake”. A game lasts 1 minute and the user has to collect good ingredients to gain points, if you select a bad ingredient you lose points. Each cake has 8 layers and the more cakes you complete the higher your score at the end.

After Multipack Presents, an event held by web designers/developers for other web designers/developers I visited the team down the corridor working on the game. At this time there was about 20 hours left to complete the game before it was demoed. I was soon tasked with building a Universal iPhone & iPad app that would hit the App Store with all proceeds going to Children in Need.

The game itself was built using HTML5 Canvas & Javascript. This alone wouldn’t be accepted in the Apple App Store as it could be visited and played on the website without the app, so I had to add a few extra features to enable it to hopefully get through the App Store approval process. These included sharing options and Game Center intergration. It will be hitting the App Store in the near future to raise money for Children in Need.

Over the past week the game has been covered on BBC Midlands Today & The Guardian. Thanks to Oxygen Accelerator who organized the project & everyone who worked on the game itself over the weekend. A great achievement to all those involved.

You can play Whack a Cake right now on the website. Go give it a try and see if you can beat the high score and don’t forget to donate to Children in Need.

Anna kicked off by highlighting how children are being monitored in School. With an ever increasing number of measures in place to track exactly what students are doing on the School network.

“The SchoolBooks were the snitchiest technology of them all, logging every keystroke, watching all the network traffic for suspicious keywords, counting every click, keeping track of every fleeting thought you put out over the net” Excerpt from Little Brother by Cory Doctorow

While I feel some monitoring should be in place for obvious reasons, parents should have the opportunity to give permission to the School to monitor their child’s activity in this manner.

“The time has come for mobiles in schools to be placed in the category of a potentially offensive weapon.” 2007, NASUWT general secretary Chris Keates

To hear that mobile phones are seen as “offensive weapons” and that schools have the power to confiscate, examine data on the device and destroy data is truely shocking. Anna showed an inspiring video of a young South African who described how he had to write his 8,000 word business plan on a Nokia 6234; which just shows how useful having access to devices like mobile phones can be.

Anna then moved onto focus on ICT education in Schools. As mentioned in my last post it has been a few years since I left school and while the curriculum has developed since, the problem with what schools are teaching remains. When I was in school we were using Frontpage Express or Word to build websites, which meant most students at the school would not delve into HTML beyond changing some copy here and there.

“I was flabbergasted to learn that today computer science isn’t even taught as a standard in UK schools.” Eric Schmidt

In 5 years the take-up of GCSE ICT in schools has dropped by 33%. (Source) The Royal Society suggest that the decline in students taking ICT is down to the design & delivery of the ICT curriculum in schools.

Children are taught to use PowerPoint and Word to create websites meaning they don’t see the HTML that makes up the website to ultimately learn the technologies behind the web. Mozilla are running their Hackasaurus program which aims to teach students how the web is built by making them look at the source of websites as well as making them “remix” elements onto their own pages.

Want to help?

I for one have been inspired to do what I can to improve the situation in Schools and have followed some of the steps provided by Anna within her talk to get the ball rolling.

• Register as a STEM ambassador.
• Write to your old school and offer to give a talk about what you do.
• Visit the TES’s ICT teacher forum and give advice.
• Help make open source projects like Hackasaurus better.
• Write to your MP and the Eduction Secretary.
• Sign this recent e-petition to “Teach our kids to code“.

In an interesting development since the talk at updateConf it has been announced on Twitter that David Willetts has announced a pilot programme to teach schoolchildren coding & to develop a programming GCSE.

A Barcamp “#codingforkids” is also being held in London next month with a plan to discuss and debate the topic. You can find details about the barcamp here.

See Anna’s “The Digital Native” slides here.

Unusability

To kick things off Matt Gemmell (or his evil twin) talked about Usability by giving us his “Inhuman interface guidelines”.

1. More is better.
2. Be useless.
3. Celebrate stupidity.
4. Do it your way.
5. Not found.
6. Boxed in.
7. Speak English.
8. Signted users only.

I’m sure if Matt Gemmell (and not his evil twin) had presented the talk you could take away the following points.

1. Do less
The old “Keep it simple, stupid” applied here. Don’t pack features into your app for the sake of it. Quality not quantity.

2. Be useful
Pack in useful functionality, consider how & where people are going to use your app.

3. Don’t be antisocial
Use social media to share information from your app but don’t use the worst features from social media websites to do so.

4. Support orientations
Allow the user to use the app how they wish. Don’t fix the user to use a single orientation it is their device.

5. Consider data retrieval
Make it easy for the user to find information easily, don’t hide information in hard to reach places.

6. Layout for ease
Use native UI elements which the user is familiar with, ergonomics is not only for the device but for the software as well.

7. Localise
If your app is going to be used in other countries localise the app, make it easy for people who don’t have English as their first language.

8. Be accessible
Ensure text is big enough to be read by people who may be visually impaired. Use native controls to ensure screen readers and the devices OS can employ its own accessability features without problems.

Corona hacking session

Seb Lee-Delisle performed some “Live Coding” and built a Angry Birds clone using a mobile development platform for iOS and Andriod called Corona. Within 30 minutes Seb had a ball knocking over a structure made up of blocks using the built in physics engine.

Seb got the audience involved in debugging the code and various members of the audience were following along creating their own clone during the talk. Corona itself looks like a great platform to base games off, it being simple enough to build a part of a Angry Birds clone in just over 30 minutes.

With the audience joining in to debug the code as well as many members of the audience following along creating their own clone the talk grabbed the attention of a fair few developers. Speaking to a few people after the talk everyone wanted to download Corona and build a game right there and then.

The Digital Native

Anna Debenham presented “The Digital Native” highlighting problems with the current model of teaching students. Being only a few years since I left school this is a topic I am all to familiar with and deserves a completely separate blog post, which will follow soon.

Thanks to Aral Balkan, Team Update and all the speakers for putting on such a good conference. Definitely worth a visit next year.

With ever tightening funds available to them, we offered our time to see how design and dev skills could be put to use to both help raise awareness and increase financial support in order that the Bridge’s work could continue.

The Plan

First, we decided that there were a few things that the site should do better.

• Tell stories; This is important for every charity, and seemed particularly relevant here given the fact that the Bridge has helped an average of 50 people per year since their work started in 1999.
• ‘Fun’draising; We liked how sites like Just Giving made it simple and fun for people to set up their own challenge and raise money for a charity. We also liked the donation solutions that PayPal provided as the rates were preferable to other providers.
• Bite sized; Due to the complex nature of the services provided, and the backdrop of funding uncertainty we needed to tell fairly wordy information in bite sized pieces.

How we did it

• Build things; Just Giving’s great, but we felt the fees were a bit hefty for a small charity. As an alternative, we built  a system within WordPress with signups, page creations, gift aid and donations all tied in to PayPal. This way the fees incurred were only 1.4% as opposed to 5%.
• Change things quickly; Changing things as we went allowed us to work quickly and efficiently. The wireframes were hand drawn and lived in between our desks so we could quickly scribble down changes. Design and development happened simultaneously with bits being added and deleted as the ideas evolved. We also produced content as we designed to ensure that the Photoshop files represented a fairly ‘live’ version of the site rather than dummy copy or images.

Tips for charities

A few things that we learned that were useful:

• Figure out how your story can be told in an engaging way, rather than just providing users with huge chunks of text. We used infographics, video, image treatments and a blog to help reveal more of the individual impact that the charity has.
• Include a BIG call to action to make gift-aiding donations really easy. Also, take some time to look in to fees that will be incurred through online donations. Some tools are completely free, but we weighed up the credibility of adding a well known provider such as PayPal and were happy with the trade off vs a lesser known gateway which could have lower take up.
• Harness social and enable users to fundraise on your behalf. Most of the donations we’ve seen so far are from Twitter and Facebook – they’re particularly useful for spreading the word quickly about fund raising challenges.
• Make the most of what’s already out there. We used WordPress and a number of pre-existing plugins to get the basic framework up and running quickly.
• Think of other ways people may want to offer support other than financial. We made it really clear how people could support the Bridge in different ways. We also noticed that this was quite a common area missing from other charity sites. Are there ways your charity could benefit from skills or services that people may want to offer?

The results

The site was completed in three days and launched the same week. The first initiative to get people involved – the Yorkshire 3 peaks challenge is now live on the site and new content will be regularly added.

If you found this post useful, or just feel the inclination to, then you can also make a donation here.

We’ve just launched the new Fountain Park website. Fountain Park is a entertainment destination in Edinburgh with a great offering including a 13 screen Cinema, Casino, Bowling alley and various places to eat & drink.

X-Leisure came to us looking for a brand new site which focused on Fountain Park’s main attractions. The site makes use of the Cineworld API to display what films are showing at the Fountain Park. Users can then click on the film time to be taken to the Cineworld site to make a booking. The cinema drives much of the footfall at the destination so it was given a prominent position throughout the site.

The site allows X-Leisure to easily add opening hours to pages and gives them somewhere to promote News, Offers and Events.

If you have ever been in touch with 383 Project regarding a website project you will likely have heard us mention version control and deployments. This terminology is simply an explanation of a process we use to ensure that when a site is being developed the different versions of the code can be kept in check and revisited when multiple developers are working at the same time. We use a web app called Beanstalk which is a hosted solution that allows us to quickly set up version control repositories (effectively a place where each edit of a file is kept). Beanstalk also allows us to deploy websites to various servers, whether it is a staging/preview server or the live environment. Beanstalk also offers an API, which allows third party developers (like us!) to build extra features and tools.

For the past 5 months in my spare time (lots of evenings & weekends) I have been building a iOS app called Magic Bean which allows developers not only at 383 Project, but worldwide, to keep up to date with their Beanstalk account activity. Not only this but it allows developers to deploy sites without being at their desk or on a WiFi connection whilst out of the office. This allows developers to put sites live wherever they may be in a few taps of their screen.

With a bit of help from our very own Sam, who helped me out on the creative front, Magic Bean was born and hit the App Store in January. More features are constantly being worked on for Magic Bean, not only because Beanstalk add more features on their side, but also because many more features can be added to make Magic Bean better & more feature rich for developers. A recent example was the addition of Magic Bean for iPad making Magic Bean a Universal app for both iPhone and iPad.

Beanstalk themselves have been a great help getting Magic Bean off the ground, offering to run giveaways as well as helping by making API changes/updates. Without Beanstalk’s help along the way some of the features within Magic Bean wouldn’t have been possible.

As work on Magic Bean continues I find myself working with lots of the iOS SDK that I haven’t used yet. All this new knowledge not only allows me to improve Magic Bean in the future but any iOS apps that we’ll be building here at 383 Project.

If you’d like to follow progress on Magic Bean then follow the Twitter account here. Or if you’re a developer you can grab Magic Bean from the App Store.

383 provided the company with a brand new flash website along side a html site. From the flash site you are able to browse through to the html site to learn more about Ecletic’s models as well as the current happening’s at Ecletic.