Replace New Year's Eve Fireworks with an App

There have been some calls for new year's eve fireworks to be cancelled in Australia, due to bush-fires. Perhaps they could be replaced, at least in part, by spectators' smart phones. The idea would be to have each person hold up their phone, which would display part of a coordinated pattern. This would be similar top the effect where those in a stadium hold up colored cards on cue, but could form a much faster changing, more vibrant pattern. This could supplement laser light shows and displays projected on buildings. This would also turn people from spectators, into active participants in the show, as well as avoiding setting off pyrotechnics during a total fire ban.

NSW Government Needs Input on Delivery of Government Services Using ICT

The NSW Government is re-developing its Apps4NSW program (for delivery of government services using ICT) and has company GfK collecting community input.  Workshops are planned for the week of 24 August 2015 in Sydney:

"Workshop sessions for the NSW Government Department of Finance, Services and Innovation 

Hi there,

Recently you took part in a survey for the Department of Finance, Services and Innovation (the Department) for the apps4NSW program.

As we mentioned before, the Department is looking to re-develop the Apps4NSW program and is taking a community centred service design approach in doing so.

As part of this process GfK Australia will be conducting a series of 2 hour workshop sessions in August with developers, designers, marketers to name a few. The workshop sessions will also provide you with an opportunity to have your say, and network with others in the industry. 

Participation in the research is, of course, voluntary. GfK Australia has been commissioned by the Department to maintain strict confidentiality of individual responses, and the information sent to the Department will not identify individual respondents without your explicit and prior permission. 

Please feel free to forward this invitation on! We would appreciate you sharing this invitation to anyone else you who might also like to take part in these sessions.

If you would like to take part in this research we will need to ask you a few questions first to make sure we invite you to the right session, in will only take a couple of minutes. Take me to the survey

If you have any questions at all about the research process, please email discuss@gfk.com. 

If you would like to check the bona fide nature of the research, please contact Department at apps4nsw@finance.nsw.gov.au.

Your feedback is very important to us and we would greatly appreciate your time in participating in the research."

" ... Just wanted to let you know that we are holding some more workshop sessions next week. When we spoke last week you mentioned that if we were to do some more sessions the following week that you may be available. The potential sessions are below.

Please feel free to share within your network and if you or anyone can make it, please just email or call me to let me know which session/s you may be available for. ...

Mon 24^th Aug: 12pm-2pm 5:45pm-7:45pm 8pm-10pm

Tue 25^th Aug: 8am-10am 12pm-2pm 5:45pm-7:45pm 8pm-10pm

Wed 26th Aug: 8am-10am 12pm-2pm

Thurs 27th Aug: 5:45pm-7:45pm8pm-10pm

--

Office & Marketing Administrator, GfK

Apps in HTML5

Jeremy Apthorp talked on "The Future of HTML5 Apps" at Linux Conference 2013 today. He described the history of the quest for web based applications which work outside the browser window and work on different operating systems. He described standards work by W3C. He showed how some of the problems of making such apps secure and run offline with Goggle Chrome Packaged Apps. One design decision I did not understand is that remote image files are not permitted, on the basis that the device may be off-line and so not have the image file. However the IMAGE tag of HTML included ALT to provide alternate text for when the image cannot be seen. This could be used when the image in not available. Application designers are required to implement this anyway for accessibility reasons. One curious aspect of this is that Google has two different operating systems (Google Android and Google Chrome) for the Apps to work in.