type=”number”

One of the new HTML5 form options is the number attribute for input fields. This goes hand-in-hand with other attributes such as tel, email, etc. to help define the type of things we’re capturing with those elements.  This gets us away from the general type="text" attribute we’ve been used to for so long.  The other bonus using this attribute is when someone uses it on a touch device it’ll fire a numeric keypad, making it the perfect tool to capture Social Security and credit card numbers. Right?

Well, no. There have been a few hiccups along this Nirvana path for the number attributes use:

1. Apple’s iOS5 introduced separating commas into the field on devices running it
2. The field contains a spinner which increases the number entered by one digit each time
3. It doesn’t always show the “right” numeric keypad on touch devices

I think this comes from mis-understanding exactly what the W3C saw this being used for.  The spec states it is “a precise control for setting the element’s value to a string representing a number“.  The key words they use here are control and string.

Maybe type=”text” isn’t too bad

There’s been a lot of discussion (at work and online) around how to get the “right” keypad to fire, and how to rid ourselves of the separator commas. But I fear this is, as I mentioned on Rob Tarr’s post, us misunderstanding an HTML element such as we used to do with <address>.

So until, as Rob & I suggested in the comments of his post, a different type or additional attribute comes along, we really should not be trying to bend the number attribute to our will.

You see the W3C sees telephone as “Text with no line breaks”.  It is not a number. The same would probably be said for credit card information.  That’s why type=text still works. I’ll be promoting Brad‘s suggestion of using the pattern attribute to display a numeric keypad for touch devices from now on those particular fields.

Now I just have to wait for a time where I need to create a form for the user to “set the element’s value to a string representing a number” and I’ll know what element to use

You see I wasn’t that bothered by the ads, or even by the hunting. The real reason was it became so damn difficult to do anything. The continuous barrage of “upgrades” that were pushed, and multiple windows spawned every-time I clicked a link. But I only went in a few times  year so I was still dithering.

Luckily, GoDaddy’s involvement in the completely misguided H.R. 3261 bill (SOPA) was the final nail-in-the-coffin and, gave me a financial incentive with some companies offering transfer discounts.

Looking around I chose to go with hover.com, whom I heard about on a podcast (B2W I think). I can’t say enough good things about the service I got. Called them up and someone answered, no automated menu, and a couple of questions later they did the transfers for me. Awesome!

Hover still has a discount code of ‘SOPA’ which will get you a transfer for only $9 (until 1/31/12).

Being released in 2012 its one of things that could be (and is) easily dismissed by some quarters, but warmly embraced in others. In this age of faster mobile what could we want with a something like a till receipt printed for us.  The appeal to people like Josh, Warren, and Jeremy is that physical connection with the day-to-day digital world we inhabit.

Is this the first step to a realized ”papernet“? Maybe. This future seems quintessentially British, and the idea of having my digital flotsam printed off in a form that fits right into my Slimmy wallet for that morning coffee sits well with me.

The DMWebsites one was my primary, filling up with family videos & subscription, while the DavidJohnMead one lay barren.

Fast-forward and Google now wants us to link all these disparate accounts together, but there didn’t seem to be any way to rename my DMWebsites one, or migrate it all to DavidJohnMead.  Also I could only link one to my Google profile.

So, looking at the long term, I’ve decided to hook the empty DavidJohnMead one up to my Google account and use it as the primary. My hope is making it easier to share stuff on Google+ etc. But this means re-subscribing and uploading.  It’s never been a huge social hub for me, so maybe this is a good time to clean house in there.

As for the DMWebsites account, well, I ended up creating a new Google account and linked to that. It seems that would mean having double accounts in Google+ under my real name (not something I wanted), so it’ll slowly dwindled to nothing, or house those freelance web tutorials I’ll never make.

This being the inaugural event  I think it went pretty well. I’ve jotted down my notes from the event, but first a couple of small things I thought were teething issues:

• The name badge is the map – No one I spoke to figured out right away that the name badge on the lanyard, was in fact the folded up map to show where the talks were being held. Then if you take it out you have no name badge.
• No introductions – Apart from the two keynotes, none of the speakers I saw were introduced and were left to their own devices to quieten the room.
• The City View area at COSI is not great for presentations.

Sara Summers (Morning keynote – Mobile Innovation with UX)

I thought Sara’s talk set the right tone for the conference. She walked us through a recent trip to Stockholm where she visited the Ethnography museum, and an exhibition on Voodoo which changed her perception of that part of Haiti culture. She also ran through part of a video about the development of an iPad app for Nordtroms where the team camped out in Nordstrom’s store and did on-the-spot user research while making the app.

Being from Microsoft she also touched on some of the work she’s been doing for Windows Phone. “Authentically Digital” is a term they kept in their heads when designing the UI, which I like. Her approach to UX seems to be one I’m hearing a lot which is very guerrilla in its attitude. Similar to Cennydd Bowles recent work.

Tony Lukasavage ( Welcome to Titanium)

Turns out the nice guy I was chatting to over coffee was the next speaker. I knew of Titanium but never actually looked into using it, but Tony peaked my interest. Turns out the product is free (which is always nice) and works by using HTML/CSS/JavaScript to push out cross-platform mobile apps.

The big eye-opener for my was the libraries native support.  If I call a tab set, left alone it will display like the native tab set on each platform with no extra fumbling around on my part.  This makes leveraging the pattern libraries of iOS and Android much simpler and hopefully makes it natural for the end-user.

Brad Frost (For a future friendly web)

I hadn’t realized going in that this Brad was the same Brad from Future Friendly, so I was intrigued when the space helmet logo was on the screen. You can see a version of this talk on his website, but a couple of my takeaways were:

• “We cannot be future-proof, but we can be future-friendly”
• “Content is like water” – Josh Clarke
• “Context is fuzzy”
• “Accommodate for meat sticks” (fat fingers)
• mobilewebbestpractices.com
• Get the API’s down first

Brad gave an excellent presentation, one that I think corralled a lot of ideas and “we already know that” items into something whole and communicably.

Willie Neumann (Leveraging mobile in Enterprise)

Willie had an interesting talk on the approach he took when building a mobile presence for libraries.  They had a “develop fast, deploy fast” approach and built outside their IT infrastructure (with their blessing) using a GoDaddy server and public API’s.  They also employed the WURFL stack and Google’s translation tool.  It was great to see what they achieved in just two calender months of dev time.

Paul Czarnik (Afternoon Keynote – The Connected Car)

I didn’t really take any notes, but Paul provided a very interesting look at what the missed opportunities are, as well as what the future may bring fro the connected cars. Also the live demo curse kicked in when trying OnStar on stage

Jen Matson (Adaptive Mobile UX design)

Jen started off her presentation by walking us through her frustrating real-life case of using Sear’s mobile.  I always like this approach from speakers. She had a lot of information I was already aware of, but some things are always good to re-iterate:

• Mobile users do need the same content
• Improve & iterate often
• Adapt to context and capabilities

Was it any good?

Overall I was really impressed by the level of speakers, and the organization that everyone involved put in to M3Conf. I would definitely like to attend next year and encourage people to sign up early.

The 250 that attended seemed to be a good mix of designers, management, and developers. And that’s important. One big takeaway for me was to reinforce that “Mobile” is still evolving and there a lot of “right” methods out there.  Its our job to start blending those in order to deliver an experience thats great for our core users, but doesn’t exclude everyone else.

My photos for #M3Conf are on Flickr.

These were the two big things for me that they dropped. Only 2% of their users were actively engaged in the scavenger hunt-type game, and you can still pass through to Foursquare & Twitter, but only if you create a story after you’ve checked in. In my comment I said I wouldn’t leave over it, but that I hoped this shift didn’t go the same way as Brightkite, a location-based service that dropped the location-based bit and is now just text messaging.

Well its been  a couple of months and my Gowalla check-ins have been less and less.  The focus is now on creating stories around the places that you check-in to.  That’s fine, and I can see that around conferences and events, but that’s few & far between for me. Even when I attended UI16 in Boston recently (which was excellent), I was so out of the habit of using the app I had to make a concerted effort to pull it out.  It was only after we got back from a walk around Boston that I remembered I could have used the Gowalla city guide.

Feedback on a recent Gowalla blog post about the changes still seems to be negative around the changes.

I’m sure Gowalla didn’t make these decisions lightly and feel it was in the best interest of moving the company forward with the majority of its users. But for me personally the app has now moved off the home screen of my phone, relegating it to the digital back o’ beyond. Maybe I’ll use it in Columbus for the M3 Conference. Maybe.

I know I’m not typical and I really just use Facebook to check if its someone’s birthday, play a couple of games and that’s it really. But every-time I go on there it seems I have to do something to accommodate their new feature. Facebook never seems to be doing anything for me.

Take Lists for example.

I set up a few lists early on to organize my friends into where I knew them from (UK, Optiem, Progressive, etc.), but now Facebook have created their own lists and given them top billing. Problem with this is not everyone who is in my Progressive co-worker list is in theirs. This means I either have to merge the two, or sort through each one and add/delete people.  There seems to be no option for me to delete or hide their list (at least not from first glance) which is only populated by people who have indicated they work at a company.  So now I have a lot of duplicate lists I have to sort out.

Same thing with the re-vamped News Feed.  ”Top” stories are marked and I have to sift through and unmark them. Or try and find some buried settings to revert it back to just streaming all posts into the main column.  I don’t need options to rate or hide them.  And that separate little ticker in the corner, whats that for?

Like I said, I don’t spend a lot of time using the site and I don’t hate anything about it.  Its their site and they can design it however they want.  It just seems I always have to do a lot of work every-time I go in there which doesn’t make it enticing for me to spend any more time in there than I do already.

Now I know this isn’t a highly trafficked site and I do get waves of spam every now and again, but this is a little different.

Sure they’re easy to spot. The single sentence that has at least one word misspelled (on purpose) to make you think its not a bot. The content is the usual vague “great post, just waht i was looking for” which bears little or no connection to the post.

The odd thing is instead of the names being linked to best-yak-insurance-ever.com, they are all linking to Facebook, Yahoo!, and Bing.

Apparently I’m not alone in this. Pyry Lehdonvirta blogged about the same thing in April.

Has the spam software blown a fuse as some commenter’s on Pyry’s site suggest, or is it more nefarious, using legitimate links to get the comment in. If so how does this help them? Maybe to just justify charging some poor sap for their “service”.

Anyone else found this a problem?

First off the initial experiences, signing up for Path on the web and using  the Android app, wasn’t intuitive for me.  I filled in the typical username, password, but didn’t want to connect Facebook…and then, well I don’t know.  I felt like I was missing something.  On the app there was no sense of “you should go do this now”.  It took me a couple of photos in to realize I hadn’t shared them with anyone.  And choosing those people to share with seemed clunky.  I would think that should have been step 1 before taking any photos - Choose the people you’re sharing with, especially since you’re limited to 50.

After two weeks of sharing a few moments I’m calling it quits.  It doesn’t seem to have grabbed the people I was sharing with either, most of them have only posted a couple of photos too.

I’m sure its filling a niche, but obviously not one I’m part of.

After a recent update I’m now running Android 2.2.1 which lets me store apps on the SD Card. Fantastic!

Not so much.

Seems that a lot of app developers either didn’t get the memo that option was available to them, or its just too difficult to do.  Now I can kind of expect this from solo developers or small companies, but Google?  C’mon, they created the OS.  They know that there are a lot of Android handsets that had this issue. So why do they continually create great large apps (Google Music and Google+ both come in at over 7mb each)  Even Google Reader is over 2mb before I’ve even looked at an RSS feed.

And the kicker? None of the Google apps can be moved over to the SD card.  This means that I have yet to run a single Google app for more than a day before I have to uninstall it.  Heaven forbid I try to install two.

Now other companies such as Evernote and Wunderlist let me move the apps over, but run into problems.  With Evernote I can’t use the widget if its on the SD card.  Frustrating, but not a deal breaker for me.

So Google. Please take note. I’d love to use your apps, but until I can move them onto my phones SD card I just can’t use them.