Mobile Presentations on Slideshare

I have two presentations on SlideShare related to mobile technology.

Beyond the iPhone

The first presentation, “Beyond the iPhone,” was given on November 12, 2009 at Stamats SIMTech in Boston, MA. Hopefully from the talk users understand why their higher ed institution may want to explore and deploy a mobile solution, some tips for developing their mobile strategy based on our experience at West Virginia University, and then an overview, with links to solutions, from WVU’s mobile ecosystem. The mobile ecosystem includes using Twitter for mobile reporting, using TextMarks for an SMS solution, using Mobile Web OSP for our mobile web site and using a student-developed iPhone app, iWVU.

Emerging Mobile Tech

The second presentation, “Emerging Mobile Tech,” provides an overview of three emerging trends in mobile tech highlighted by how they’re being implemented at West Virginia University. It discusses how we’re using WVU Mobile Web and iWVU, an iPhone app, for delivering mobile information, how we’re using Layar to dip our toes into augmented reality with an AR campus map for iPhones and Android-based devices, and how we’re using QR codes to help as mobile bookmarks for pushing users to our campus news source.

This article was posted

Introducing Mobile Web OSP 2.0

The code that powers West Virginia University’s mobile site has been released as Mobile Web OSP 2.0. The code is a fork of the original version 0.9 of  the MIT Mobile Web project that can still be found on SourceForge. The highlights include:

You can get more details in the release notes. Screenshots of WVU’s implementation are available on Flickr.

Almost all of the documentation for the original v1.0 release of Mobile Web OSP has been updated. I’m simply missing images that show examples of the styles. The Basic and Touch template documentation will probably be useful for anyone using MIT’s code. Code is available on GitHub.  Feel free to fork the project. For those folks who really like Subversion GitHub now supports Subversion read and write as well.

If you want to stay updated on the project and have a Twitter account you can follow @mobilewebosp. The road map for the project has also been updated.

If you have any questions feel free to drop a line in the comment section below.

This article was posted

Design Patterns #1

I’m always really curious to see what other schools come up with when designing their mobile solutions. I hope to share some of the more unique or interesting ones in a “Design Patterns” series. I’ve included three different takes in my first batch:

Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)

The MIT mobile site is the granddaddy of a few mobile sites out there (including West Virginia University’s). Nice that it degrades gracefully across multiple devices so that pretty much anyone can get at the data. It has an iPhone homescreen-like look for iPhone devices. Some might say that’s not that original but I’ve found that there are very few ways of packing in a whole lot of sections into a very small amount of real estate. If a design functions well then use it. iPhone version on the left and smartphone version on the right.

University of Notre Dame

The University of Notre Dame mobile site is based on the original v0.9 code from MIT. Obviously the main screen looks a bit different that what you see from other MIT-based sites. It was the first MIT-based site that I saw that I had worked in some nice original features like the open computer section and PrayerCast.

The University of Alabama

I saw the University of Alabama’s mobile site pop-up on MobileAwesomeness.com (an interesting site for ideas if you ignore the ratings which seem heavily skewed towards design houses). I really love the clean layout and theme for the site. I also like the clear branding that occurs throughout your use of the site. The choice to use Google Static Maps even on the iPhone is interesting. I have to agree that the weight of the JavaScript even in the mobile optimized version 3 of Google Maps API does make it a hard choice to sometimes to include if you’re looking to make the fastest/lightest site you can (which is sort of the definition of mobile). iPhone version on the left and smartphone version on the right.

Want to be featured?

Want to be featured in a future post on design patterns? Drop me a line.

This article was posted

An Introduction

I guess every blog needs some sort of set-up for a first post (though I’m putting this at the top for the launch). For the last year I’ve been doing mobile development on and off at West Virginia University. We’ve implemented a few mobile sites, released an open source mobile framework, integrated a student developed iPhone app with campus resources, used QR codes and a mobile site in a coordinated campaign, allowed prospective students to check their application status via text messaging… just a boatload of things. This great post from @fienen, ”Best of Mobile Higher Ed Web”, has spurred me to enter the blogging world to share my own experiences as well as tips and tricks related to delivering mobile solutions in a higher ed setting. Hopefully what I share is helpful to those embarking down a similar path.

Oh, one thing to be clear about, I work for the marketing arm of our university. That means I sometimes don’t see the academic uses of tech since I’m not faced with that as a problem set. So the blog as a whole may skew towards marketing.

This article was posted