*TLDR: Or at least a rough estimate of how long you've spent on a project.

It's very easy, even for the most disciplined of teams, to become so involved in a project that agile stories and time trackers go out the window; the only goal is to finish. We had this happen on a project last year and it made it very hard to see where the time went during our project retrospective. We knew we'd been working constantly, but on what? Knowing that we did diligently commit our code to Git made me wonder if there was a way to approximate time spent based on commit timestamps.

Turns out, several people had already been working on this and we settled on a ruby gem from Frank Rietta. You can read more about the assumptions used in calculations over at his site and GitHub, but it couldn't be easier to install:

Installing is easy from your computer with Ruby installed. From the command line, run: gem install git_time_extractor Then go one of your GIT project directories, and run: git_time_extractor > output_time.csv

The reason I picked this tool over others is that the spreadsheet generated can be manipulated in whatever way need for records, sort by employee, what took the longest, how much time did we spend in total etc.

Alongside the release of their new tabletop game, Warhammer Age of Sigmar, Games Workshop have been promoting several new type of eBooks from their publishing imprint Black Library. For a company who already sell three distinct versions of their books, what does this mean, what is this “new” format and what does it mean for gamers?

First let’s look at the books we’ve seen to date, they fall into 3 categories, Print, Enhanced (iBook) and eBook (EPUB 3 and Kindle).

Print 

The print edition is exactly what you expect, the same hardcover format that we’ve known for years, or is it? Around the end of 6th edition and release of 7th edition 40K there was a shift in the design of the BRB and the Codexes. Compare the text heavy Codexes of 2nd edition to the new Codex Space Marines and you’ll see what I mean. The newer books are full of high quality, full page images, spacious type and high-res photography with a consistent styling between digital and print versions.

It seems as though the print version is now being designed alongside the digital editions, rather than being tacked on as an afterthought and shows that Games Workshop is serious about digital content. Perhaps they are even taking a “digital first” approach, it’s certainly possible as the print books now look a lot like the iBooks edition, but is more likely that they have well defined templates for both.

Digital First Design

A quick note on Digital First Design. Generally considered a good thing, there’s no denying that it can lead to a fresher, more modern looking book. That said, we’re starting to see publishing industry push-back, especially in education, as there is a definite feeling of sameness, even blandness to a lot of digital books that then migrates to print. eBooks are more or less packaged web pages, so some upcoming CSS standards should improve typography and layout options, allowing for much richer “print-like” designs in the future.

The problem with eReaders

Not all ebooks and certainly not all eReaders are created equal. In the “real world” we can classify books as hardback, softback, comic books, coffee table, reference and so on. Here in the Matrix they’re all just “eBooks” and all formats are expected to work everywhere; this leads to Lowest Common Denominator Design.

The latest James Patterson novel is ideal to read on your Kindle or Nook, but for anyone who’s ever tried to navigate Warhammer 40,000: The Rules on a Kindle Paperwhite mid game will find it to be a lesson in madness.

The layout is perfectly nice but this type of reader isn’t really designed for this type of content, it’s designed for novels. So instead we chop up our beautifully designed to make it linear. It’s like printing out the content of the rulebook on copy paper. I’m sure some people like it this way or have low expectations for the technology, maybe they just want an easy way to read the fluff, but for gaming it’s a horrible experience all-round. Why? Because any digital book creates an inherently poorer User Experience that the physical equivalent. We “know” how to use a book and use it quickly, in a non-linear fashion, as we jump from reference to reference. But this isn’t how a typical eReader works, as it’s primarily designed for novels, anything beyond linear navigation is a feature that’s been bolted-on.

This is a huge problem in Education as textbooks are also used in non-linear ways. eBooks that were initially seen as the way of the future, are now considered to cause more problems than the paper books they aimed to replace. This left room for companies like Apple and Inkling to come up with alternatives.

Enhanced (iBooks)

The most popular form of alternative eBook is the iBook working hand-in-hand with the iBooks application on Mac and iOS. The iBook format is a proprietary extension of EPUB 3 introducing some functionality unique to Apple WebKit and addressing the issues above by allowing richer designs and providing a more appropriate reading experience.

As with Digital First Design this was at first considered a good thing.

Introduced by Apple at an education-focused event in 2012 the iBook was designed to solve the problem of creating digital textbooks. It allows anyone to create beautiful content specifically for Apple devices by using a WYSWIG editor and embedding interactive widgets like quizzes and galleries and an interactive glossary. The big improvement over standard EPUB 3 was the custom reader that Apple included in the iBooks Application (yes the format and reader are called the same thing. Yes there was also a laptop by the same name too) which provided a more natural method of navigation that your standard eReader. Using gestures you can swipe between Chapters, Sections and Pages and pan and zoom in and out to jump around in content.

Games Workshop started publishing books in this format back in 2012 and it finally seemed that a perfect format had been discovered for digital gaming books. If nothing else it certainly felt premium, further cemented by the release of Codex Space Marines which included enhanced features like embedded audio and the Force Requisition army builder.

It was around this point that I switched from print to digital, but as good as the iBooks format is, it does have issues. First off it’s iOS only and until very recently was iPad and Mac only. Secondly it’s slow. So slow. Apple added animated book opening effects to the iBooks software meaning that jumping from one section of a book to another (without a hyperlink) can take up to 10 seconds; in the heat of a game, that is way too long.

[caption id="attachment_10367" align="aligncenter" width="990"] This is a real-time animated gif of an iBook opening on a 2014 MacBook Pro.[/caption]

There are problems for publishers too, the books can only be built using Apple’s proprietary iBooks Author tool, effectively introducing an additional development track to the publishing workflow and only sold through iBooks, for which Apple take a 30% royalty. This is why publishers like Amazon and Comixology have removed all buying functionality from their apps, you can buy books from their online store and then download it to your device afterwards. It’s not a great experience for users but I can see why they do it, 30% is a huge junk wether you’re an indy publisher or a multinational.

I believe it’s been the dual pressures of providing high quality ebooks for non iOS users and a way to reduce the Apple tax on sales that has likely driven the creation of the new format released alongside Age of Sigmar.

eBook edition

The ebook formats, EPUB 3 and Mobi, get a bad wrap. If you’ve seen the digital version of White Dwarf magazine you’ll know why. This is the same format that publishers use for novels, which obviously works well there, but makes it impossible to create more than the simplest of layouts. Known as “reflowable ebooks” this content will “flow” from screen to screen allowing you to change the font to suit and making it readable on any size of device.

Reflowable EPUBs can be created easily in many word processing packages and desktop publishing tools like Pages and InDesign or generated from a folder of text files. Content is king which is why the focus is put on type in this format, but compared to the the print or enhanced edition it looks like something your Nan could do in Microsoft Word.

What it does have going for it is that it is quick to produce and can run on pretty much every device. If you’ve bought the DRM free ebooks from Black Library, you’ll get a Kindle edition too (most publishers generate their Kindle books from the EPUB 3, which is why I didn’t include it on the list of formats.) Publishing through Black Library also allows Games Workshop to save the 30% that Apple takes on fees. Some may ask why GW don’t charge 30% more for books sold through iBooks and I’m sure they would if they can but Apple’s T&Cs stop you from charging a higher price for the same product on their store. On of the disadvantages of the Black Library is that for less technical users it can be pain to download and transfer ebooks; the Kindle is so successful due to the tight integration of eReader and store.

New eBooks

Two weeks ago my article would have stopped with the eBook edition, however Warhammer Age of Sigmar brought along a new flavour of eBook; no longer would Android or mobile users have to suffer the poorly laid eBooks we’ve seen in the past.

The recent iOS 8.4 update means the iBooks editions work on iPhone, so there’s no reason for iOS users to buy multiple formats.

The first of the new books was the Age of Sigmar paining guide, you can and should grab a sample of this on the Black Library site and in iBooks, it looks lovely. Or should I say they look lovely because the tablet and mobile versions have appropriately different designs and using an app like Calibre or Kindle Previewer you can freely and legally convert them to work on your Kindle too.

Like the standard eBooks, these are also EPUB 3 but used the fixed-layout flag in their config, this let’s publishers set a page size in pixels and layout the content exactly as they want it to show. Beautiful looking eBooks and on mobile too, have we just found the holy grail?

No actually. The fixed layout format has fallen slightly out of favour with publishers for a number of reasons, the biggest of these is that eReaders treat this type of content like a PDF in a few ways.

• Font size: In fixed layout books you (obviously) can’t change font size, so you’re at the mercy of the designers, just like a PDF. You can zoom in and pan around though so at least that’s something.
• Annotations: If you want to make notes and scribbles in your eBook you’re out of luck beyond the most basic text, unless of course the eReader allows for something more. Compare that to the numerous PDF apps out there on desktop, tablet and mobile that let you markup the page however you see fit.
• Page size: The name “fixed layout" says it all, the page size is set to common iOS screen ratios. On older iPhones and Android you’ll likely find some some borders around the content.
• Treated like a PDF: If you compare a fixed layout page and a properly generated (with links and stuff) PDF you’d be hard pressed to see the difference. Open one of these books in iBooks and you’ll even see the same UI used to navigate PDFs with the added problem of performance issues

As each page in a fixed layout eBook is a single HTML (XHTML actually) page, iBooks uses the webkit rendering engine to process each page and generate a thumbnail, letting you scrub through pages quickly. However iBooks doesn't really cope with scale, possibly because people didn’t consider the 250+ page behemoths that we see in gaming and in education. Image trying to open 250 graphics heavy web pages at the same time, that’s what opening a large fixed layout book is like. Thankfully once it’s finished processing the book works great but on older devices like the iPad 2 or original iPad Mini you might find that iBooks crashes each time you try as it comes up against the memory limit on the device.

There’s nothing wrong with fixed layout EPUB 3 per se, it’s just that the eReaders let us down again; the portable reading experience is very different from the printed and should treated as such in both the design of the books and the eReaders used to consume them. So what is this format good for? In my line of work we use it a lot of kids’ story books and direct conversions of legacy books when stakeholders require a 1:1 match between print and digital; it’s generally considered as something of a step-backward in this case.

Unlike the iBooks (enhanced) editions the new fixed layout EPUB’s don’t require a separate development track, they’ve been generated from InDesign automatically, you can see this in the metadata section of the image below. For template driven content like this, once you’ve got a your first project set up, there is little to no additional work to generate fixed layout content for new books. Beyond clicking the export button that is.

So think about this, Games Workshop now makes a book once and can now export automatically to print, mobile, tablet and probably even ebook editions but instead of users buying a book and getting access to whatever format is necessary, users are encouraged to buy the same book multiple times generating almost pure profit for

I’ve said before that I have no problem paying the same for a digital book as the print edition, but this only applies to “prestige” formats like iBook edition, or Comics on Comixology, where care has been taken in the design and implementation to provide a better experience, e.g.. the special features added to the latest Codexes. Like many of you I’ll even go as far as to buy the print and digital editions of some books and the Horus Heresy series from Forge World is the type of book you’d only ever want in physical form but I have to draw a line at paying twice for what is the same thing.

There is no technical reason that the mobile, tablet and ebook editions shouldn’t all count as the same purchase, there’s even an argument that they should be available as a download with every print book or perhaps even charge a small premium like Marvel do with comics. I can’t help but think the iOS 8.4 update came at a bad time for GW, you’d think that with the number of iPhones in the market they wouldn't miss out on telling people that their books now work on iPhone too. Unless of course they want mobile users to buy another copy. (Of course they do.)

For my money I’ll continue to buy the iBook (enhanced) editions, the app may be slow, but it’s improving and as eReader designed for education its support for annotations and glossaries is second to none. The fact that I can now get these books on my iPhone only helps seal the deal. If I ever move to Android, yes that means I’d loose access to my books, but as it stands now I’d need to pay twice to have the appropriate book on both my Android tablet and mobile.

A Note on eBooks

As someone who makes eBooks for a living, this might sound like I’m shooting myself in the foot, but be careful when buying eBooks, not only are you subject to lock-in in various book stores, but the terms and conditions from some publishers may mean that you never own the content and trying to convert from one format to another may mean you are actually in breach of their terms.

Always look for DRM free options where possible never be afraid to push back on publishers to improve the quality of their ebooks. You wouldn't stand for a brand new printed Codex if the cover was hanging off and the ink smudged on a bunch of pages, digital products should be no different.

We have three published apps in each App Store, iTunes, Amazon App Store and Google Play, they’re published by our account but use licenced third-party IP.

We’ve had two apps rejected on first pass by Apple only to be accepted at review when we proved we held the necessary licence, a third because of an issue with a demo account that we fixed and they re-reviewed the same day.

On Amazon an eBook reader app for a tabletop games company was rejected with no reason other than “Amazon deemed it unsuitable for Kindle” but was allowed on other Amazon devices; we eventually made it onto Kindle too after some tweaks. Just like Amazon removing IAP in Comixology and leaving it out of the Kindle App, we had to drop IAP in our ereader on Amazon.

On Google one app was actually pulled after being live for months, this is something not many people see or hear about. Pulled, no warning, black mark against our developer process and a very closed appeals process. Again we provided details of our licence and after 10 days it was restored. We all hear about Apple’s “draconian” review/rejection process and maybe it’s just because there are so many iOS developers it feels familiar, but it is miles better than both Google and Amazon currently offer and feels like there really are humans making the decision.

What I find interesting about both Apple and Google here is that we had to prove our rights to an IP but yet the stores (especially Google Play) are full of clones and skeevy fakes, some of which have been around for years. Just type “Frozen” into Google Play and you’ll see what I mean.

Like all the best posts this blog started life as a tweet in response to @imyke and episode 30 of Inquisitive.

Apparently 2013 is the year of the smart watch. Back in April one in particular caught my eye Pebble, by the aptly named Pebble Technologies took Kickstarter by storm raising  $10 million (!!), well over their initial goal of $100K.

The Pebble uses Bluetooth 2.1+ EDR and 4.0 to pair with your phone an receive notifications, paired with an e-ink display the drain on both watch and phone is very low, unlike last year's Sony Xperia Smartwatch.

Out of the box (and on iOS especially) the Pebble doesn't do much more than show the time and weather, but on Android (and  iOS 7) it can be set up to receive custom notifications, receive navigation directions from Google maps, control music and more.

Honestly, it takes more work than most people would be bothered with, but I don't mind. I even took to creating my own watch face, combining the popular split-screen look with Calendar events. That might not be for everyone, but being able to look at my watch and see when and where my next meeting is, is a small win in my book.

For anyone else wanting to download the "Fancee Watch" face, you can grab it here http://archive.andrewgribben.com/oldblog/oldblog/fTMz and install it on Android using Canvas for Pebble.

Tablet form factor is an interesting thing; an iPad user since day one, I sold my iPad 2 after using the Nexus 7 for a week last year, but once the iPad Mini was released I jumped at the chance to own an iOS device in the 7" form factor. I am a Mac user, my primary phone is an iPhone, and regardless of how good the Nexus 7 is , the iPad fitted with my workflow, seamlessly. Setting the availability of certain apps aside (OmniFocus, OmniGraffle are both Mac apps that are available on iPad too) I'm not saying I can't use anything else, but at the moment, I don't want to, but that doesn't mean I won't try.

Through my day-job at Purple Guerrilla I've had the opportunity lately to test on all of the major 10" tablets. Despite going in with some pre-formed opionions about what I would and wouldn't like, I found the results quite surprising.

Apple iPad

First up, the "New" iPad, not the newer iPad, commonly referred to as the iPad 4. The differences are minor enough that for the purposes of this test, I'll consider them as one and the same.

The 10" iPad is a beast. I remember when the first iPad was released, it was like something from sci-fi, the iPad 2 form factor slimmed this down further, but compared to an iPad Mini, it's still huge. If you don't have an iPad Mini you have to understand just how slim a device it is. I was watching actual, near future, sci-fi a few weeks back and an iPad Mini used as a prop, looked so futuristic that I found it jarring.

There's something about the iPad's "premium" build quality and weight (slightly heavier than iPad 2) that make it feel very fragile; like handling your Granny's best china. Nexus devices get a bad rap for feeling cheap, but I have no qualms throwing one down on a coffee table; if I tried that with an iPad it would probably slide right off.

Microsoft Surface Pro

I really wanted this to be good, I genuinely mean that. I'm so divorced from the Windows way of doing things (since I installed that first free Red Hat CD from PCW Magazine) that I actually like Windows 8 and its Modern UI. The problem is that despite all the marketing and posturing, the Surface Pro is not a tablet. The Surface RT is a pretty lack-lustre device, but at lease it is a tablet, the Pro, despite the name is a completley different device. The closest comparison that I can make is that this is Microsoft's MacBook Air, it's a fully featured, Intel based, ultra portable notebook.

The problem's started when I was first handed the device. The Surface Pro is so heavy that you wonder what they've filled the device with. (This article is not about facts and figures, but about experiences and sensations; the things that actually matter when using these devices.) I know from The Verge's excellent review that the Pro is half a pound heavier, that makes this 10" "screen" it heavier than my 15" Macbook Pro.

Too heavy to use as a tablet and with an active battery life of no more than 4 hours, it seems that the Surface Pro is designed to be used at a desk. The inclusion of a Display Port for video out only reinforces this, as does the inability to charge via USB (like every other tablet), both Surface models require a reasonably large power brick. Whilst chained to my desk via power cord I noticed another problem, the Surface Pro comes with a stylus which clips limply into the side of the device, using the same magentic port that is used for the power adapter. So, that's going to get lost soon.

As metioned previously the Modern UI really appeals to me, so nothing is more frustrating that launching an app and being kicked straight into "Classic" or Desktop mode cough Office cough. I wish there was a more clear division, even a switch to disable the traditional Desktop and the apps that require it, however it seems most long-time users have more of an issue with Modern UI and want to kill it and reclaim their Start button.

Microsfoft like to compare their devices against those from Apple, recent ads have shown off the Surface's true HD (1080p) display and 64GB storage as standard, so it was a little surprising to find that roughly 40GB of that storage are taken up by Windows 8 itself. 40GB, just think about that for a moment. Imagine buying a 16GB iPad to find you have only 6GB of usable space, people are already outraged by the 1GB or so that they currently loose to iOS,

The Surface Pro could be a successful device, if I was working in a Windows environment, I'd certainly take it over a Lenovo Thinkpad, but as a tablet it would be easy to carry around one made of stone. It's also prohibitively expense, £719 without the essential keyboard/cover.

As some people will think that there was no chance I'd find any redeeming qualities in the Surface, I made this list of things that I do like.

• Windows 8 - Modern UI
• Touch Cover
• The trackpad on the Touch Cover
• The premium build quality
• I actually like the little flap!
• Internet Explorer 10
• Accounts sync across Windows 8 devices via my Windows Live ID
• The Pro runs desktop games pretty well; there's something cool about being able to plug my Xbox controller in and have it work automatically.

Google Nexus 10

I know it's been out a while, but the Nexus 10 (or any 10" Android) was never really on my radar. Thinner and lighter than the iPad and with the a 300dpi display, the Nexus 10, despite being made by Samsung (I generally find Samsung devices to be plasticky) is easily the best Android tablet I've used to date.

Android Jellybean 4.2.2 is not all that different from I last remember it, it's an incremental release, but one that makes the OS feel a little more coherent. For example calendar events from my Exchange account show in Google Now, previously Exchange email and calendars were left out in the cold; I guess Google thought no one in business would use a Google device. The "holo" interface, introduced in 4.0, brings coherency to what was a very fragmented UI (similar to what iOS 7 will hopefully do for Apple), Android looks futuristic, but is still very useable; not an easy feat to manage.

The device itself is strange, while the iPad is very uniform, the Surface solid (like the 2001 Monolith) the Nexus 10 is a bit "wobbly". With rounded corners and a asymmetric thickness, the Nexus 10 looks soft and friendly. It's also remarkably easy to hold in one hand, like a book. Something which I find painful with a large iPad and impossible with a Surface Pro. Sideloading of content to Google Books, extended Google Drive functionality, better Exchange support and a beautiful 300DPI display have made the Nexus 10 a real joy to use and I've found myself reaching for it over any other device

The one thing (literally the one thing) that lets the Nexus down is the fragmented Android development environment. When Apple released it's retina devices, with much fanfare, it provided the tools and incentive to developers to make their apps retina ready. Whilst almost all (citation needed) new iOS apps are built with retina support and pixel doubled graphics, most apps on Android that operate without the "Holo" UI have yet to be updated. The worst offender, Comixology, who already have HD comics on iPad but on the Nexus with an even higher dpi count, we're still looking at the low-res version. Digital comics may not interest you at all, but the principle is this, that the world leader in this vein of digital media, 5 months after launch, has not updated their app to support the Nexus 10's screen. My suspicion (based on limited Android development) is that the problem is not with Comixology, but with the Android SDK and the difficulty inherent with developing apps at multiple screen densities, for countless variations of device.

Result

The best bit of yesterday's WWDC 2013 keynote had to be the change of tone within the address itself. This was a side of Apple that we rarely see; aware of its criticism and the ecosystem in which it exists. I don't see Steve Jobs doing that, but I don't necessarily think that is a bad thing either.

I've had around 24 hours to review and play with iOS 7, although my initial reaction was akin to a religious experience, the lustre quickly wore off when testing on a phone filled with third party apps. Much like the Microsoft Surface ads, the iOS 7 video had lots of shots of Apple's own apps (and Jony Ive in a white room), but back in the real world, what were once beautifully designed third party apps, now look heavy and out of place; an artifical barrier now wedged between the old and new design paradigms.

I love the new design language, unlike The Verge I don't mind the icons and I can accept that this is a beta, but I have to wonder how this will affect app development.These days the best Android apps use the "holo" design language, the same with Modern UI on Windows 8. iOS, on the other had, has a history of strong third party UIs, so it will be interesting to see how developers take to, or even adapt the new interface.

Parting thought: OS X Mavericks - Calendar and Maps seem to conform to the new design guidelines, should we expect a complete overhaul by the time it is released?

The next time a client asks you to cut corners, or blames you for the the fallout of a late stage spec change, just remember Thomas Andrews.

Born in Comber in 1873 and a pupil at RBAI (Inst to locals), Thomas designed and project managed Titanic for the White Star Line, an impressive accomplishment in my opinion. During construction, his plans for additional life boats and extra safety features were overruled, resulting (or at least contributing greatly) to the loss of life and sinking of the ship on it’s maiden voyage on 14th April 2012.

Sadly Thomas Andrews died onboard Titanic when it sank. A telegraph after the tragedy reads “…ALL UNANIMOUS THAT ANDREWS HEROIC UNTO DEATH, THINKING ONLY SAFETY OTHERS…” What a legacy to leave behind; despite his warnings being ignored and the ship sinking fast, Andrews still thought of the passengers (users) first.

So how do we build “unsinkable software”? We can’t, that’s impossible, but we can try. Even if we don’t convince clients to do the right thing, then we should still do everything we can to help the user. Our code/designs will be the better for it and people will take notice.

A few weeks ago on twitter I passed remark to Matt Johnston that it would be great to have Industry-funded, STEM-focused schools in Northern Ireland. Yesterday, Matt put me in touch with  Denis Stewart and his wife, who between them have more experience of the education system than everyone I know, combined.

In the IT industry we love to rail on the "failings" of the education system and think if only we had the chance we could do it better. There are so many factors involved in changing education that it become much more than just changing education; cultural factors, family pressures, financial implications and job vacancies all have to be taken into consideration. There are already schools in NI, who receive funding from Industry and who have specialities in a range of STEM subjects, who I have no doubt are very good at what they do. Innovation is contagious; I'm sure many of these schools developed their speciality from one teacher, passionate about their subject who drove school policy forward.

I don't pretend I can fix things or that I have all (if any) answers. My school has been very good in giving me free reign, setting IT policy and testing out new systems, but we're part of a very small sub-group of a much larger system and as someone put it yesterday in "the Tasmania of Northern Ireland."

Is it enough to have a few specialist schools and a few innovative teachers? What about those who are still unreached? Mostly working class boys, whose career aspirations are either professional footballer, reality TV star, claim benefits, or "get out of school at 16, join a trade and make some money." I'm not being elitist; if I'm honest this is my cultural background. Neither am I saying everyone should go down an academic route. What I ask is, how many of these students would be potential innovators, if we could only get them past, "maths is hard" and "science is boring." How can we show what will be out there in ten years time when to them school is so irrelevant; they have more technology in their bedroom than most classrooms and they make better use of it too.

How can we better connect technology? Not just connect different elements of technology but how can we connect with teachers and students and get them engaged with it. Napster was one of those moments when society became truly engaged with the Internet; I knew it had made a difference when my 70 year old Aunt began using a Napster clone to download knitting patterns.  Education needs it's Napster. Not a way to illegally download music in class, but a way to connect existing technologies; meeting a need which it's users may not even realise they have.

Whether it's debating the need for STEM schools/STEM in schools, developing Jotter or teaching, I want to make the best of technology that exists, which we may even have, but aren't using in a useful way. Aspiring that my software project, Jotter be like Napster is perhaps a very lofty ambition; but is it not better to set a high goal and fall short, achieving something, than not set any goal or try at all. Is that not what we keep advising our students and if it isn't, why on earth not?

My move from developing software to teaching high school was extremely enlightening; working and socialising with a tech savvy crowd had made me ignorant to how IT was perceived by users in the "real world."

After watching Objectified I began to think about how you don't need to know about all of your users to make a good product, just the extremes; the middle will fall into place by itself.

On one end there are some really switched-on people in education, Fraser Speirs and David Cleland, to name but two, who are pioneering the use of technology in schools.  At the other, you have teachers who have don't have an internet at home or know how to use The Google and who reluctantly go along with new IT policies that come across their desk, they'll need help, but have no other choice. To them IT is an unnecessary inconvenience. In the middle you have teachers who are IT aware, they can send emails, use a printer and probably have a Facebook account, but it's a means to an end. As long as things work they're happy to make use of it.

As software is developed, we not only need to ensure it is relevant, functional and well designed, but that it is usable even by those who have very little IT experience; there's no age barrier either, graduates can have worse IT skills than veteran teachers; none of them will be installing Moodle. Users in the middle might not spend time online searching for a new piece of software (although now that "apps" are such an embedded part of culture, perhaps I'm wrong) but if what they use works, in that it works how they work, then the software itself will melt away.

As I see it, a huge problem with how ICT is used in education is that is still isn't seen as an infrastructure, like the building or the electricity. We get a pile of computers and throw them into a classroom and tell the teacher to work away. In Northern Ireland, C2K has made huge leaps forward, but there are still too few teachers who are happy, willing and/or skilled enough to innovate with the resources they've been given.

The iPad, solution or not, is seen as the "microwave" of the computing world and, what many don't realise, is more cost effective than netbooks, which, my school at least, thought, would be good value for money. If you count up the cost of repairs, and reinstalls we could have bought an iPad and still had change. Its not the only way either, I have high hopes for Google's Chrome OS; I customised Ubuntu on our netbooks so that they don't even have a traditional GUI, only the browser and I've never looked back.

While many in the IT industry (myself included) have called for the death of the traditional IT Teacher and instead have IT as an integral part of every subject, it isn't possible; not until hardware and software become invisible, just like an everyday appliance. I can only hope that Jotter will be invisible to its users.

As the project continues, I'll release more information about exactly what Jotter is. At the moment I'm still not sure how to describe it myself, but hopefully from these blog posts you'll at least see the reasons behind what we are doing.

Andrew Gribben

AKA "The inevitable iPad post"

Even though the iPad has not yet reached these shores, it seems that the world has been taken up by the frenzy of it's release, it's design, it functionality and, it's iBooks. It would seem that in just over a week the Ebook (or is it eBook?) reader has been relegated to a niche product and the LCD backlit iPad announced as the new saviour of books, newspapers and the rest of the publishing industry. Ironically the move that will save this industry is the exact same one that only a few years ago was apparently going to destroy the record industry. The iPad with it's shiny colourful iBooks and funky page turn transitions is apparently the closest thing to a real book that you will get.

Do you know what, they're probably right too, with the power of the Apple brand and the iPad hype, it's hard to see iBooks not being a success. Even setting aside the damage done to your retinas and the carpal tunnel from the weight of holding a 9" "book" I really do feel that it's going to reintroduce reading to an increasingly illiterate TV cultured society. Once they're hooked on iBooks its still not the end for eBook readers, no, it's a wake up call. The manufacturers can raise their game, not necessarily to add features, but to perform the simple task of displaying and browsing an electronic book, only better. Colour eink, touch displays (everyone who picks up my Nook and the Kindle before that intuitively try to tap the screen) are a few features that spring to mind.

Already Amazon and Barnes & Noble have released some major Kindle and Nook updates. The Kindle is to get an SDK (KDK actually) and the Nook has had a facelift (see below) along with a much needed speed and battery life boost. It's good to see continued support and development for these devices. Although having played with the Nook for a while, rooting it (similar to jailbreaking an iPhone,) installing a web browser, feed reader and other apps, I've found them to be an annoying distraction to what I prefer to use it on most, actual reading! The only third-party Nook app I wouldn't be without is Trook, which allows me to download books from my Calibre library at home, including daily "newspapers" compiled from RSS feeds and that's only because I'm too tight to buy actual eNewspapers. :)

The Nook's New Look - From stylish and minimalist to glossy and "Windows XP" like.

Footnote: The latest update to the Nook has really transformed it into a very capable device which negates most of the original concerns I mentioned in an earlier review. Although I prefer the Nook, there are still three important features missing which are available in the Kindle, the ability to export notes, rotation of display and the sorting of books by date.

In September 2009 I began teaching in Mourne Independent Christian School, a small private Primary and Secondary school in Kilkeel. Along with my teaching responsibilities I also inherited the privilege (and it is actually a privilege) of setting the IT policy and managing the IT infrastructure. With the blessing of the principal and school committee I set about replacing the ageing computer room expanding the network to allow teachers to have IT resources in their classrooms. Through the Community Microsoft Authorised Refurbisher (MAR) programme, we were able to get  2-3 year old, ex-governement Dell desktops, very capable machines which met our requirements and then some. Although having never heard about it before this programme allows WEEE disposal contractors to refresh and resell old hardware.A few weeks ago we took delivery (actually I collected in the back of a Vauxhall Agila) of our new desktops and over the course of the past week, with the help of some very eager pupils, we stripped out the old and connected up the new.

Open source software has always been of great interest to me, both from a moral and from a geek point of view. I've always preferred Linux as an alternative Operating System to Windows and especially over the last few years it has grown into an incredibly useable everyday system. The maturity of the Ubuntu distribution would allow us to have a secure, reliable and fully loaded learning platform, for free, which would work the way we wanted. Without even a second thought the decision was made to switch from Windows to Ubuntu 9.10 (with Edubuntu packages installed) for desktops, using the default GNOME desktop for high school pupils and the OLPC Sugar interface for the primary school. Having tested it in Parallels, for a server we choose  Ebox, itself based on Ubuntu 8.04. Configuring it as a content filter, print, file and OpenLDAP server we have been able to set it, and the Ubuntu desktops, so that each pupil and staff member has a roaming profile with private and public networked Documents folders. Having installed several similar, larger Window Server based solutions, this was not only easier, more user friendly and free but after a long hard week it was a real feel good moment to see the new computer room booted up for the first time yesterday.

With ICT classes resuming after half term, pupils in the midst of CLAIT exams will be able use Microsoft Office under CX Office, but by September all pupils will have migrated to OpenOffice.org.



Teachers will have to learn the new system, but as some have already commented its very user friendly and intuitive. The biggest challenge will be fully utilise the huge range of educational software available in our lesson plans. I don't think it'll take long, the level of excitement and interest among staff and student alike is not something you'd see after rolling out another C2K network. Ubuntu is going to be a real asset to the school for the foreseeable future and as a friend alluded to earlier will help produce pupils with some real IT skills.

So reads the strap line for Barnes & Noble Nook. For those of you who aren't familiar with American book retailers, Wikipedia says:

Barnes & Noble, Inc. is the largest book retailer in the United States, operating mainly through its Barnes & Noble Booksellers chain of bookstores headquartered in lower Fifth Avenue in Manhattan.

I should mention at this point that I have a great fondness for Barnes & Noble, having visited this amazing (and huge) store in Baltimore in 2000, it may have had something to do with this being the first book shop I'd ever been in which had a cafe (great idea btw.)

Equatable with Waterstone's here in the UK, B&N operate both on the high street and online, selling physical and electronic books and a range of ebook readers. In late 2009 B&N launched their own reader, the Nook, into an increasingly crowded marketplace, in direct competition with Amazon's Kindle 2. In what would seem to be lessons learnt from competitors, Amazon and Sony, the Nook featured both a 6" e-ink display and an LCD touchscreen, avoiding the Kindle's sluggish e-ink based menu navigation and the glare from the Reader Touch. Powered by Android and featuring both an AT&T 3G Sim and Wifi for OTA purchases, on first glance the Nook seemed to represent the next generation of ebook readers, but after initial reviews hit the internet, it seemed that was not the case. The Nook's Android (1.5) OS was accused of being unstable and buggy and page turns were slooow. Hackers at Nookdevs discovered the whole operating system ran of a MicroSD card, which gave users the impression that the slowness was a hardware problem, rather than a problem that could be fixed with firmware. Along with delays of Christmas Nook orders (well into the new year) and the talk of an impending "Kindle killer" from Apple, the Nook seems to have dropped from off the tech radar entirely for most people. I am not most people.

After determining my Kindle DX was just too big for reading novels (in the interim, my usage patterns had changed along with my job) and so after selling the DX, my options seemed to be the aforementioned Kindle 2 or the Sony Reader Touch. After checking out Mark's Sony Touch I felt the glare was too much for me; I liked the idea of the International 3G on the Kindle 2, but it's limited to Amazon and Wikipedia only, so not a huge advantage then. The Nook, on the other hand, had in the interim received two firmware updates, improving speed and stability, had been rooted (similar to jailbreaking an iPhone) and could now run a Web browser, Pandora and could download directly from Stanza and Calibre libraries using Trook. All using wifi, meaning they would work in the UK, unlike the Nook's 3G, starting to sound good?

Thanks to USUnlocked.com I was able to order a Nook and have it sent to the UK, for less than the price of a Kindle 2 (which adds tax, shipping and customs charges to its base price) and have been putting it through it's paces over the past week. Initially I had planned a technical review in this post, but after some sage advice, I'm going to hold it off for another time along the some hi-res photos. Leaving this post to focus on my initial hands on reaction.

• The packaging is pretty, Apple pretty, but nigh on impossible to get into, unless you are a member of mensa. In fact it's so nice, that I've used the sleeve and an old moleskine notebook to create a tidy case.

• The Nook is solid, but heavy, my wife reckons that it's heavier than the Kindle DX, but Wikipedia disagrees.

• I've read that the design of the Nook is plasticky and cheap looking, but I find it quite stylish.

• It fits nicely into your hand thanks to an ergonomically curved back.

• All ebook readers should come with the default screensaver saying "Don't Panic." It should become law or something.

• Boot-up takes forever and a day, although resume from sleep is very fast, possibly faster than the Kindle.

• Once you update to firmware 1.1.1 page turns are fine, not bearable, not slower than the Kindle, fine, meaning not a problem.

• Once rooted you can do all kinds of fun stuff like replacing fonts (I like Georgia) and using Trook, letting me download books and news feeds from my Calibre library

• The touch screen is not an iPhone, but it's useable, more so than the Kindle DX's keyboard

• Unless you turn Airplane mode on and set the touchscreen backlight timer to 10s, the battery drains within a day or two. With those set, you might get a week, we'll see.

• Like the Kindle the Nook doesn't use folders to sort books, unlike the Kindle it offers no sort options, books seem to order themselves whatever way they feel.

• Removing the back cover is ok, but it makes scary cracking noises, so be brave.

• Inside you have a MicroSD slot, removable battery (sort of) and a sim card, remove more of the casing and as reported there is another MicroSD slot containing the file system and OS.

• I like the size and shape.

• The screen has great contrast and is helped further by the black strip around it. With black text on a grey screen, I'm surprised so many e-readers come in white, the black helps create an optical illusion that the grey background is whiter than it really is, making it more readable. True fact.

• B&N's store has access to Google's library of 1 million e-books, I've found some real gems that don't even show up on the Google Books website. Getting these on a Kindle was a nightmare, well, not as easy.

• There is no rotate function, because:

• PDF reflow is awesome, you can scale up the fonts in any document (providing it has fonts), similar to the Sony Reader Touch.

• PDB files can be searched quicker and jumped about in faster than EPUBs.

The Nook has been a pleasant surprise, it has its flaws, which I'll go into in my next post, but overall it's a great device. Is it the world's most advanced e-book reader? Probably not, especially when technology moves so fast. Is it the best e-book reader for me? Only time will tell.

I'd love to hear what my readers think about e-book readers, do you have one, would you buy another, what features do they need, or is there no point to them at all? Leave a comment below.

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The Open Coffee idea was born in London "to encourage entrepreneurs, developers and investors to organise real-world informal meetups to chat, network and grow."

Started one year ago, and held on alternative Friday mornings, the Open Coffee Lisburn branch has proven to be a huge success, drawing in techies, bloggers, entrepreneurs and more. Most importantly this random, free and open networking group has, for a lot of us, created real-world friendships.

The openness and social nature of Open Coffee, compared to the strict regimented structure of other business networking groups, such as BNI means that we can try different things. So on Saturday 16 January, we'll be having our first Open Coffee Lisburn outside of Lisburn, in Banbridge. "On Tour" as I like to call it, we'll be meeting at 9:30AM in Starbucks at The Outlet. With most attendees being married and with kids, we encourage you to bring the family along too, it'll be a great social event.

If you've never been along to an Open Coffee meeting, this is the perfect opportunity to come along and meet the group.

You can contact us on twitter through http://twitter.com/oclisburn
The majority of us are on Google Wave and if you add me, I can invite you to the group - andrewgribben.com@googlewave.com
And finally, you can keep up with our events by subscribing to our iCal

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Psalm 100:5 - For the LORD is good; his mercy is everlasting; and his truth endureth to all generations.

Happy New Year!

A few weeks ago I started my own project and corresponding Facebook group for what soon became known as the Open Bible Project. The goal being to produce a version of the Scriptures for various e-book readers which, within the constraints of the device, has a useable user interface and readable layout.

Many, many versions already exist around the web, but either have hideously formatted text or are far too unwieldy to fit into typical usage patterns for the Bible. Of course others have been working on this problem, Osnova has produced several Bibles and developed a jump to verse technique using the search function of the device. Type ge.1.10 and find and the reader will jump to the Genesis chapter 1 verse 10.

I've used a similar technique, by hiding a code for chapter using white coloured text (doesn't show on the device but is still searchable) you can enter Gen.1, Matt.1 etc and the reader leaps to the correct chapter. As far as the reading experience goes, each verse flow into one another, with verse numbers showing in a smaller font.

Very soon I'll have an Open Bible Project website up and running, hosting the scriptures and various reference books online. Each user of the website will be able to annotate, highlight and link text across books of the Bible and the reference library. This customised version of the Bible will be available (freely) as a download for use on your reader, bringing those highlights, notes and links with it.

We've got our Google Wave invites and while we figure out what it actually does and wait for what comes next, all we really have is another method to communicate with each other, that we actually have to login to and check. Unlike email, twitter and facebook which we are being prompted about regularly and are in the habit of checking, whole conversations could be going on in wave that we won't realise until we decide to give it another go next month and see what the fuss is all about. But now thanks to the Prowl iPhone app, we can have push notifications coming from the desktop wave client wrapper, Waveboard

Here's the steps you'll need to get started.

• First off it's really handy if you have a spare computer which you leave running, so you get notifications when you're out.


• You'll need Growl for this to work


• Prowl for iPhone and the Prowl plugin


• In the Growl system prefs make sure that the default notification is set to Prowl


• Visit http://www.getwaveboard.com and download the installer and let it do it's thing (Mac Only)


• Install and run Waveboard. At the moment it's a wrapper for the website but with a few nice features added; hotkeys, status bar icon etc

What should happen is when you get a new wave, or an existing wave is updated, Waveboard will send the notification to Growl which in turn will Push out the Prowl app on your trusty iPhone and look like this:

Waveboard also offer an iPhone app which can be launched from the Prowl notification, it's £0.59 and is'nt much more than a wrapper, although I'm sure it will improve over time, but I decided to stick with Google's webapp version. Just browse over to http://wave.google.com, accept the warning that your browser isn't supported and you should see webapp version of Wave. At this point you can add it as a bookmark to the homescreen, giving you a nice Wave icon and remove those browser controls. It's flakey but it quite useable.

I'm not sure what will come from Wave, it could be the next Gmail, or the next Orkut, either way it'll be an interesting journey.

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I've been using the Amazon Kindle DX, in the UK, for a while now and have grown to love it's ability to display PDF, more than any other feature. Until recently once feature which I had never really used was subscribing to Newspapers, that is until I discovered Calibre.

Calibre is a free, open source, cross-platform ebook management software. It's like iTunes (the way it used to be) for books, but kinda uglier. Looks may not be it's strong point, but it is great for managing your library, converting formats (DRM free of course), renaming books and meta information individually or en masse. One feature I hadn't made use of, was it's ability to generate a newspaper from an RSS feed. What surprised me even further was that on the DX, the newspaper displayed in the exact same way, with a section list etc, as the newspapers from Amazon. Very nice when the blog or news site you use doesn't have and issue to buy on Amazon, even nicer when you're in the UK and Amazon have blocked purchases from outside the US.

But wait, it doesn't stop there, Calibre goes as far as to contain "recipes" which are used to scrape text from certain websites. Web page scraping might be a controversial feature, but if you want a newspaper created from BBC News or a your unread Google Reader articles, then there's a recipe for that. It's even possible to customise your recipe by adding new feeds, so my BBC Newspaper now contains a section for news in Northern Ireland just after the headlines. You can see how it turns out, below.

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As explained yesterday, the blog had a slight mishap which resulted in me spamming twitter, well his is what I've been up to. I'm trying to link the various social networks I make use of, through the blog, outputting to twitter and Facebook; one look at my blog will show my lifestream of posts, photos, videos, bookmarks and links in one neat time-ordered list.

So far delicious and two flickr accounts are being imported and a Feedburner feed of all the posts and twitter and Facebook updates going out.

Anyone following my twitter feed (@grib) got a bit of a shock last night as they were bombarded by around 50 tweets, over a period of a few minutes. Sorry about that!

What happened was that I was trying to link a few social network sites together; I wanted photos posted to flickr to automatically create a blog post and then for the blog to send out a tweet. Sure you can do this with posterous, but any blog posts created have photos linked back to their site, not flickr.

Using RSS and the WP-O-Matic plugin I had planned for a new post to be created when new photos were added to flickr's RSS feed. But... I forgot I had the other plugin turned on, TwitterTools which automatically sends out a tweet for each post and you can image what happened.

So for anyone following me in various clients including SMS (@wiseguyrussell), I humbly ask for your forgiveness and promise that next time I'm working without enough sleep, I'll be more careful.

I've had a few requests since posting this on twitter, so here's your very own Kindle DX "Don't Panic" screensaver, which can be installed using this hack.

The ever pleasant, ever knowledgeable Steve Leighton of Has Bean fame, kindly lent me a prototype coffee roaster last month at the cost of a review. Being me, I promptly got caught up forgot about it and so last night was actually the first time I got to power it on.

For those of you that have never heard of the Behmor 1600, it's a home coffee roaster that's been on sale in the States for a while now and the developer of it will soon(?) be releasing a model that works on the juicier 240V we have at this side of the Atlantic. What's so special about this roaster you ask? Well as Tom at Sweet Maria's says "There's finally a home coffee roaster that can truly do a full pound of coffee!" that's 453g in new money. That's a great weight, roughly twice what I can roast in my Gene Cafe and it has a host of amazing features, quiet roasts, smoke free, consistent roasts etc.

So what did I think of it?
Well first off, it's a great size, pretty much the same a our microwave, which means it can happily sit on the worktop and not look like a warp core which keeps my wife happy.


The control panel looks quite complicated and the manual even more so. I can almost forgive that, as the major of users will be coffee geeks, but I had to read it through twice just to be sure I was doing things right and that does seem excessive, either that I was just having a really stupid day, who knows?

The smokeless filter is a nice touch and does a really good job up to a Full City (ish) level, after that you're likely to get a charcoal'd bean anyway, but as a lb of colombian decaff found out last night, no amount of smoke filtering will help when your beans roasted to the point of starting a fire. Which brings me to the negative...

Visibility. Frankly it's terrible. Due to the nature of the machine you really have to open the door and remove the chaff tray during the roast (which will affect the internal temperature) to have a good look at the beans. The above problem happened because I ended up shining a maglite in to see how the roast was getting on and completely misjudged it. This paragraph was originally going to be quite scathing, but I found out after cleaning there is actually a light inside the roaster (the clue being the button marked "light" on the panel. So maybe I was having a stupid day after all) however the bulb in this model wasn't working, I'm assuming it's just went during transit/usage or because it's a protoype, but I'll get that replaced today and I'm sure it'll be a help.

In summary, the Behmor 1600 is an innovative roaster which is intended to live in your kitchen, like any other appliance, with a wide range of temperature profiles and settings it more than makes up for over complicated instructions and will probably help you understand the coffee roasting process better anyway.

In the next part of my review I'll be looking at the pre-set curves and range of roasts available and then wrap up by comparing and cupping roasts against my other home roasters.

Remember these are just my initial thoughts and I will continue to make posts as I roast with it more.

I'm sure many of you have will know what I'm talking about when I say it is very hard to keep track of all your online social interactions these days, tweets, blog posts, comments, bookmarks, videos and more!

To help us keep our sanity as we traverse the Social Multiverse™ several useful tools have been created; FriendFeed will aggregate most of the sites you contribute to into one twitteresque page, allowing comments to be made in one place, but unfortunately outside of the environment of the original post. Other tools, such as coComment or co.mments, keep track of conversations by aggregating your comments, from multiple sites, into one place, with browser plugins installed to automate it.

I've been using both these solutions for sometime now, to both feed my sidebar and help keep track of interesting discussions. Recently I've discovered Yahoo! Pipes, which according to Wikipedia, is:

...a web application from Yahoo! that provides a graphical user interface for building applications that aggregate web feeds, web pages, and other services, creating Web-based apps from various sources, and publishing those apps.

I've used it to pull my feeds from blogs, twitter, youtube, flickr and any discussions I'm tracking all into one time ordered feed. Pipes that you create can be made public so that other users can create clones based on their information my source is available here, just paste in your feed URL's and you're good.

I have plans to modify my pipe further, as at the moment it is a fairly basic RSS aggregator and other examples on Yahoo! Pipes put it to shame.

What other methods do people use to keep track and stay current?