The framework is being billed as device agnostic, that is web applications built with Enyo should work great on mobile, but also will live happily on tablets, laptops, and elsewhere. This is a good position to take, as increasingly web application developers are having to consider a wide range of target devices rather than just focussing on mobile and/or desktop browsers. For installed mobile apps, the project recommends using PhoneGap to package Enyo applications with native wrappers.

Another key feature is a component-oriented model, where you can take parts of your site and encapsulate them as reusable components – for example a common form layout or a common control type. This looks like an interesting way to create DRY web applications at the client side.

Enyo is still at quite an early stage of release, and most critically is missing the UI Widget components. Until these ship (according to the FAQ they should be out next month) there isn’t a great deal of point using Enyo unless the idea of component-oriented design is something you’re really into. However, looking forwards it could be an interesting competitor to frameworks like JQueryUI and JQuery Mobile.

I don’t know to what extent the original HP team are still involved in Enyo, but the project seems to be attracting attention on Github and a community is forming around it. It would be good to see some part of the WebOS dream live on.

For more information, check out the Enyo site.

• It works on all kinds of devices and across all networks
• You can search, read and respond to messages even when you’re offline
• Works with intelligent filtering services
• You can send and receive messages with anyone on any network, not just the same service provider you use
• The server code is open source so you can run your own
• Completely distributed architecture with no central server or hub node
• Uses open standards for pretty much everything
• Clients for all platforms including mobile, even TV – and anyone can make their own client as the API isn’t proprietary
• You can send messages of any length, including rich text, images, links and documents
• You can create “lists” of people to message together as a group, again even if they don’t use the same server or service provider as you
• You can embed links in your web pages that automatically launch the user’s client with a new message to you (a bit like Web Intents)
• You can publish archives of messages on your own website
• You can save your messages on your own computer, back them up on a usb stick, or store them in the cloud – its up to you
• It doesn’t matter if the company that invented it goes bust or gets bored with it and stops developing it, as there are lots of alternatives and pretty much every tech company is backing it.

I think this is a really cool technology, and I encourage you to take a look at it. Find out more here!

However, not everyone is convinced yet and think that we should stick with proprietary messaging silos tied to one service provider such as Facebook and Twitter, despite the obvious risk of these services being discontinued, monetized, tracking your communications for nefarious purposes, and spamming you with advertising at any opportunity.

I mentioned ROLE in a previous post, where I encouraged them to work with the Apache Rave project and its great to see this suggestion being taken up seriously by the project team; hopefully we’ll start to see contributions from ROLE to Apache Rave soon. Rave is a “white label” social network/portal platform that includes support for both OpenSocial and W3C Widgets (using Apache Wookie) and at the event Jasha from Hippo and I were each able to show W3C Widgets and OpenSocial gadgets being combined in workspaces which was a great demo.

For the actual widget competition, I worked with Li Na, Sten Govaerts and Felix Mödritscher on a fairly simple widget that tracks how well you’re progressing towards getting your first draft of your thesis written. While this sounds quite trivial, I think its best to work on quite basic problems and expand out (something I elaborated on in a talk at the barcamp). So we created a HTML5 app using Local Storage rather than any advanced APIs, and then created the W3C Widget package and an OpenSocial gadget.xml afterwards, lastly using PhoneGap to create some native mobile versions.

We also developed it using Dropbox as our collaborative IDE! This wasn’t completely ideal compared with SVN or Git but did mean we could all work simultaneously on the widget, although it worked best if we were hacking different files rather than all editing the same script, as it resulted in lots of conflicts. However as a quick “get it done” environment I think it worked pretty well, and we were very productive.  I’m sure this contributed to our winning First Prize (though I think the fact our widget is bright pink didn’t hurt either).

Try it out yourself at http://labs.cetis.ac.uk/thesis or get the code from github.

For more information on ROLE, see the project website.

Briefly, the web intent approach relies on the browser acting as a broker between websites. Each website can offer to register itself to provide a particular service for the user, such as sharing photographs. When another website wants to allow users to make use of such a service, it creates an “intent” containing the type of service to be used, and the payload data. The browser can then offer the user with a choice of which service to use.

For example, if you use Flickr and Picasa, you might allow your browser to register these sites to provide the “share image” service. If you use a drawing widget, it could then have a “save” button that uses an intent. When you click “save”, you would be offered the choice of using Flickr or Picasa for saving and sharing the image you created.

The same approach can be used to share links and clippings as well as media.

The benefits range from minor things such as reducing the clutter of “share” buttons on sites, to potentially opening up services much more widely as developers no longer need to implement integration points for services directly. This means that rather than defaulting to a few widely-adopted services, niche service providers could also fit into the ecosystem alongside the well-known brands. In higher education, for example, specialised image collection and research link management tools could have the same effective level of integration as Flickr and Digg; likewise academically-oriented reputation and recommendation services could have as ubiquitous access as the Facebook “Like” and Google “+1″ services.

Currently, you can only use Web Intents via a JavaScript shim which can be used to create demos. However, its likely the technology will be standardised in W3C and added to browsers in the near future.

While it could be argued that for most people money went virtual a long time ago with the emergence of online banking and debit cards, there is a strong trend towards “appifying” payments with digital wallets and mobile payment mechanisms.

Square[1] and Google Wallet[2] are the ones making the headlines, but others may be close behind.

In universities, contact-based payments are already used in cafes and libraries using cards such as Squid[3]. Contactless payments are also making their way onto the high street [4][5].

In a slightly more bizarre move, MasterCard is adding contactless payment technology to wristwatches [6].

Most of these systems use variations on RFID and NFC technologies, however perhaps the most critical component is the software, and the service infrastructure that lies behind it[7].

For education, this may not seem like a particularly important development, however most universities and colleges need to handle payments across a wide range of services and facilities (cafes, library, short courses, shop, events) and will probably need to start planning for accepting contactless payments across campus.

[1] Square’s updated Card Case app gets you a step closer to ditching your wallet
[2] Google Wallet is hitting the road for a 5-city tour with $10 “bribes”
[3] http://www.squidcard.com/
[4] Contactless ‘pay at the tills with a mobile’ system introduced 
[5] Firms hope London Olympics push contactless payment across Europe
[6] MasterCard Rolls Out Prepaid Contactless Wristwatch in U.K.
[7] Swift mobile wallet adoption hinges on apps 

Mobile

Every vision of the future now has a strong place for mobile [1][2]. We’re seeing consistent trends for increasing data use and service access from mobile, and ubiquity of devices, and a strong rise in smartphones as a % of total device ownership. The form factor for smartphones has been established as pure touchscreen interface, with a fairly stable set of standard sensors (GPS, accelerometer, compass, microphone, camera). Innovation is mostly focussed on incremental improvements in each of these aspect [3]; however a recent game-changer is the Siri voice recognition interface [4][5], particularly for blind users, but also as an advance in interaction methods more generally.

Analytics

Analytics and “big data” are terms being applied to all kinds of sectors and topics, including learning, health, management etc. Mobile analytics [6] is an emerging area, where organisations try to take advantage of the contextual data possible with mobile platforms. In education, areas where analytics are being applied include tracking learner attention [7], behaviour management [8], truancy [9], teacher performance evaluation [10] and school dashboards [11].

Tablets

The tablet computing category now appears stable, and has effectively killed off netbooks. From the top end iPad, to the $35 device from India [12] [13], there is now a wide range of devices spanning 7″ to 11″ screen form factors. Attention is being placed, as might be expected, on educational applications [14], and in particular to the area of textbooks (see below). A future vision from Microsoft [1] also puts an emphasis on tablets, with possible new future forms including foldable tablets, tablets that can link together into larger canvasses, and surface-based computing.

 Apps, Widgets and Appification

“There’s an app for that” has entered popular culture; almost any service can now be envisioned as an app, from healthcare [15] to agriculture [16]. The key challenges are device and OS fragmentation keeping costs high relative to returns for new entrants, also a worry for education as “bring your own device” can mean “bring your own interoperability problem” [17]. However services like PhoneGap (acquired this month by Adobe [18]) based on HTML5 and W3C Widgets are emerging as the way to solve this in the short term. W3C gained very significant interest in the are of “offline web applications” from a wide range of vendors, suggesting the area of partially-disconnected applications could be one to watch [19].

e-Textbooks

The “textbook problem” seems to have rising prominence in education technology policy. In Asia, there is a strong push for e-books, e.g. in China from a slow start last year [20] huge growth is now likely [21]; in South Korea [22] there is also a major national strategy. In the US, the concept is even making front-page news [23] although the focus is more often on the hardware – especially iPads [14], although the Kindle Fire platform seems to be garnering attention too [24]. Even Steve Jobs’ posthumous biography states it was his intention to disrupt the textbook market [25]. Again we have an issue of standards and interoperability, particularly as we move beyond basic PDF and e-Book formats towards e-textbooks providing advanced  capabilities such as built-in testing and feedback functions.

REFERENCES

[1] http://venturebeat.com/2011/10/27/microsofts-vision-of-the-mobile-future-is-astounding-video/

[2] http://venturebeat.com/2011/10/27/rim-mobile-future-video/

[3] http://www.tmdisplay.com/english/news/2011/2011_1020.htm

[4] http://www.apple.com/iphone/features/siri.html

[5] http://mashable.com/2011/10/03/iphone-5-assistant/?utm_source=twitterfeed&utm_medium=twitter

[6] http://radar.oreilly.com/2011/10/mobile-analytics-unlock-the-wh.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+oreilly%2Fradar%2Fatom+%28O%27Reilly+Radar%29

[7] http://www.downes.ca/cgi-bin/page.cgi?post=56221

[8] http://www.classdojo.com/

[9] http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-09-30/robo-truant-tech-and-other-apps-to-fix-education-jonathan-alter.html

[10] http://formativelearning.com/

[11] http://eduvant.com/

[12] http://mindshift.kqed.org/2011/10/can-a-35-tablet-be-as-effective-a-learning-tool-as-an-ipad/

[13] http://liliputing.com/2011/10/aakash-android-tablet-hits-india-for-60-or-less.html

[14] http://finance.yahoo.com/news/Many-US-schools-adding-iPads-apf-1245885050.html?x=0&.v=2

[15] http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/mobile-health-apps-arrive-09292011.html

[16] http://venturebeat.com/2011/10/27/farmers-turn-grass-into-cash-with-the-grassometer/

[17] http://mfeldstein.com/does-byod-solve-or-worsen-k-12-tech-woes/

[18] http://news.cnet.com/8301-30685_3-20114857-264/adobe-buys-phonegap-typekit-for-better-web-tools/

[19] http://www.w3.org/2011/web-apps-ws/Papers

[20] http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/usa/2010-08/02/content_11080657.htm

[21] http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/tech/internet/china-sees-e-book-boom-prefers-e-books-rather-than-paper-books-survey/articleshow/8054153.cms

[22] http://www.csmonitor.com/Books/chapter-and-verse/2011/0706/In-South-Korea-all-textbooks-will-be-e-books-by-2015

[23] http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/19/education/19textbooks.html?hp

[24] http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2011/09/amazon_kindle_fire_scare_apple.html

[25] http://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/steve-jobs-had-hopes-of-disrupting-textbook-market/33912

Monster Math

There was an Apple Dashboard Widget for the Oblique Strategies for a while, but its disappeared for some reason. So I’ve created a new web widget using W3C Widgets, and built some mobile versions using PhoneGap – enjoy!

Oblique Strategies Widget

While the primary topic is “offline web applications” this also covers the general area of installable web applications – so W3C Widgets gets a lot of mentions here, as do Google’s CRX format and Mozilla’s OWA format, though as a paper from Telefonica notes:

“These new manifest format proposals are precursors to fragmentation on the Web and we believe action has to be taken to avoid it”.

(Although most people seem to agree that a proliferation of packaging and manifest formats for web apps is unhelpful, we don’t seem to be able to escape XKCD 927)

Another point worth noting is the range of devices being considered; for example Toshiba and LG are concerned with apps for TVs as well as tablets and mobile.

However, the main focus of the papers is offline applications, and a paper from Google sums up the current state-of-the-art:

“The last few years have seen the specification of a handful of offline enabling technologies along with nascent implementations from different browser vendors. That set of enabling technologies include, LocalStorage, WebSQLDatabase, WebIndexedDatabase, WebFileSystem, WebWorkers, and ApplicationCache. Support for these is fragmented and where implementations do exist, critical components are not mature or stable enough to rely on heavily.”

The number of offline options for web applications has ballooned from storing a few kilobytes in a cookie to a wide range of storage-related specifications; the most well-known of which, LocalStorage, has quite a few implementation problems (which has prompted comments from some browser vendors that they’d prefer to deprecate or remove it – before its even had major takeup.) So clearly there is a lot of work to do in this space, whereas the area of web application manifests and packaging (aka Widgets) would seem unproblematic by comparison.

For those who don’t know already, PhoneGap provides a way for developers of mobile web applications to convert their code into apps for different mobile platforms. Effectively this means “wrapping” the web app in some sort of native shell for iPhone, Android and so on.

This provides a handy service to developers who want to focus on using web technologies (HTML, JavaScript, CSS) but want to be able to have their apps available in things like the App Store for iPhone or the Android Market without having to recode everything in Objective C or Java.

PhoneGap also provides shims for accessing common device capabilities (such as location or the camera) from JavaScript – rather like WAC or W3C DAP – whether or not the phone has actually implemented these specifications.

Perhaps a little less well known is that PhoneGap uses the W3C Widgets specification as the “lingua franca” of mobile web applications. In particular, PhoneGap uses the W3C Widgets: Packaging and Configuration specification for both the widget metadata and to configure the APIs to use.

For the latter, PhoneGap uses the W3C Widgets <feature> element for declaring which APIs the application wants available, e.g.:

<feature name="http://api.phonegap.com/1.0/battery"/>

Developers can also specify this information via a web form when uploading their widget, or include it in a config.xml file as per usual.

PhoneGap also adds a few extensions to the W3C specification, such as an <app:splash> element for defining a splash screen to display when the app launches on the phone, an orientation preference, a “versioncode” attribute (only used for Android), and a hover option for icons (only used for Blackberry).

Its interesting just how few extensions (and abuses, as Filip Maj has rather modestly described them) are actually needed in practice to target such a wide range of devices.

For more information on how PhoneGap implements W3C Widgets, check out the developer documentation for PhoneGap Build.