Busses in Bristol are shit. It’s an unfortunate fact of life.

Expensive, late, infrequent, shit.

But LiveBus.org, by James Wheare does actually help to ease this situation, providing you with (as you might expect) live updates on busses for particular stops.

It looks rather nice, too.

Brilliant.

I’m not sure this is such a great idea; that Flash was not indexed by Google has, in the past, been a very good reason not to make websites with Flash. (And reasons not to make websites with Flash are a good thing.)

At any rate, I like to think that websites which use Flash for their entire presentation are on their way out… hopefully this won’t affect this.

Well that’s what Rahul Sood (founder of VOODOOPC) did with his own Air. I suspect he’ll be known as ‘the guy who used his Macbook Air to cut his birthday cake’ from now on.

Er… happy birthday.

The bonus about the new iPhone is that it brings with it a new iPhone OS which will be available to all older iPhones. That’s great news, but I somehow expect that older iPhone users won’t be getting everything for free.

I also wonder about what sort of upgrade options older users will have. My contract will last for another year; I’m not exactly in a rush to spend that kind of money on a phone again until that time, but I’m sure there are some who would love to have the new model right away… will there be a fair route for them to upgrade, without costing them an arm, leg and testicle?

The obvious stuff

• Recording movies — Even at a low resolution for the old phones, this is a feature I really do miss. It’s a shame they haven’t gotten a move on and added it by now
• Mailing on pictures from the Internet — I miss this every now and again. I’m sure it’s something Apple could come up with an adequate interface for doing.
• Copying/pasting text — There are many possible ways for Apple to implement this as far as the user interface is concerned… but I’m suspicious as to how many of them are any good. Hopefully they’ve been investigating and testing different methods and have pinpointed one they’re happy with by now.
• Full HTML notes which sync with Mail or Stickies — At the moment, you can make notes on the iPhone which aren’t viewable on the Mac, or you can make them on the Mac but not edit them on the iPhone. There must be a better solution…
• A better calculator! — Some scientific and programmer options would be lush.
• More events from iPhoto — It’s not fair that you can only sync 20 events to the iPhone. I want more than that, but not all of my events…

The more creative stuff

• 3G — It seems to be clear that the new iPhone will have 3G capability. This is good news in the UK, where 3G coverage is likely to be more complete than EDGE coverage. EDGE coverage has been improving vastly, but we’ve not even had it here for a year, yet. 3G, on the other hand, has been here for years.
• GPS — I hear that GPS chips are a little rubbish at the moment; they take a while to get a lock on, and they’re yet another drain on the precious mobile battery. But what excites me about GPS is the automatic geotagging of pictures I take, along with the reassurance I’ll always be able to pinpoint my location (very handy when you’re in London and you’re not a Londoner…)
• Bluetooth syncing — Apple have been dishing out Macs with inbuilt Bluetooth as standard for yonks. The iPhone must have the most underused Bluetooth chip going. This one seems entirely obvious to me: light data such as your contacts, calendar and bookmarks are ideal candidates for Bluetooth syncing. Yet I can see Apple considering this to be one thing too many to work on, so I expect they’ll introduce syncing over the Internet instead.
• Bluetooth liberation — Thinking about Bluetooth on the iPhone leads you to quickly realise how little it’s used. Yet Bluetooth can actually be quite a fun technology. Hopefully they’ll liberate it’s API to developers and we’ll see some fun apps using it. At the very least, I’d like to be able to send JPEGs to other phones.
• Better interaction with other phones — I can’t send picture messages to anyone else. Sure, I can email them with a much better JPEG image, but a lot of people I know don’t have email addresses…
• An amazing remote… — Perhaps especially with Bluetooth, the iPhone has the ability to be an amazing remote control… and very interactive one, too, thanks to the screen. There are already some apps which accomplish this, but it’d be nice to see the Apple polish in effect.

Spreading information across many different pages has become an accepted and expected convention of websites. But I feel it’s often done without proper reason, especially since keeping everything on one page can have some real benefits.

Why a webpage rather than a website?

With one-page websites, since it’s just a page, there isn’t anything to be explored. It simplifies the whole process of finding information, as the user quickly learns (through the lack of navigation) that all the information they want will be on that page.

Searching, therefore, is simpler for both developers and users. Since there is no site, there is no need for a search engine, and the browser’s standard ‘Find…’ feature may be used in confidence that all information is being searched.

This does all rest on a reasonably well structured page, though. In this situation it’s not necessarily a good idea to stick to the standard header-paragraph-subheader-paragraph linear layout. Users will be scrolling down the page and reading it much like a newspaper or magazine—with which they’ll be very familiar—so designing with techniques used for print is welcome. They may even feel more comfortable dealing with information laid out like that.

Case study: Parkside Dental Centre

Take a look at Parkside Dental Centre, a one-page site I recently worked on. It uses the fabulous Blueprint CSS library/application for it’s grid-based glory. It makes print-like one-pagers much easier to make, and much more robust with regards to the code.

All of the information is there, neatly displayed in about five screens worth of scrolling down, and it means in a matter of seconds, by scrolling and scanning, you can find what you want to. Much better, I think, that having to dig through a website to find what you want.

The groups, made up of five or six students, had three or four months to develop the games. Their target was to make the most ‘enjoyable’, ‘playable’ and novel game they could. Each year the students get a range of resources to work with, including three gigantic displays, motion pods, spatially aware devices, etc. All very cool.

Off your trolley? — Wiimotes and megascreens

The concept behind a game called ‘Off Your Trolley!’ was to ride down Park Street (in Bristol) in a trolly. They digitally modelled all of Park Street and the Clifton Triangle perfectly, with painstaking detail, and even wrote their own physics engine to manage the racing.

The controls were simple - sit on a padded platform, with handles there to recreate that ‘trolley’ experience, and lean from side to side to steer. It was incredibly fun and easy to play, although you quickly tire yourself out from the steering.

On the technical side, they had placed a Nintendo Wii remote horizontally on the front of the controlling platform, the signals from which were picked up by a Bluetooth dongle and decoded for game. It’s very tricky to get that working on Linux, in which they wrote the game, but they managed very well nonetheless. On Windows there is a library which makes it trivial, apparently.

Grunts — home-made multi-touch that works

Another game, Grunts, presented an even more interesting hardware setup. They had developed their own multi-touch display table for this worms/lemmings-like game, the multi-touch component allowing multiple people to play it at once.

The display itself was made in very much the ‘Jeff Han’ style. A sheet of acrylic formed the display itself, which had images projected onto it from underneath. On the multi-touch input side of things, infrared light was pummped into the acrylic from little diodes situated all around the fabric.

Total internal reflection ensures the infrared light doesn’t escape downwards, unless the acrylic is pressed on (by a finger), in which case total internal fustration occurs and the infrared light escapes downwards.

Below all of this is an industrial strength high-FPS infrared camera, which takes a movie of the touches and sends them to a computer for analysis.

Obviously all of this is backed up by some strong analysis of the footage coming in. It’s safe to say the implementation was excellent, and all manner of touches and gestures were properly and smoothly converted into game interactions.

Needless to say, though, that the implementation (which cost c. £600, including £300 for the camera) was great to see, and very exciting, too. It works. Well.

You can get a decent looking inkjet for c. £30, and a wireless inkjet for c. £50.

The problem with printers are their size, and not everyone has enough desk space for them (nor do they use them enough to want to have them on their desks). Plus, getting up and going to get freshly printed documents is good for the health.

Everyone wins!

What I really, really want is Dictionary.app for the iPhone. I would pay for that.