CloudBank on the phone

This week was all about getting CloudBank to run on actual phones. Pushing apps from the development environment onto the phone is a fairly straightforward process described in detail in the Android developer documentation.



Almost inevitably hitherto unnoticed bugs will appear once an app runs on a real device. Among the many possible causes for unexpected behaviour is forgetting to change localhost references to the real server on the web! To automatically deal with this one needs to find out if running on a device or emulator, which seems essential in many ways but strangely is nowhere documented.

import android.os.Build;

public static final boolean isEmulator(){
return Build.MODEL.equals("sdk");
}

The android.os.Build class holds all kinds of information about the platform we're running on. I picked the MODEL field, which gives me "sdk" on the emulator and "HTC Magic" on the phone, but you might replace that with whatever you see fit.

CloudBank in Florida

Yes, we've had a paper on CloudBank accepted for the prestigious mLearn 2009 conference in Orlando. The reviewers liked the idea behind CloudBank and unanimously waved the paper through. There will be plenty of opportunities to discuss the concept with a focused and knowledgeable audience. Looking forward to sunny Florida :-)

User Interface

As Lyn described in a previous post, our users' ideas about CloudBank are in many ways different from our original idea. While the initial design focused primarily on collecting and sharing content, users emphasised browsing and filtering content already in the system. Other high priority requirements were a quick application start-up, support for links to online content and a personal dictionary mode.

The Balsamiq mockups below show how we translated these requirements into four application screens in the CloudBank app:



Clockwise from top left: 1) Welcome screen with 'personal' list of content items contributed or edited by this user. 2) Edit screen to enter and edit content, with sub-activities to take a picture, record audio, add link to online content. 3) Detail screen for list items selected in (1) or (4), with direct option to edit the content. 4) Browse screen with all content items and options for full-text search and tag based filtering.

CloudBank off to Handheld Learning conference

Good news - we've had our short paper on CloudBank accepted for the Handheld Learning exhibition/conference at the Barbican, London on Oct 5-7. This will be a good chance to get a wider perspective than we usually find at academic conferences. Many top speakers are expected, e.g. visionary thinker James Kurzweil, James Paul Gee, whose work on games we've admired for a long time and, er, Malcolm McClaren, wearing his artist's hat, so that's all right then.

The reviewers seemed to like the CloudBank concept, but pointed to the potential problem of what to do with inappropriate content. We have some ideas on that for the revised version.