magpie's shiny things

I recent­ly acquired a Blackberry Pearl. 

It’s a nice lit­tle device that does­n’t absolute­ly scream cor­po­rate whore but lets me car­ry around a lot of the essen­tials of my life in my (over­loaded) purse. It also has per­haps the small­est screen in pro­duc­tion on a device capa­ble of tru­ly access­ing the web. 

While I love hav­ing access to all the minu­tia of my life in an instant. (Third old­est niece’s mid­dle name? Coming right up.) Using it to find stuff on the web dri­ves me half nut­ty. A sim­ple look-up of store hours or a phone num­ber is a mess for any­thing I don’t already have book-marked. Google’s pre­sen­ta­tion of paid and then “yel­low pages” gen­er­at­ed search results ahead of the store’s actu­al site is beyond annoy­ing. (It’s also very dif­fi­cult to dis­tin­guish between the paid and not paid results — at least in the stan­dard black­ber­ry web browser.)

I’ve been think­ing that it’s about the tiny size of the screen.

Even in my plan­ning for the weath­er infor­ma­tion of our web­site I’ve been focused on the get­ting it all to work in the tiny bit of screen that the Pearl affords. But I had some hints that there was more to the mat­ter than just the form fac­tor. I decid­ed that the left hand list­ing col­umn of sin­gle data points should be moved up in the HTML file so that they would appear first when you get to the main weath­er page because exact­ly how warm/cold it is and how much rain has fall­en are the two bits of infor­ma­tion I most need when I’m not at home.

This morn­ing Peter Merholz at Adaptive path writes about design­ing for mobil­i­ty and hits it in one.

His key state­ments are:

“The thing that’s inter­est­ing about design­ing for mobile isn’t the form of the device. It’s that the device comes with you.”

…and…

“We don’t want to explore cyber­space when we’re out-and-about. We want to quick­ly get a key piece of infor­ma­tion, or make a key con­nec­tion. We want key func­tion­al­i­ty at our fingertips.”

The dif­fer­ences in the envi­ron­ment in which we are using the device/web dic­tate dif­fer­ences in how we want the web to behave. It’s not about the device. It’s about the task appro­pri­ate for the context.

Even a lap­top with a mon­ster screen used in the Avis park­ing lot of the air­port should dis­play the basic infor­ma­tion such as the “store locater” or “map” nav­i­ga­tion but­tons at the top of the page. Because we don’t want to browse the selec­tion of books at Borders we want to find the near­est Borders store.

It’s clar­i­fies what has been both­er­ing me about using the web via Blackberry and why it is that I am try­ing to do with our own weath­er pages isn’t quite work­ing out. I have a sneak­ing feel­ing that I’m about to dis­cov­er that sim­ply rear­rang­ing the HTML (to sort out the load order) and mak­ing a sec­ond CSS file (to address the con­straints of the mobile device form fac­tor) is not going to be enough. Mobile implies a dif­fer­ent set of tasks and infor­ma­tion needs that can’t be addressed by rear­rang­ing the box­es on the page.

This after­noon I have been look­ing for non-business exam­ples of graph­i­cal pre­sen­ta­tion of data. Particularly I’ve been look­ing for good exam­ples of sports sta­tis­tics pre­sent­ed as sum­ma­ry graphs. The base­ball equiv­a­lent of a week­ly sales trend by region graph, if you will. 

I am under­whelmed. There are a cou­ple of sites out there doing his­tor­i­cal graph­ing. Including (not recent­ly updat­ed) Baseball Graphs. But the major sports sites (ESPN, and the league offi­cial sites.) Still rely on the tra­di­tion­al text and numer­i­cal “box score” that I first learned to read sit­ting with my dad at the break­fast table. There’s a nice exam­ple with expla­na­tion of a base­ball box score on wikipedia for those of you not lucky enough to have grown up with base­ball for breakfast.

Check out this ESPN report on theColorado/Boston game (21.oct.07) Other than the addi­tion the cute team logo icon next to the game high­lights, it looks pret­ty much the way it did in the morn­ing paper. Why?

My best guess… We learned to fol­low the game via text and num­bers pre­sent­ed in the box score for­mat. It serves it pur­pose well and we know how to read it. We don’t want to learn to read some oth­er (visu­al) language.

from the shop man­u­al for my truck:

slack­en vent flap trun­nion fixing

fab­u­lous!

Better Explained is a web site cre­at­ed by Kalid Azad based on the idea that 

There’s always a bet­ter way to explain a top­ic. Insights are flu­id, muta­ble, and work for dif­fer­ent people. 

He focus­es on math and pro­gram­ming (web tech­nolo­gies) with a lit­tle bit of the kitchen sink thrown in.

His abil­i­ty to use a nar­ra­tive voice and the free­dom to add graph­ics put these expla­na­tions in a dif­fer­ent cat­e­go­ry from the more author­i­ta­tive voic­es heard on wikipedia but avoid the we have every­thing and here’s five ads too feel of about.com.

His Another Look at Prime Numbers takes the oth­er­wise for math freaks only top­ic of these odd­ly behav­ing num­bers and looks at them from a very dif­fer­ent per­spec­tive Chemistry. Odd and amus­ing and like­ly to stay with you for while. 

While some experts quib­ble with a few of his state­ments. (Politely.) The ideas are made clear for the lay­man — and read­ing the com­ments will show you where the lit­tle gaps were cov­ered over.

Nice job.

I’ve got his two arti­cles on ver­sion con­trol queued up for “wait­ing around for oth­er peo­ple” reading. 

I’ve been work­ing on mov­ing a bunch of our old fam­i­ly web­site (Black Dog Farm) to a new serv­er (Blackdog and Magpie.) It’s not the pret­ti­est web­site you’ll ever see but it serves well as a sandbox.

At the moment I“m work­ing on build­ing a new set of weath­er report­ing pages. We have a fair­ly com­plete set of weath­er obser­va­tion instru­ments and an old machine in the serv­er cab­i­net that records that data from them. Here at the MCWD I can fire up a pro­gram called Virtual Weather Station and look at many (many) graphs, charts, and reports. The trick now is to get all that love­ly data up on the web. (I’ll detail some of the strengths and weak­ness­es of VWS in anoth­er post.)

In addi­tion to dis­play­ing our total geek­i­ness by hav­ing live weath­er report­ing on our web­site, we use the report­ed data to keep track of some of the highs and lows of rur­al life. Like pow­er line destroy­ing winds and freez­ing temperatures. 

Today’s quandary is about what data to put where on which page and how to arrange it.

The main item on the first page is easy. VWS pro­vides a nice sum­ma­ry graph­ic called “Broadcast” that is uploaded via ftp. 

But what to do with the rest of the space? In par­tic­u­lar what to do with the left col­umn? I’m torn between pro­vid­ing cool stuff for vis­i­tors, like a rotat­ing Northwest weath­er triv­ia and pro­vid­ing the infor­ma­tion I most need when I’m not at the house.