Jacob Gibbins - Photography

Jacob Gibbins is arguably one of the South Wests most up and coming cycling photograher (his style's not just restricted to cycling but it is the main field he excels in). However what Jacob makes up in photography skills he slightly lacked in website design. So I decided to put my skills to use in helping a fellow Photographer/Cyclist out.

Now I'm not saying at all that I have good web design skills or coding skills but I do like to think I'm not terrible at either so here's what I made for Jacob:

His full site can be viewed: http://www.jacobgibbins.co.uk/

As always wherever I've tried where I can to make my work under creative commons act so feel free to nab the HTML and CSS (obviously all images are copyright to Jacob Gibbins so don't nab them!)

I've also uploaded the FLV file so feel free to use this also under creative commons. I tried to comment wherever I felt people might get confused. My plans are to make a proper loader bar between images and to tidy the code up some what. But I am getting married in less than 3 weeks so this website has slipped a tad in priorities!

The idea of this FLV file was to have an easily accessed and mostly protected set of Jacobs top 33 images. Sadly it really only works for landscape images but two portraits side by side also works! I wanted to create a flash file which meant Jacob wouldn't have to constantly edit some flash file to alter his top 33 images. I got around this by getting the flash file to search the folder "MainPhotos" on his server and grab the pre numbered images from there. So simply changing these images is all he needs to do to change his portfolio images. Making sure they have the same names and it should be simple as!

M-Learning just some playing

I have future possible projects with the possibilities of having a M-Learning add-on/aspect to them, and have been looking at the different possibilities of developing for them. The biggest hurdle as with all E-Learning projects I find is keeping the project generic and open to as many people as possible.

With M-Learning the problem is catering for the mass amounts of different types of Mobile devices people possess. Which leaves 3 possible platforms to develop a application/learning resource in:

• Flash
• Java
• HTML

Flash: With mobile flash growing in popularity and Adobe now offering it free for mobile phone operators to offer it with their phones this is defiantly an platform to watch flash has obvious advantages to offer such as easy application development and even simple patching over from current Flash projects. Flash is my preferred option to use in any development, however it lacks popularity within phones which is on the change but could still be too early to use.

Java: Has been available on phones since before phones existed... probably, is a harder platform to develop in, is very versatile, supports 3d, bluetooth the possibilities of Java seem endless. However its biggest flaw is Microsoft hates Java, with it being a major rival to its own platform, Microsoft as a result doesn't directly support its use on Windows Mobile devises (PDAs/Mobiles). However there are a number of 3rd party applications which apparently allow you to run Java on a windows mobile device... I've not had any success doing this and as a result I'm not happy supporting this as a method for students.

HTML: Simply creating a load of offline websites could be a very simple yet effective method as it will be free! Which is the important thing, and will be highly adaptable to work on all manor of devices of all shapes and sizes. However it is a tad boring!

To summarise... I think if these upcoming projects are to have an M-Learning spin and its to a mass of students with unknown devices then I think a simple HTML interface is needed which can be down/upsized to the devices.

However if the types of devices the students are using is known then this could open up the possibilities of creating a more interesting resource, say for example the masses of Cepple PDA's where made available to the students then flash could be installed on these devices and as a result some interesting resources could be developed... Flash + Touch Screen = SCORE!