Basecamp and Campfire served their purposes well. As a team working on iPlan we predominantly stuck to using Basecamp; Campfire was only used when we were collaborating on pieces at the same time. I found features I enjoyed, and features that were rather annoying. As a group we often texted each other for deadlines, but most of our actual communication about the project work was posted in basecamp. Basecamp made it easy to share and upload new versions in a quick and convenient factor, and when splitting up tasks, that helped a lot.

We frequently used the ability to upload and download files, particularly larger files. It was nice to work from basecamp as the servers were relatively fast. However, once we uploaded these files, we often made minute changes or sometimes wished we could just change the name. The ability to not change names and limited time to edit posts was somewhat frustrating. One time, we had the wrong file zipped with another file and we couldn’t change its name and found out after 15 minutes, so couldn’t edit the post. This led to confusion and just caused us to spend more time than should have been necessary. We also seemed to find that campfire should just be built into the messages within the general basecamp group area. We typically used messages so we could alert eachother with emails when major stuff got done. If we had the ability to chat within the message, it would’ve been a bit more useful.

In my opinion, our greatest success was getting iPlan to work with Facebook. None of us had any experience working with Facebook, and with its many bugs combined with assembling it into mobile jquery, it was a miracle we were able to get it working in time. Our biggest failure was choosing jquery mobile; it seemed to fight many of the calls or require a separate work around just for jquery’s sake. After getting the facebook calls to work, we had to spend an additional 8 hours recoding for it to work with jquery.

If we were to do it again, we definitely would drop mobile jquery. It simply hasn’t had enough time to fully develop. Besides CSS3 is starting to sprout, it would be a bit of fun to use CSS3 transitions and such. Other than that I was pretty happy with our outcome. On a fast server iPlan would definitely get some users.

Original Site: www.CNN.com
Mobile Site: www.m.CNN.com

CNN is widely considered a reliable source for news. I was glad to see that their website continued this trend. At first glance, users see the CNN logo paired with their traditional red band across the top.

Room for improvement
This same approach was continued into their mobile website. Mobile CNN.com, slightly makes better use of its limited space by reducing the red band and converting it two useable buttons. These buttons, Latest News and Audio/Video, look good but are slightly useless. For one, you’re delivered by default to the Latest News section, making one think they’d replace the smaller top right Weather button with the Latest News button.

To further this, the second section – Audio/Video – is highly unorganized and seemingly slow. When you first load it up, you’re presented with a still screenshot of a video, and when you click this section you’re presented with another screen asking you to play the video. It would just make sense that they’d eliminate the play video step and just play the video when you click it. Additionally, when I typically browse the CNN site, I’m not on the world’s fastest internet connection, I’m usually on the go using 3G (4G is still rather sparse) so it’s rather irritating to have to load up and watch an advertisement before my video. CNN should really consider doing away with mobile video advertisements – stick to banner ads for mobile, there’s just not yet enough bandwidth to go around.

My last major critique is on their home page. When you load up the site, all you can see is an oversized image of their Latest News story; in my personal opinion, I feel many people would rather read the multiple story captions than see a single low quality picture. If they weren’t interested in losing the picture, they could eliminate its wacky rectangular shape, square it up, and make room for the pictures headline.

What It Does Best

But CNN mobile does do best what its known for – delivering news. Disregarding discrepancies with image sizes and buttons, the actual content within is of the same quality on the original site as is the mobile site. Often you’ll see companies cut down material for mobile web. CNN mobile has set up its content in a nice fashion; instead of loading the entire page at once, it distributes the articles into multiple sections, and offers, at the bottom, a choice to load the entire article. When you’re done reading, you can even select Next Article to move on.

The Download
Overall, it’s a useable mobile site with a full load of content. While some sections require a few additional clicks to navigate, for the most part you’re not restricted into shortened footage or articles. It’s a nice relief from having to navigate the full site to find what you need. If Mobile CNN fixed up their navigation buttons, eliminated the video advertisements, and reduced the repetitive clicks I think the site would be as good as it could get.

Facebook, the world reknown social network, has developed a couple of mobile websites. It has both Facebook Mobile and Facebook Touch. In this analysis we’ll focus on Facebook Touch, developed for mobile touch devices such as the iPhone.

Facebook Touch: http://touch.facebook.com
Facebook: http://facebook.com

Facebook Touch takes the mobile approach of websites and adds one more element. This element, known as touching, allows a user to press down on the device’s screen, then drag, slide or release without the need of a mouse.

The Pros
The login, seen in the picture, has expanded the text fields and buttons to allow appropriate room for the use of fingers. I find this a delicate change from other mobile websites, which you’re often forced to zoom in and click, then zoom back out to view the resulting information. Additionally, the login page provides a rather unique feature: the ability to login using your phone number. Few sites have yet to add this feature, most rely on the typical e-mail approach. That said, Facebook often tends to be a trendsetter, and I’m guessing we’ll be seeing more of the phone logins in the future. And like the traditional Facebook site, their simple layout and use of few colors, allows for quick loading times between pages.

Home
Once a user logs in to the Facebook Touch site, they’re presented with the Home screen. On the home page you can easily navigate between your News Feed, Events, or Places; however, it can become a little tricky when trying to search or click on notices. For some reason Facebook decided to include the search button as a tiny magnifying glass in the top right corner – when looking for the first time, this threw me off. Additionally, a typical user scrolls down their News Feed without even noticing the small icon for their updates. I think a more prominent positioning, or widening of the red notifications would help eliminate this issue and alert the user of their notifications quicker.

The non-mobile Facebook page does have its advantages. For one, the News Feed is quite short on the Touch site displaying as few as 8 updates at a time. On the full Facebook site, not only does it display almost double the posts, but when you scroll to the bottom, it automatically loads more. The Touch site doesn’t include this nifty feature, you’re forced to click a small icon that says “Older Posts.”

The Download
All-in-all, it’s quite a useful site for any touch device. I tried using the traditional Facebook site on my iPhone as well. I was quite frustrated after a few moments of zooming in and out to navigate through anything and resorted back to the Touch site. While most of the Touch icons are large enough, I felt a few of the important elements such as search and notification icons could have been stressed more. On a scale of 10, I’d give the site an 8.5, nicely done Facebook.