Category: Uncategorized

Android gets turn-by-turn based navigation

Posted on by primaryt

android_man_kicking_appleSo, this might initially be a very “educationally focused” post but you have to read between the lines to understand the significance of this (even though it was somewhat inevitable) announcement.

Basically turn-by-turn is that lovely lady who tells you to “turn left in 20 meters”.  We all knew it was coming to the UK but companies such as Jarmin & Tomtom have been trying to stop it.  That is because they have made absolute packets of money by selling their app to iPhone fanbois and girls alike.

This may be the final blow android needed to really knock the Apple iPhone OS off it’s #1 mantel.  How does this affect education you may be asking?  Simple, a consumer based demand of Android handsets is inevitable now that your phone now replaces your usual Sat Nav product, and lets face it.  Google will do some crazy cool stuff with turn-by-turn based navigation, already boasting an incredibly smart caching system that caches your trip so if you lose Internet connectivity you don’t lose your map or location.

As android becomes more popular and more schools grow sto adopt the platform it means less iPhone applications will be developed and more Android developers will pop up.  Is this a good thing?  Surely iPhone apps are better than Android apps?  Yes it is a good thing.  Android promotes open source and a large majority of the applications available in the market place are completely free.

So today’s  announcement might not have a direct impact on Android in Education but the knock on effect should be huge and the future certainly looks bright the little green operating system and it’s place in the UK market.

As a side note its worth mentioning that most of the popular netbooks/tablets will soon run Android (including devices such as the Asus EEE)

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How to create a crowd in an airport – Iceland Ash

Posted on by primaryt
Head to Head
Image by WexDub via Flickr

Got my laptop out at the airport and swarms of people came around me to try to get updates for my flight. Turns out I was far more useful than the girls on the desk. Idea for a business, non biased, non liable information desk that is purely a peon charging £1 per person for information at times like this.

Unbelievable how bad the information flow is from the airlines to the desks. In Morroco the cues here are large, thankfully I’m with Easyjet and not Ryanair.

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Don’t wait for f2f to vent

Posted on by primaryt

Feedback GopherLet’s play a little game:  We serve 100k+ web pages each day across our services, how much feedback do you recon we get each day?  50?  40?  30?  If only..  We get about 1 piece of feedback a day from all of the services combined.

Why is that? Teachers love to tell you what they think face to face but never fill in web based forms even if they get stuck with something.  My plea to you is that you give any website you visit feedback, wether positive or negative.  Infact without any positive feedback at all from my contacts on twitter I don’t think I would even be involved in 1/2 the projects I am which means great free sites like Primary Games Arena would disappear into a void.

Who benefits from you clicking the feedback/twitter button? Nearly all feedback from teachers is letting us know that they are having problems using a tool in the classroom, be it confusing, foreign, buggy or just weird.  The thing that teachers should know is that usually a developer gets given a brief of a problem and codes the most elegant, simple solution.  User interface is often the software developers 2nd priority.

You own the web. Don’t forget that it’s the users that truly own the web, so if there is a site that you think has a bad interface, don’t wait till you meet the owner of the site face to face, click that feedback button and unleash Hell!  We genuinely want to hear from you, both positive and negative!

I fear for the future. The future of tablets.  Ugh.  More output, less input (from visitors).  I mean, you have an extra hurdle to get to the keyboard, I expect you will feedback less.  That makes me a sad bunny 🙁