Grow with Global Apps
By Darron | Apps, Best Practices, mLearning, Mobile Devices | No comment yet
Mobile is predicted to be a $119B industry in 2015 (see MobiThinking article). With the current 5 billion mobile subscriptions, 3.8 billion outside the US, it is hard to ignore the burgeoning market and the huge potential for reach. If you’re developing an app in English only, you are ignoring 73% of the mobile market–this is not something a global organization can afford to do.
Windows Phone 7 – all over the place
By Darron | Apps, mLearning, Mobile Devices | One comment so far
I’ll admit that I’m so cheap I do not yet have a smart phone or other cool mobile device for personal use. I want one though, and I know it’s only a matter of time before I’ll have to get one just to turn on the lights in my house–so I study the heck out of them.
Recently, I worked on localizing some elearning modules for Windows Phone 7. I must say that I liked what I saw, and I saw it over and over again as I rolled the modules out into various languages. I love the live tiles and the hubs, especially the People hub with its Facebook integration. The real-time videos of navigating through the various features looked pretty good, and it seemed to zip through. It clearly was designed, as Microsoft claims, for a ‘glance-and-go’ experience that is much more desirable than an app-centric environment. I got very excited about this new look and feel that Windows had produced. It’s a far cry from the Windows-lite Microsoft has been trying to pass off as smart phone OS for the past 10 years, and I was sold.
mLearnCon
By Darron | General | No comment yet
Here I am at mLearnCon. I arrived last night, and I started in at 7 am today beginning with words from Executive Vice President and Co-Founder Hedi Fisk. Tomi Ahonen is kicking things off with the keynote address right now, and then it’s off to listen to Float Mobile Learning’s Chad Udell talk about “Design Approaches for Adapting Content for mLearning.” I’ll update throughout the day as I’m able to fill you in on any goodies that I come across.
mLearning Simulation Environments
By Darron | Development Tools, mLearning | No comment yet
mLearning is making its way into many training/learning strategies, whether the mobile learning module is a part of or the entire JIT learning application. It is important to know how the me-learning application will look to the learner. Since most learning modules are developed on desktops/laptops, it’s easy to check the end product on that same machine. And there are development techniques which can ensure the user experience is consistent regardless of platform. For example, publishing to a SWF will give the same experience to learners on Mac and PC because the SWF is platform-independent. There are also bits of code that will tell browsers how to behave so that Firefox and IE, for example, render the same way.
Musings About the Future of Flash
By Darron | Development Tools | 7 responses so far
I hear a lot of talk lately about Flash going the way of the dinosaur and HTML5 emerging as the dominant, evolutionarily superior development tool. (OK, so that simile was a bit dramatic, but you get the idea.) I’ve heard persuasive arguments from each camp, and I’m frankly a little flummoxed. Here is what I’m hearing:
