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Create Your Own Smartphone App

Create Your Own Smartphone App — MISSION: DS106

Although it seems like smartphones can do anything these days, every iPhone, Android, or BlackBerry owner can think of one thing they wish they’re phone could do. Well here’s your chance. Come up with your dream application and then create a picture that encompasses what the App would do. It could be something feasible or something completely out of this world. Maybe someone will even be daring enough to try to make your idea into a real app and make millions! Have fun with it.

A week or two ago I made a simple Remember to Create Daily web app for iphones. If I was a real developer I’d take this a bit further and make a TDC app that could submit to Flickr, youtube and soundcloud. It would let you pick pictures and photos from your camera roll and record audio directly.

The app would post and tag the media to the appropriate service. It would optionally post to your own WordPress or posterous (and anything else with an API). In doing this it might be that the DS106 organisers would encourage the use of a ds106 tag for things participants want in the main DS106 stream, this might not include the daily stuff.

Most of the inspiration for this comes from the MakeWaves app, this is one for school pupils. It is the only blogging app that allows you to post audio as well as the more usually supported images and video. I reviewed Makewaves on my main blog: Making Waves

I though I was going to bang out a series of screens for this assignment, the audio capture, the settings screen etc. As I started I realised that this would take a great deal of thought and many days. I just stuck to the first screen. I grabbed the icons from the Noun Project. These downloaded as svg files. I had to use Gimp to open these, I then copied them and pasted into Fireworks 8. Even this one screen could do with a lot more thought. The spacing and positioning of elements, choice of icon and workflows all would need careful consideration.

My other ideal app would be a journey teller, this would combine the above with a gps tracker and create a series of ‘post’ which would be placed on a map when published, (or viewed with maps in the post) I’ve messed about with such things before: Boos on a map and A Mapped Walk for example. But it is a fairly long drawn out process. I’d love to do this on the fly without having to do any work on returning home, again I’d like image, video and audio support. The app would have to be able to store the information when there was a poor or no signal.

Video Camera – Attribution ( CC BY 3.0 ) Shaomeng Zhang, from The Noun Project
Camera Licensed Under – Attribution ( CC BY 3.0 ) Stanislav Levin, from The Noun Project
Microphone Licensed Under – No Rights Reserved ( CC0 ) Ryan Oksenhorn

I got this picture from google

What is Creative Commons? | Flickr – Photo Sharing! by Enokson

I’ve been using Creative Commons media since I discovered the web 2 world. It makes perfect sense to me. I’ve just added the same license to this blog Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.5 UK: Scotland License as I use on my ‘real blog‘ I slap a straight Attribution, Noncommercial, Share Alike on my flickr photos.

I was annoyed when this one, cables, was used Is this theft?, not because I wanted money, but I just like the idea of sharing. That one broke the Noncommercial bit. I never did hear from them.

On the other hand, someone mailed me through flickr mail and asked if they could use this photo in a book, I was delighted. I got a book, but no cash crossed my hands.

As a primary teacher I always found it hard to teach attribution to young (say 10 year olds). Sometimes I though they had got it, but then thy would attribute photos that wee not marked as reusable. I recall one pupil, very pleased with a blog post who attributed: I got this picture from google.
At that point I decided there should be a wee kids license, this would allow youngster to attribute all the various license, CC, GLP etc as used under the wee kids, I don’t fully understand copyright but I am trying license.
Once I though I had the perfect chance to explain. I found that several My Space (remember that) sites were hot linking blog headers my pupils had made as backgrounds. I hoped to engender some indignation. On showing the class the response I got was COOL!
The other thing I did to try and help young pupils attribute was to make a variation of the flickr search sites. A flickr CC search toy. This you search for CC flickr photos, it gives you the embed code with attribution (unlike Flickr’s own, which just links. It also will produce a photo with the attribution stamped onto it. Hopefully making it much easier for primary pupils to find images and use them while helping attribute.

The Stamping option produces a photo like the one above, adding a strip of attribution to the bottom.
(The coding and design of A flickr CC search toy is pretty horrible, but I think it does what I wanted it to do.)

Keep Calm and Make a Gif

A new Assignment form Ben Rimes, ds106 Technical Difficulties | The Tech Savvy Educator worth 36 stars! My own effort took all of 3 minutes so an easy win;-) I started here: KEEP CALM AND CARRY ON with the Keep Calm-o-matic and finished in fireworks, with a bit of noise.

Let’s face it, ds106 is a difficult ship to sail. Besides the shark-infested copyright waters and the mine filled seas of comment-apathy, it can be hard to keep the ds106 boat going forward all the time. So let’s honor the fact that the site will more than likely continue to endure growing pains, and provide some excellent “technical difficulty” signs/gifs/media that can be displayed the next time the site goes down….wait, it’s working now, right?

ds106 Technical Difficulties — MISSION: DS106
Finding time to do a few Assignments today as it has been raining fairly steadily.

After the Jump an animated version, suggested by Chad Sansing:

Continue reading “Keep Calm and Make a Gif”

Kung Fu Hustle

I am fond of animated gifs, but haven’t had time to make any. After seeing Jim Groom’s Master of the Flying Guillotine Animated GIFs I went over to YouTube to see if I could find any kung fu. Kung Fu Hustle – YouTube which I had watched in the cinema. Very much a comedy. I downloaded the movie and grabbed a few gifs:

I didn’t spend much time on these, but there is something fascinating about animated gifs.

To download youtube videos I use youtube-dl a command line tool. It seems to work better than some GUI tools I’ve used.

To grab gifs from the movie once downloaded I use Movie2Gif this is just a GUI front end for the Gifsicle command line application. It works on a Mac and you can download it from a link on the Movie2Gif post if you want to give it a try.

More after the jump:

Continue reading “Kung Fu Hustle”

Letter to Camp Week 3

I’ve not been around the camp as much as I hoped this week, so am sending this note. It has been a busy week here in Scottish Edu Tech land.
I did keep up with most of my daily chores, mostly by using my phone and not taking too long about it. I particularly enjoyed the 6 minutes past the hour day, an interesting activity. I’ll embed the various tdcs below and a set from the 6 minutes past too.
I’ve bumped into quite a few campers along the way, mostly on flickr comments http://www.flickr.com/activity/ is a useful way to keep up with this traffic. I’ve also visited a few of my fellow campers assignment posts and had a few chats.
Strangely I’ve not seen any/many of the folk from my Bunkhouse, the Wäscälly Wäbbits in passing, I’ve not made it into minecraft at all this week. I did watch, in a school I was visiting, some 11 year olds co-operation to build various things in minecraft on iPads. Inspiring and I hope to get up and running in there soon.

My week 2 daily creates:

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