Monthly Archives: August 2008

You’ve got (too much) mail

Here’s a simple idea:

Imagine if your email server got a little bit slower each time you checked for new messages during the day.

Just a few seconds longer each time would quickly add up, if you’re one of those people who live in their inbox all day.

By later in the day it would take a couple of minutes to actually see any new messages,  That would probably be enough to break the “Get New Mail” habit.

And knowing that you only have a few opportunities for a quick response time each day would force you to be a bit more conscious about when you want to do that.

What do you think?  Would you appreciate some tough love from your email server?  If that option were available, would you use it, or are you addicted to email on demand 24/7?

400m

The Olympics are done for another four years.  

Here’s a physical challenge for those of us who have spent the last two weeks (or the last two years!) sitting on our behinds urging others to go faster/higher/stronger…

How long do you think it would take you to run 400m?

Just one lap of an athletics track.

Why not try it out this week.  

Go as fast as you can.

Here is a target time to aim at:

Nick Willis ran the last 400m of his 1500m final race for bronze in just 54 seconds.

If that sounds too hard (and, without wanting to be unkind, it will be FAR too hard for most of us), how about this:

Catherine Ndereba of Kenya and Zhou Chunxiu of China, who got the silver and bronze medals respectively in the women’s marathon completed the last 400m of their race in about 1 minute 16 seconds.

If even that feels beyond you keep in mind they had run over 40km prior to starting that final lap.

Amazing.

What’s your best time?

The Key To Happiness

The key to happiness is apparently simple: low expectations and unsuccessful friends.

If you believe that then I should be a miserable wreck. I have neither!  Good thing happiness is over-rated. :-)

Here is an article by Peter Griffin from the July/August issue of Idealog about the multi-talented Nigel Stanford, possibly the most successful person you’ve never heard of, and one of my old friends who continues to motivate me to do more:

The Road To Rubber Monkey

The best quote:
“It sounds terrible but the gift I have is the ability to think like a stupid person.”

Mobile Banking [Guest Post]

This is a guest post by Jay Nielson from Kiwibank. Enjoy!

To coincide with the launch of the iPhone in New Zealand, we at Kiwibank decided to launch a new Mobile Internet Banking system. We knew from the start that we wanted to support many different devices, but unfortunately, we were stuck with a full timeline of just three weeks. We had this time to design, build, test and implement essentially a new Internet banking platform and we had one developer and one tester to do it.

My name is Jay Nielson and I was that developer and I’m hoping that this guest post that Rowan has allowed me to write will give a bit of insight into how we approached this project, some issues we came across, some of the tricks we found and lessons we learnt especially for developing for the iPhone.

We launched the first version of the site in July with basic support for the iPhone. Of course, we wanted full support for many devices, but the iPhone was going to bring the publicity that a basic site may not be able to. Behind the scenes we set up the architecture of the site to be able to dish out completely different code depending on the device.  We were able to include different style sheets as necessary and, of course, different images.

For example in the latest version, the login page is designed to fit the device if you’re browsing on an iPhone but is stripped down if you’re browsing on a simple Sony Ericsson phone.

iPhone Login Page

Mobile Phone Login Page

We knew from the start that there were other mobile sites out there but the difference between us and them is that we never meant to have just a single version of the site.

We had the basic design used on some of our other websites from our design company (Springload in Wellington) to use as a base. Because our current site is written in classic ASP (and I know that site inside out) I decided that the limited amount of time we had meant that the site was going to be built with the older technology, with a rewrite at a later stage.

I developed it with a very rudimentary controller/presenter system where I bought all the page logic out from the presenters and left them to render the page as they needed. This was the way I managed to easily add new device support – with the page logic separated out (and most of the presentation data bundled into classes) adding new device support was easy. As for detecting the different devices we found plenty of information on the net about which phones use which user agent strings, it was just a matter of finding the common attributes and taking them out. In all there are about 20 checks to determine the 6 different devices (iPhone, Browser, Windows Mobile, Mobile, PalmOS and Blackberry)

We decided to include the 90% most used features of our Java mobile application:

  • View Accounts;
  • View Transactions; and
  • Transfer funds.

We restricted funds movement to only within your own accounts, which allowed us to defer implementing the KeepSafe security used on our other sites.

The trick with all of this is getting the site working as a web page but looking like an iPhone application that people are familiar with. This meant big buttons, simple layout, uncluttered and to the point. Our friends at Springload helped immensely at this stage.

The biggest issue we had with the iPhone (apart from being able to only test on a Mac) was the fixed width.  Browsing the web on the iPhone is pretty simple. The device can render the page using Safari and you simply zoom in and out with a pinch motion with your fingers. Now, there are META tags you can add to the heading of the page to restrict the zoom levels and while they are pretty straight forward, but the device would never seem to return the text back to the font size it was to begin with after you rotate it to landscape mode. A bit of research was needed and we found the following code seemed to overcome it:

<meta name="viewport" content="user-scalable=no" />

<meta name="viewport" content="initial-scale=1.0" />

<meta name="viewport" content="maximum-scale=0.6667;" />

<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width" />

<meta name="format-detection" content="telephone=no" />

The first four lines dictates that with width and zoom levels are to be static while the final one stops our accounts numbers being turned into phone numbers for auto dialing!

iPhone Accounts Page – with option to rotate to widescreen for more detail

With the iPhone version of the site working it was release time. We got it live the day before launch and have received positive reviews. As far as marketing it went, we decided to keep it a little low key and went more for word of mouth with a single press release rather than full page newspaper ads. It worked well. As far as our estimates are concerned, we had about 10% of the iPhone sold in New Zealand logging in and the only limiting factor was that no one could buy any more – we’re still waiting for our three to arrive!

Something else we tried which we haven’t done much before is to be quite open about it. We posted on blogs, answering questions people had and set up email addresses for feedback. We knew this was going to be an iterative process and took steps early on to get the feedback from customers that we needed.

With the launch a success we looked to the future. We had given out an email address for people to post their ideas about the site and the number one requested feature was support for Windows Mobile, so of course that was a priority in the new release. There were a few layout issues as well we needed to fix, but we also decided to try out hand at multiple language support.

A little addition that I wanted to sneak in was changing the page layout to display more information if the iPhone is rotated to landscape. There are a few issues at this stage, but the concept works perfectly. On Rowan’s post about us, the comments got into renaming accounts. I added that functionality in as well after the discussions there.

The latest version of the site, launched this week, now has the extra features we wanted including support for multiple languages, starting with English (the default), Russian (as the tester’s wife could speak Russian and it was a perfect way to test international character sets) and my favourite, Swedish Chef Bork Bork language, for a bit of fun (Bork! Bork! Bork!). All the language strings needed to be taken out and are stored in a database which is then cached in the session for the customer when they first log in (or change their language). I created a C# GUI front end to that database to allow us to update/add new string values without a full release of the code. In reality, we could release Arabic tomorrow without any updates to production. The language strings are per device and per language. So for mobile, if needed, we can summarise a lot more text as it has a smaller screen real estate.

Login Page – Russian

Login Page – Swedish Chef!!

The new version of the site works on the iPhone, Windows Mobile devices and mobile phones with sufficient browsers.

To top it off we have even been nominated for three TUANZ awards, including innovation of the year so wish us luck on the 28th.

We’re always looking for new ideas and feedback and would love to hear it. You can email us at mobile.ideas@kiwibank.co.nz

From Rowan:

Given that most of their competitors measure their progress in months or even quarters, I think it’s great to see a bank turning something like this around in just three weeks.  And also to iterate quickly – already they have released a second version which incorporates a lot of the feedback they’ve received following the launch.

Plus can you imagine any other bank launching a Swedish Chef version of their site?  It’s fantastic!

What do you think?  If you’re a Kiwibank customer, how do you find this application?  If not, would a good mobile app be enough to make you switch?

I’m interested in your comments.

Also, if you’re interested in writing a guest post here about something you’re working on please feel free to get in touch.  My email address is on the right hand sidebar.

iPhone Upgrade

I picked up a 2G iPhone when I was in the US earlier in the year.

I’ve been meaning to write a review here for a while.  

Here is the short version: I love it!

Upgrading to a new 3G model doesn’t really interest me for now. I’ve added 200MB of mobile data to my existing cheap plan, and have never come close to using all of that.  So, I don’t need to upgrade to get on a better plan … in fact, it would cost me more and I’d be locked in, so I don’t really see the incentive there.  

And it doesn’t really seem to me that there are any really compelling functional, or even aesthetic, reasons to switch.  

Am I missing something?  

Until yesterday, I haven’t even felt the need to upgrade my software.  

Then Cultured Code announced an iPhone version of Things which syncs with the desktop.  That will do it for me.

So, I’m looking for somebody who can help me upgrade.  

According to iTunes I’m currently running v1.1.3.  I’d be interested to talk to anybody who has done this successfully.  I’m hoping it’s as easy as the initial unlock and jailbreak.

Also, while I’m at it …

Prior to the iPhone I used a Windows Mobile phone, and used Missing Sync to sync with my address book and calendar.  When I say sync I’m talking mostly theoretically.  It never really worked properly, randomly changing contact details around and dropping appointments into the ether.  

Very frustrating, and not really recommended at all!

What’s more, even though the software is now removed, it’s left some muddy footprints in my network settings:

There are literally hundreds of those dead connections listed.  I can only guess that it created a new entry each time I connected the phone to sync, and never cleaned up after itself.  It’s a pain because it means that this settings page takes forever to load, and I’ve also noticed that my Mac takes a long time to switch onto a different network connection (e.g. when I move between wi-fi points, or disconnect an ethernet connection).  Perhaps it’s somehow working through this list to check which connections are available?

Does anybody know a quick way to remove these?  

Any help with this would be much appreciated. :-)

More books…

The books I listed earlier in the week have been selling fast.  I’ve updated the previous post to show which are still available.  Get in quick!

Also, as one observant reader pointed out, I forgot to list my copy of The Dip, which as I mentioned was part of the motivation for this whole exercise. So, that book is now also for sale, plus I’ve just listed a few more new titles that may be of interest to somebody out there:

Have you got a shelf full of books that you won’t read again too?

List them on Fishpond, give somebody else the opportunity to enjoy them, turn them into cash and replace them with some new ideas.

It’s all good!

Callaghan Files

Last year I went along to hear a lecture by Professor Paul Callaghan, who is head of the MacDiarmid Institute at Victoria University, called “Beyond The Farm And Themepark”.

It was an excellent thought provoking presentation which I recommend to anybody who is interested in NZs place in the world.

Set aside 90 minutes and watch it online here:

Hot Science – Beyond The Farm And Themepark

Here is the description from that site:

Leading science communicator, Professor Paul Callaghan, outlines his vision for New Zealand’s future prosperity in this lecture at Auckland War Memorial Museum as part of The Royal Society of New Zealand 2007 Distinguished Speaker series. Converting most of our forest into greenhouse gas has given us an abundance of grass and a thriving dairy industry. Yet through good fortune and some wise heads, we have, notwithstanding attempts to subdue it, sufficient residual natural environment to claim the label “clean and green”. Our landscape is magnificent and helps define who we are. But this lecture will argue that we have the potential to be a great deal more besides, and that we must be if we are to build the society we want our children to thrive in. It will argue that we can enhance our prosperity through sensible investment in science and technology, coupled with culture change. The first part is the easy bit. The second requires self-belief and a sense of purpose. David Lange once said New Zealand’s destiny was to be a theme park (and Australia’s, a quarry). We can surely think and act beyond that. Indeed New Zealand is such an interesting place to live precisely because we are so capable of determining our future.

There has also been a series of interviews with prominent NZ business people running on Stratos over the last few months.  Unfortunately I think this channel is only available to Sky Digital subscribers, and probably even them most of those will be blissfully unaware of it.  But, the interviews themselves are available on the MacDiarmid website:

The Paul Callaghan Interviews

What do you make of all of this?  Do you agree with his suggestions?

Or are we happy being well regarded as farmers and tour guides?

Read any great books lately?

Read any great books lately?  If so, what did you do with them when you finished them?

Earlier this year Seth Godin encouraged everybody who had purchased a copy of his latest book The Dip to sell or give away their copy, in an effort to double the number of people who had read it.  It’s a good thought.

So, encouraged by that, I’ve decided to follow my own advice and clear out some space on my bookshelf.

<shameless plug>

This also gives me a great chance to try out the “Sell Yours” feature on Fishpond, where anybody can list second-hand books for sale and they appear on the site along side the new titles.

</ shameless plug>

If any of the titles below sound interesting to you it would be good to give them a new home – they are priced to sell from $9.95 and all at a significant discount to the price of a new copy.  I should also say, by way of promotion, that I’m a bit of a pedant when it comes to keeping books like new, so in most cases you’ll hardly be able to tell it’s not a new copy.

And, if you have a bookshelf full of ideas that could also be shared you might like to do the same (and maybe add a link to your list of items for sale in the comments here, so others can find them).

Books for sale:

Note: I listed most of these a couple of days ago and some have already sold.  Plus I have some more on the shelf that I haven’t had time to list yet.  Check the site for an up-to-date list of the titles still available for sale.  And, if the title you wanted is already sold, I’m sorry but I only have one of each to sell – you could always buy a new copy (use the same links above).

Day Six

Some random observations from the first six days of the Olympics:

  • High Definition is just spectacular.  I’m definitely going to be watching less television after these two weeks, because going back to standard definition now is just painful.
  • Freeview has also exceeded my (admittedly somewhat low) expectations. Getting it setup was as simple as a visit to Dick Smiths.  I plugged it in and it more or less set itself up. Nice!
  • The additional “TVNZ Sports Extra” channel is a great.  It was excellent, for example, to be able to watch uninterrupted coverage of the equestrian cross-country event earlier in the week and the cycling road time trials yesterday, both of which only featured on TV One later and even then heavily edited.  Although, I wonder why it’s not broadcast in HD too?  Is there a technical limitation behind this?
  • Related to that: if TVNZ have the rights to all of this content, why don’t we have 10 channels of uninterrupted coverage on Freeview showing all of the different sports?  I’m not really into the gymnastics (or handball, weightlifting, judo, fencing, etc), but I’m sure there are people out there who are so let people choose what they want (see: The Long Tail).
  • What’s with all of our medal chances getting sick?  Have they checked that there are no South Africans on the catering staff in the athletes village?  And, would it have been so bad for Mahe Drysdale to tell us he was sick beforehand, rather than leaving us all to suffer through the last 500m of his race assuming he was just knackered?
  • If Peter Montgomery says “red light, warning, warning” during a rowing commentary again and we lose, will he be allowed back in the country?
  • Getting fourth sucks, doesn’t it!  But, gosh there are a lot of losers at the Olympics: Moss Burmester, for example, was fourth out of a field of forty-four qualifiers.  For him even the 6th fastest time ever was not good enough for a medal.  It’s tough eh!
  • The star of the games so far for me: the slalom kayaker from Togo … just like Eric The Eel, but actually good at his event! (go on and click the Eric link above if you didn’t already … it’s a brilliant Roy and HG commentary of his race in 2000)
  • Does it matter that the giants footprints in the opening ceremony were faked?  Likewise, does it matter that the aforementioned kayaker from Togo actually lives in France and, in fact, hasn’t been back to Togo since he was a baby?
  • Ouch (also, on video, if you can stomach it)
  • Have you noticed how TV3 now has a whole separate row in their daily medal table for Michael Phelps?  They’ve also quietly dropped the NZ medal count which used to be in it’s place.  So far, he’s ahead of all other countries except for Germany, South Korea and China.  And, in fact, is equal with all of the other members of the US team combined!
  • Speaking of Phelps, how come he never gets a tummy bug?  The worst that seems to happen to him is that his goggles fall off, and even then it only means that he doesn’t get to break the world record en route to winning another gold medal.  
  • Has anybody remembered that the All Blacks are playing this weekend?
  • Isn’t it sad that the first thing that crosses the mind of the CEO of New Zealand Equestrian Federation when he watches Andrew Nicholson fall off his horse a couple of days back is not: “bugger, there goes the medal chances” but instead: “bugger, that’s going to stuff our funding!” 
  • Finally, here is a good question for a pub quiz: which country is represented by the three-letter code: IRI?  According to Wikipedia it’s Iran.  I can understand why they might not have wanted IRA, but surely IRN would have been a more sensible choice  Also, further down that page is an explanation for why Malaysia is MAS not MAL.

That will do for now … the sofa beckons.

CORRECTION: It turns out that Michael Phelps did in fact break the world record, even without goggles.  And Moss Burmester is the 6th fastest individual over 200m butterfly, not the 6th fastest time ever (which I imagine actually all belong to said Mr Phelps?)

Speedy-ness

The iPhone has been a catalyst for a number of mobile versions of popular sites, including many I use most days:

Xero, NZ Herald (*), TripIt, Kiwibank, Google Reader.

(*) if you haven’t discovered m.nzherald.co.nz I recommend you check it out – I’ve completely abandoned Stuff since they launched this.

I’m interested to see how these mobile versions have been designed.

They don’t try and cram in too many features.  They use super large fonts and large buttons, and as a result there is not a lot of room on each page for too much noise.  The things you can click (or do we say “touch” now?) are immediately obvious.

They are not bogged down by lots of unnecessary images or scripts … so they are FAST!

Here is a quick comparison of the corresponding login/home pages:

Site Version Page Size Download
Xero Standard 938.4kB 7.86s
Mobile 12.7kB 2.92s
TripIt Standard 334.2kB 8.15s
Mobile 13.7kB 1.78s
NZ Herald Standard 595.8kB 8.89s
Mobile 126.5kB 3.58s
Kiwibank Standard 69.5kB 4.79s
Mobile 34.3kB 3.06s
Google Reader Standard 71.1kB 3.82s
Mobile 3.7kB 1.12s

I realise that this is completely unscientific.  For example, I used an empty cache in each case.  No doubt many of these sites are faster the second time you visit because of caching.  I also tested only one load of each page, and there are any number of things which could have caused the speed to vary.  And it’s a somewhat random sample of sites to choose.  But, I hope it is a rough drawing of the point I’m trying to make nonetheless – that is, the mobile versions are much smaller and as a result much faster to load.

I wonder how much of this thinking will filter back into the main standard browser versions of these sites?

Hopefully designers and developers will start to see the benefits of some of these things (less design, bigger fonts, etc) into ALL of the sites they work on, whether intended for mobile users or not.

At the extreme of this trend is a site like Muxtape which only has a mobile version of their site.  If you visit using a normal browser, you get the mobile version – a simple, fast-loading page with big obvious design elements.  In other words, you get a great usable webpage.

Which makes me wonder … if I’m just wanting to see the latest headlines, check my balances or lookup a travel booking, why wouldn’t I load the mobile version of these sites in my standard browser, rather than waiting around for the full versions?

Loving TripIt

I’ve raved about TripIt here before.  But, it’s worth repeating.  If you travel a lot and don’t use this service you’re missing out.

Here are a couple of aspects of their service which I’ve only recently discovered, which make it even better …

1. m.tripit.com

They now have a version of their site designed specifically for mobile browsers, so you can quickly and easily get details of your itinerary and bookings from your phone on the go.

They’ve even included a “Check Flight Status” link for upcoming flight bookings, which is very handy.

More information

2 iCal feeds

Previously whenever I booked flights I would manually add the details to my calendar – including times and flight numbers etc.  I would also usually enter an all-day appointment for the days I was away, so I didn’t accidentally make other appointments when I would be out of town.

TripIt can take care of all of that for you automatically.

Just add the iCal feed to your calendar and any trips and flight bookings will automatically show up on the appropriate dates.

Those two things aside, the single greatest feature of TripIt is still the complete lack of data entry required – just forward on the confirmation emails you get from airlines, hotels and rental car companies and they will pull them all together into an itinerary for you automatically.

Magic!

Ozzy, Ozzy, Ozzy

The Olympics kick-off tonight.

So, with Freeview HD ready and waiting and 18 fewer hours per day to be writing blog posts things might be a little quieter around here over the next couple of weeks. :-)

Lance links to a great interactive Olympic Medal Map from the NY Times.

As you drag the slider along it’s interesting to see how pre-WWII the Olympics were dominated by Europe and the USA,  then along comes the Soviet Union and East Germany (apart from 1984 in LA, when NZ won a record 8 gold medals), then become much more global in more recent times the medals start to be spread around Asia, South America and Africa (with the exception of 1976, when African countries boycotted, and John Walker won the 1500m).

And, as Lance notes, in the last couple of Olympics the main talking point has been the rise and rise of Australia.  From winning no golds at all in Montreal to 4th place on the medal table in both Sydney and Athens with 16 and 17 gold respectively.  As Richie might say: “fine effort that”.

At the Athens games they even passed us on a per capita basis, where we normally do pretty well.

These tables (from the Google cache as the original site is no longer) show the medal rankings from the Athens games by population and by GDP:

By Population (Australia 3rd with 0.85 gold medals per million people; NZ 7th with 0.74 per million)

By GDP (NZ: 21st; Australia: 25th)

The big winner is Cuba, who is 3rd by both measures.

So, what about predictions for this time around…

The Australian Olympic Committee is predicting they will win 44 medals, 20 of them gold.  So to match that on a per capita basis we’d need to win 9 medals including 4 golds.

(using population numbers from the CIA World Factbook)

Here are the 11 candidates who have a current top-3 world ranking heading into the games: Valerie Vili in athletics; Sarah Walker and Catherine Cheatley in cycling; Mahe Drysdale, the men’s coxless four and coxless pair in rowing; Tom Ashley, Barbara Kendall and Andrew Murdoch in sailing; and Bevan Docherty and Samantha Warriner in triathlon.

In addition to those there are another 28 kiwi athletes who are ranked in the top eight in their events, and keep in mind Hamish Carter was well outside the rankings heading into the triathlon in Athens, and we all know how that ended up.

I think they can do it!

Oi, Oi, Oi!

Bonus (for stats geeks): based on this guys analysis “the number of medals won is roughly proportional to the cube root of the population.”  So there you go!

Bike Stations

This is a great idea…

http://www.bikecentral.co.nz

The idea of leaving the car at home and using a bike to get to and from work is pretty appealing, but still not many people do it.  These guys appear to have solved most of the associated problems, by providing somewhere safe and secure to keep your bike during the day, some showers (for the sweaty ones amongst us), a locker for your riding gear, a place to grab a bite to eat, and even a service area for any urgent bike repairs (and if they can’t fix your problem they’ll lend you a bike to use to get home).

Unfortunately it’s only in Auckland at this stage.  Hopefully their global domination plans include Wellington in the not too distant future!

Virel.org

A while back I was playing with microformats, and changed my contact details in the sidebar of this site to use the hCard format.

It was all a bit academic, until recently when I was contacted by the virel.org spider to say they had picked up my details and automatically included me in their search engine.

It’s interesting to see these things slowly starting to be useful in a wider context.

More info about Virel

How’s the weather?

The tenth most visited NZ site in July with over 500,000 unique browsers…

metservice.co.nz

Yup, that about sums it up doesn’t it!

Trade Me still dominates, with 2.8 million unique browsers and over 1 billion page impressions.  That’s 64% of all recorded domestic page views!  And they’re still hiring.

Meanwhile, according to latest figures there are now 1.5 million internet “subscribers” in New Zealand.  Of these 59% are broadband users (I’m not sure what definition of broadband is used here, but we’ll take it as meaning not-dial-up).  

So, while that has improved a lot in the last year (see my previous post: Broadband usage still under 50% from March 2007), that’s still a lot of dial-up users out there.

I wonder if iPhone users are counted as subscribers yet?

Usage stats from Neilsen Online, subscriber numbers from Statistics New Zealand via NZ Herald