Feedback Forum

We've had some mail!

Woo...

Well - ok - not actual mail. But one of our readers has commented on this lovely blog of ours and we thought we'd re-post it and give it a (well deserved) response.
Cool.

Well - here's the comment we received:

"Hey. I dont usually comment on websites.
But this ones thrown me... I found out about this blog way back at the first day.
I was super hoping to see more about wap design, the process you might go through, Some thoughtful insight on the mobile world, etc etc...
But all ive seen is a plug for your mobizines site - Which obviously its about mobizines so why not.
But I was super hoping I would see more informative posts.
Hopefully you take this comment to heart because you people seem to know what your talkin' about.
If you do take this to heart... mabye you can explain how its feasible for you to offer up mobizines free? I'm wondering how you would benefit mainly in this question.

Heres hoping you run with my comment. (and not to the trash bin)

Signed: Anonymous"

First off - Thank you for your feedback Mr Anonymous (whoever you are!).
When we got the email here at Mobizines with your comments in we immediately forwarded it to our techie/development team and challenged them to come up with some more 'informative' (shall we say) posts about Mobizines etc and how they all work.

Basically - Your comments have been taken on board and we are doing something about it!
Originally we didn't want the blog to become overly-techie and/or just a 'plug for the Mobizines site' - but if more process/design stuff is what you want - then we shall try and fulfil that need, (as well as sticking in the odd random post as per usual).
So...

WATCH THIS SPACE!

In answer to one of your questions mind -
(about Mobizines being free) -
Have a look at the last paragraph of our very first post.
Hopefully that might go some way in explaining how we do it - let us know if not!

Also...
Here's hoping this 'Feedback Forum' section becomes a regular thing...
If you have something to contribute to the Mobizines team or if you have any feedback about the service and/or the blog - You can reach us by either:

a) Leaving a comment on this here blog of ours or
b) Mailing us at bloggers@mobizines.com

We're generally quite a nice bunch of folk and most things get addressed pretty sharpish..
Hope to hear from you soon!

My Mobizines for mouseless devices

Rich just showed me the coolest thing ever.

When we were putting My Mobizines together for the website we decided that it would be the coolest thing ever if we made the interface all drag and drop and Web 2.0ish. (I've now recanted and a more accessible version is in the works, but bear with me).

About that time Robin bought himself a PSP "for research". The website rendered OK but of course the PSP is mouseless: there's a pointer but you can't drag. So I hacked in the ability to triple click a Mobizine icon to subscribe. All was happy, the PSP project was kind of forgotten, and we went back to drag and drop as a metaphor - but triple click remained.

Scroll on six months and mouseless browsers are popping up everywhere. We tested My Mobizines on the Wii and - with triple click - you can indeed subscribe to a Mobizine.

And now for today's discovery: Rich just brought his brand new N95 over and showed me My Mobizines running on it in zoom mode. Triple click an icon and - bingo - Mobizine subscribed. This is obviously really bizarre as the point of My Mobizines was to provide configuration of your mobile device from a web browser, and here was a mobile device configuring itself.

I think this says more for the clever people at KDE, Apple and Nokia for making the N95 do proper web than my coding (no, the Javascript isn't obfuscated: that's how I code). It also says an enormous amount about the rock solid frameworks My Mobizines is built on: prototype by Sam Stephenson and script.aculo.us by Thomas Fuchs et al. As I side note I made a right tit of myself at a conference yesterday when I met Ryan Singer from 37Signals and I utterly gushed over prototype and the great stuff 37Signals has given the community. Oh well, sometimes its good to be a fanboy.