Bradley Howard's Blog

2011 favourites

Dec 27, 2011 at 2:29pm

Last year I wrote about my 2010 favourites and it was one of my most viewed posts of the year. So I thought I’d repeat it for 2011 too - and there's a clear theme running through these favourites!

Favourite new gadget

One of the things I’ve really got involved with in 2011 has been cycling. It started in February when I was out of breath going up a local (yet very long and steep) hill, then got to June where a group of friends rode the BHF London to Brighton. I then started riding into work (13 miles, from North West London to the City).

Three rear wheels later, thanks to the Holloway Road, I decided to go for a new bike. My £27 eBay investment (see below) had had its day after almost 1,800 miles between May and December.

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However my favourite gadget wasn’t the new bike, it was the base layer clothing. Base layers have been around for a few years and despite some literally freezing motorcycle journeys, I hadn’t used one until cycling this winter. They are fantastic and if you get cold easily, try wearing them under your clothes. There you go, a favourite gadget that doesn’t run out of batteries!

Favourite book

Without a doubt, it was Lance Armstrong’s autobiography. It’s a very easy read that is very emotional about someone’s battle with cancer, from denial through to winning the Tour de France afterwards. Thoroughly recommended.

In second place was Alan Sugar’s autobiography which was several times longer than Armstrong’s, but just as enjoyable.

Favourite iPhone app

I’ve started using Barclays Boris bikes to travel around the City if the meeting is only one or two tube stops from the office. So the BarclaysBikes app is really handy, showing how many bikes and spaces are at a specific location. The AR (Augmented Reality) view is genuinely useful to find the nearest bike.

A close second is the updated LinkedIn app. The previous version never seemed to work without wifi. The latest app is excellent for looking up contacts after a meeting or even in the middle of a meeting when we’re discussing a mutual ex-colleague.

For outside work, the Geocaching app is excellent. It shows the three nearest geocaches and makes a spare hour disappear quicker than you can say “Where on earth would someone have hidden it around here?”

Favourite award

Without a doubt, I was extremely proud of the team to receive to a Sitecore Site of the Year award this year for our work with Cadbury.

tags:

LinkedIn, London to Brighton bike ride, application review, awards, bicycles, book review, iPhone, mobile, motorcycles,

0 Comments

Heinz personalisation

Oct 12, 2011 at 9:59am

I am always surprised about how I seem to learn a new buzzword or new type of technology that I've never heard before, and then I seem to hear it several times in the next couple of days.

I started reading about personalised labels in the middle of last week. I'd like to say that it was in depth industry research however the truth is that an article about 'Get Well Soon' soup in the NMA news feed caught my eye because Mrs H was feeling rather poorly last week. The warm weather has subsided and it seems half of Britain has caught a cold, Mrs H falling into this category.

So I thought I’d be nice and order a personalised soup for her. The Facebook app and checkout process was super slick, although one particular issue knocks out the entire campaign logic – it takes 4 days for the soup to arrive in the post, by which time Mrs H’s cold had (thankfully) cleared up and I suspect most people’s colds are gone by 4 days plus a Sunday to make it 5 days for delivery.

One other minor observation – although I doubt most other consumers would notice – is that the agency who have implemented the campaign, We Are Social, are branded on all emails, and part of the checkout process.

Anyway, I ordered the soup on Wednesday and it arrived on Monday. Mrs H’s cold had all but gone by Monday but she thought it was a nice surprise getting the personalised soup in the post. Will we eat it? Probably not, but it looks really good in the kitchen.

I’d never bought a mass produced, personalised food product like this before Wednesday however on Friday I was asked by a customer about personalised labels and again on Monday and Tuesday by other clients!

To finish, on Monday I was in a totally unrelated meeting when the prospective customer said that they print personalised labels for a variety of customers. This was completely unprompted, at which point I started to laugh at the coincidence of the last few days!

tags:

Facebook, application review, f-commerce, personalisation, social media,

0 Comments

Stinging nettles? There's an app for that

Sep 5, 2011 at 9:18am

Although I love the outdoors, I haven’t been stung by stinging nettles for years. Until this weekend, when I went actively looking for small boxes in stinging nettles around the parks near to my home.

It’s all been part of an activity called geocaching. I’d heard about it from my niece whose Scout troop look for geocaches whenever they go camping or on a day out.

Geocaching is a simple concept – it’s a real world treasure hunt game. There are over 1.5 million caches around the world. You can go to the main website, geocaching.com, or use one of the iPhone/ Android apps and look for a cache near you. The site runs a ‘freemium’ model – you can play for free or for advanced features you need to pay a small charge.

I live in North West London and there is at least one geocache in every park near my house. There was even a cache at the end of my road - the one photographed above. Caches range from ‘micro’ size – the size of a 35mm film canister, all the way to a ‘large’ box. Inside the cache is some paper to write your name and a short message, and in the larger containers there are other objects. The rules are that you can remove an object if you replace it with an object of more value.

I’m always in favour of any activity that gets children away from the television, and part of geocaching’s success is that because there are so many places to find, it’s easy to have a spare hour on the weekend to pop out and find a cache.

There’s no policing or moderation of the system – so there’s nothing to stop you going to the website and claiming you’ve found all 1.5 million caches. But that’s missing the point – it’s a game, and the fun is really in finding the boxes more than the website components.

We found five geocaches this weekend (and couldn’t find a sixth, in the closest park to my house). It felt quite addictive and fun for all the family – including the dog who I don’t think we’ve ever walked so far. Just be careful of the stinging nettles.

tags:

application review, freemium, games, geocaching, mobile, site review,

1 Comment

iPad review - at last

Jun 23, 2011 at 9:19am

I've been pretty vocal about not-seeing-the-point of an iPad and so Alex Day at Endava lent me his iPad for a few weeks to see if I'd change my mind.

I'm now ten days into iPad ownership (more like borrowingship) and here are my thoughts.

It doesn't replace any previous gadget. The thought of taking an iPad into work, or not taking my laptop home to do some late night work is frankly ridiculous. To open a Word document or PowerPoint requires buying some apps and I doubt they support some of the features we use at work (track changes, comments and Sharepoint integration). So it doesn't replace my laptop for a moment.

I'm checking email much more often. One of the first things I did was to wipe the data (sorry Alex) and synchronise my personal email and work email. Which means the iPad alerts me when new calendar requests come in, etc. Now I realise why Alex lent it to me...

I've totally stopped having spare moments since the iPad came home. My wife and I charge our iPhones in the kitchen near the kettle, and every time I make a cup of tea, I'll play on the iPad for a minute or so, rather than wait around doing whatever I did before the iPad.

The one app that excels above others on the iPad is FlipBoard. Flipboard takes your Facebook, Twitter, Flickr and other accounts including favourite RSS feeds, and converts them into a beautiful magazine style format (see the screenshot above). It takes images from links inside Tweets from people you are following and shows them as part of the article. It is the neatest form of personalised content I have seen anywhere. Content publishers should take note of this app as a glimpse into the future of content publishing. When you look at the Flickr feed on FlipBoard you need to remind yourself that this is user generated content - the quality of the photos and the screen are excellent.

And while we're on the positive points, the battery is excellent. Alex's iPad doesn't have mobile coverage, just WiFi, which is fine considering it never goes outside of the house and office. I've only charged it twice in ten days. I guess that's why the device weighs the same as a hardback book.

Everyone in the family is playing much, much more games. Despite owning a Wii and Xbox (with kinect) and 2 Nintendo DSs (DSes?) the iPad is the preferred device, especially for Mrs H. The graphics and general playability are superb, and that's just on the free games we've downloaded.

And that's why in think that I don't get the iPad. I want it to replace my laptop and paper notepad, but it's not that type of device at all. It's not about productivity, it's about entertainment. It's a media device. It is a large iPod not a replacement laptop.

Yes you can convert it into a productivity tool, by buying £50 worth of apps and using the rubbish on-screen keyboard, which will probably give you RSI within five years, you can suffer whilst telling everyone you abandoned your laptop years ago. Ten years ago you were probably saying the same thing with a Palm V.

tags:

Endava, Facebook, RSS, User Generated Content, application review, content, flickr, ipad, laptop, twitter,

2 Comments

Windows 8 review

Jun 6, 2011 at 9:41am

So, the covers have started to be lifted from Windows 8. Take 5 minutes to watch the video to see a glimpse of Microsoft's new operating system.

Some immediate feedback:

"We're watching Google". Google believe the [Chrome] browser is the future, so Microsoft are looking to pull as many Internet services out of the browser into small apps.
"Touch my screen". I hate fingermarks on my screen. Walk up to someone else's screen at work today and touch their screen - you'll get a reaction as if you invaded their privacy! No one likes fingermarks on their screen. Windows 8 will be all about touch screens though. We recently bought a new PC at home and I decided not to get a touch screen because I was concerned the kids would have wrecked it within weeks. And a keyboard on the screen? A vertical keyboard? No thanks.
"It looks so beautiful until you want to do anything productive". All the screens in the video look really nice - it's like 'Windows 7 mobile meets XBox'. And then the video shows Excel and Word, which are straight back to square one.
"Multiple windows - hmmmm". I get the slider to show multiple windows, but the sad thing is that this is a world away from how people really multi-task with many smaller windows. Have a vertical slider is very inefficient with wasted space.
"Files haven't changed". Whilst Microsoft should be commended from abstracting the C: hierarchy to users folders (it started in Windows Vista and Windows 7 makes it even easier), the abstraction should continue. Why do we still care about files? The only point of a file it to email it to someone else, and Google Docs has solved this already (by sharing it from a central place).
"Why no Kinnect?". After using Kinnect over the weekend with the family, you start wondering why objects in the rest of the world need you to touch them! Kinnect (aka waving at things) is the future and a smaller one to one style interface would be much better than touch (see #2).

However the OS does look lovely. It's like a 'Windows 7 meets XBox' interface (and both are good). I'm just concerned they're fine on a 5" screen or when you sit 5" away from it. Sitting a foot away from it at a desk for 8 hours a day requires a different style of UI.

tags:

Google Chrome, Kinnect, Microsoft, Windows 8, XBox, application review, usability,

3 Comments

Spotify Premium

Apr 15, 2011 at 9:48am

I had a new hard drive installed in my laptop this week and when I re-synced my iPhone I lost all my MP3s.

I don't understand how Apple can produce such a great phone, with great synchronisation with a number of computers, but be so damn awful with keeping my music catalogue together. That's my frustration over and done with.

I decided once and for all to upgrade/buy Spotify so that I can use it on my phone. I've used Spotify regularly on my laptop and home PC (I should enter an award for the most varied music styles in a single playlist) for ages and even before wiping my iPhone, it was frustrating only have a couple of dozen, old MP3s available on the phone.

In fact Spotify is so good that I'm considering changing our in car stereo to one that accepts a line-in (i.e. from the headphone socket in the iPhone) rather than an iPhone specific connection - to make it futureproof.

A major advantage of the iPhone app is that it downloads the music to your phone rather than streaming it - which means you can carry on listening without an Internet connection.

The one remaining issue in the house is that with the kids starting to get MP3 players of all shapes and sizes (and budgets), Spotify is only useful to my wife and I. The kids still require me to buy MP3s for their devices.

We think of music as ultra portable nowadays, but in reality, compared to records, tapes and CDs from the past, you can't swap music as easily as you used to, when music really was social!

tags:

application review, freemium, iPhone, spotify, traditional media,

0 Comments

Weeknote #1 - losing weight and launching a new chocolate bar

Mar 1, 2011 at 9:10am

Weeknotes seem to be the new compromise between micro-blogging (aka Twitter) and full on blogging. Take a look at Weeknote - it's quite a neat site if you have something to say but don't want to be constrained to 140 characters.

Marc Holmes and others have started adopting a nice approach to their blogs, by including a weeknote every errrrrr.... seven days, so I thought I'd try it too. So here goes for the last week:

Launched The Race Season on SpotsVStripes - a new campaign as part of Cadbury's sponsorship of London 2012. A very addictive set of Flash games. And a new chocolate bar (the Race Bar - try it and let me know what you think). Here's the TV advert:

Found an excellent new utility for capturing tall web pages as images.
On a personal note - last week was officially the first time it cost more than £20 to fill up my motorbike. I'm not complaining too much, considering a bottle of water at Euston station costs £1.50 (that's 20p more per litre than petrol).
Using Timely more and more for writing loads of tweets in one session, then letting them 'go live' over the course of the week.
Finished reading Lord Sugar's auto-biography, loving virtually every word of it. Worst of all, I didn't have another book ready to start reading, so I'm back to the Metro each day. Another reason to use the bike more!
Read a couple of good articles - one which said that in the US most Internet shoppers are pretty affluent; the second is debating whether we're in a second dotcom bubble.
I got my data back from a faulty hard disk.
Learnt what the word undecillion means during a session on IPv6. (10 to the power of 36).
A fair amount of cycle rides (two sessions of 20+ miles) and a 2.5 run around the block. All in the aim of completing this year's London to Brighton quicker than last year and being a stone lighter at the same time.
Watched that match...

tags:

London to Brighton bike ride, Weeknote, application review, blogging, book review, business, motorcycles, twitter,

3 Comments

Avoiding the data cowboys

Feb 24, 2011 at 5:37pm

In December 2010, I started looking for a software utility to back up my data on my home PC to my FTP server that I use for some personal websites.

The inevitable happened – I turned on my PC one day and the computer wouldn’t boot. I tried a number of different utilities and rescue remedies over the following days, but after a while the BIOS in the PC didn’t even recognise the drive. I bought an external hard disk caddy, plugged it into my laptop and only half the time my laptop could see the drive but no data. When it did recognise the drive, it would lose it after a few minutes.

I quickly asked some friends on Facebook for data utility recommendations.

Someone recommended a utility from SysTweak. I downloaded the trial – it showed me the contents of my disk! I recovered a few files, which worked. I quickly paid for the full version.

To recover the whole drive I had to do a hard disk scan. But everytime I started a scan it wouldn’t complete because the drive ‘disappeared’. It was really frustrating and time consuming.

I came into work one day and asked the super-techie-support chappies what to do. They recommended a data recovery company. However data recovery companies are the modern version of builders - most people wouldn’t recommend a company they’d used before! Apparently these companies all offer really low prices, but once you send your drive to them, they open it and then you receive the infamous “Oooooo, it’s worse than you described”, and then you’re led into further gotchas and costs.

You want recovery media – how else are you supposed to get hundreds of Gb back? You'd get charged full RRP for an external drive from these cowboys.

I was pretty despondent by this time, however the manager found me and recommended one company he’d used for a similar personal situation to mine – Datatrack Labs. I contacted the company and took a really cautious approach.

In the end, I managed to get the data recovered for around £350. It was considerably more than their website’s “starting from” cost, but they were open to negotiation because I was an individual rather than a business and I wasn't in a hurry. I got all my data back on an external drive in a few weeks.

I’d highly recommend using Datatrack, in an industry which doesn’t get a lot of recommendations because of the cowboys out there. Actually, I’d recommend you back up your data more often.

Photo courtesy of Remi on Flickr (- it's not a picture of my hard drive!)

tags:

IT, application review, site review,

0 Comments

Screenshot-ing tall web pages

Feb 21, 2011 at 6:07pm

It's the simple things in life that are often the most difficult.

Recently I needed to take a screenshot of a web page which covered two or three screens in height. Usually I press the 'Print Screen' keyboard button and join them together in Paint or Photoshop, but this is so time consuming I wanted to find a utility that can do it for me.

After several unsuccessful (but all promising) trials, I found the poorly named Fireshot Pro. I'm sure I once owned a joystick on my Commodore 64 with the same name, but I digress...

Fireshot captures 'tall' web pages (and other screenshots) to files, the clipboard, printer, email, pretty much anywhere you want really. Personally I highly recommend installing the Chrome plugin if you like the same browser.

You can download plugins for loads of other browsers too - I'm sure there's one for the Commodore in there somewhere.

tags:

Google Chrome, application review,

0 Comments

Yammer review

Nov 28, 2010 at 7:04am

Yesterday, as an experiment one of the guys in the office, Ben, setup a Yammer account for our company.

Yammer is like a private version of Twitter - so the public can't see any messages, and you can only invite people on the same email domain (in our case @endava.com). Yammer shows messages in an easier to read 'thread style' rather than just sequential list.

There is also a mobile app, which I haven't installed yet, and a desktop app written in Adobe AIR - that needs a lot more work to make it useful and/or intuitive.

So once Ben created the account, he invited a few more people. In turn they then invited a few more.

Within 24 hours, there were 49 people on the network, with 25 having signed up.

The communication through Yammer has flowed endlessly during work hours, and even the usually anti-or-don't-understand-Twitter people have been contributing.

In summary, Yammer is like an electronic version of a water cooler/coffee machine. It's much more open and collaborative than Skype or other IM products, so communication travels much quicker. Personally I find it much more useful as a business tool than Twitter. For people working from home (which many of the 25 contributors have been), it looks like it could be pretty useful.

tags:

Yammer, application review, business, collaboration, twitter,

2 Comments

Tags

2011 favourites

Heinz personalisation

Stinging nettles? There's an app for that

iPad review - at last

Windows 8 review

Spotify Premium

Weeknote #1 - losing weight and launching a new chocolate bar

Avoiding the data cowboys

Screenshot-ing tall web pages

Yammer review

Bradley Howard

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