I've been using this for a week now and it's working fine. Yes a couple of hiccups and hey this is technology we're using here so expect it I guess. The nice thing is that Dave and his crew are very approachable and available. Keep up the good work guys.
Spent some time over the weekend with Dave Harper of Wireless Ink. Dave's shop produces an elegant little tool for creating true moblogs: sites both publishable and, critically, accessible via phones and other mobile devices.
Such WINKsites, as they're known, offer their creators a feature set unusual in (forgive me) the mobile space: user-configurable chatrooms, standard-issue blogs, form wizards for audience surveys and so forth. Navigating a WINKsite will be familiar to anyone who’s ever used menu-driven iMode sites - or voicemail, for that matter: it’s a simple matter of paging down through screens of options.
It’s nothing if not simple, which is key to its appeal; the main drawback is that, given the dimensions of screen real estate we're talking about, there's no easy way to let folks showing up on the “front page” know how rich the option trees foliating beneath them are. Challenge number one, then, is making the navigational richness somehow self-evident without cluttering the screen. (Challenge number two is good navigational labeling; we have good reason to believe that users don’t mind paging through even arbitrarily long lists of options as long as they have a strong sense of scent to let them know they’re on the right track.)
There are aesthetic issues, of course, in the presentation of WINKsites, as well as problems related to the appeal of a product currently based around text to an audience increasingly primed to regard multimedia content as essential. Even given all this, Dave’s product impressed me as a good first-pass answer to one of the prime unanswered questions of the First International Moblogging Conference, which is something I think of as “closing the loop.”
The Conference overflowed with ingenious ways to get information – text, photos, geographical data - from a mobile device to a conventional Web site, but what nobody was showing at that time was a product or service that then returned such information usefully to a handset. WINKsites offer a way for their creators and users to do just that, relatively painlessly. It’ll be cool to see where Dave and his team take this. [v-2 Organisation RSS feed]
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