Discovering Mobile Websites and Apps at M-Libraries

On Monday I attended a preconference at m-Libraries which was supposed to be about designing e-learning content for mobile devices. Much of the workshop was focused on streamlining your content, which wasn’t of particular interest to me. I was lucky enough to be sitting a a table of web librarian folks though. So we customized the workshop more for ourselves and looked at and discussed different mobile sites and apps together.

It was really fun getting to see the apps and site which people knew of. Discussing their potential pros and cons. It was also nice that a couple of us had iPod Touch to play with to show off particular sites and apps. One of the most difficult thing about showing off iPhone apps and sites is figuring out how to show them to others (en mass). While you can grab screen captures from and iPod/iPhone, I don’t know of a good way to do do full motion screencapture of a iPod/iPhone. I really wish that there was so that I could embed a video of an iPhone demo in presentations. The same can be said for other cell phones. While there are emulators, they aren’t always great. So often we are left with passing around devices which isn’t the most effective. Still, it was really valuable for me to be able to sit with a group of colleagues, look at websites and apps and talk about what we thought worked and what didn’t.  We also spent time talking about what bits of content that we thought would be most appropriate to mobile devices.

Overall I think that it was a valueable experience for the folks sitting together and sharing our mobile plans and thoughts.