ChrisBell.eu

For my sins, I use public transport for commuting, specifically First Buses in Leeds. I don’t work to a strict regiment, so on a morning I’ll catch the next bus into the city centre, whichever that may be, and from whichever stop that might be (I have the luxury of being served by two different bus stops).

Whilst First Group have made good efforts to bring bus timetables into the 21st century with the release of their native apps, they leave somewhat to be desired in terms of usability and convenience. What I really want on a morning is to know when the next bus is, and I want to do it as I’m walking out of the door. It’s possible with the existing apps, but they are slow and clunky - especially when you need to request information about multiple bus stops.

Without further ado, I’d like to introduce the Alexa skill I’ve been developing recently - “NextBus UK”.

After developing SalaryBot for both iOS and Android platforms, it had crossed my mind that may be the next step would be to develop the app for Windows Phone. After a bit more thought, I decided not to bother, as for the market share I just couldn’t see how this would be worth my effort. Then I got incentivised by Nokia.

A common setup in a web development team is to have a shared local development box, which is usually located on a private local area network. Whilst this setup has previously worked well, with the shift of consumer activity to mobile devices well underway, a big problem with this workflow has surfaced itself: how do we develop/test on mobile devices?

A Google Analytics feature that's been eagerly anticipated for years appears to have been rolled out without any press at all. The ability to accurately segment mobile (smartphone), tablet and desktop has long been desired, and has at some point recently, finally been delivered to Analytics users. … »

Looking to monetise the hybrid iOS app that you built using a framework like Apache Cordova/PhoneGap? I’ll make the assumption that you aren’t all that familiar with Objective-C, but you’re happy to code away using frontend web technology. This poses an interesting question: How the hell do you integrate AdMob on iOS?

As mobile continues to disrupt the ways in which we think about traditional digital marketing, I thought I’d take the opportunity to look at how mobile has been used within the UK’s leading digital agencies.

UPDATE 2013: This is actually more like a success, failure, then success story - teaching us all to NEVER rely solely on SE traffic. Read the updated version here.

Having just realised the last time I updated this blog was eight months ago, I feel the need to make a post; and what better way to do it than explaining my absence from it. Well folks, this is my story about MySalaryCalculator.co.uk - where quite a bit of my spare time has been spent for the past while.

It’s been a long time coming, but finally I have got round to producing a video for the iPhone app that I developed in my Final Year Project at university - StaffsLocator.

I’ve had a number of academic enquiries about it over the past year, so I think it’s about time I published some information about it.