Last week I was sick, epically ill, so much so that getting out of bed was a feat comparable to climbing Everest.
So whilst stuck in bed with nothing but my mobile phone and my iPod touch I did what any web professional would, I surfed the web. I thought my first port of call would be ICTHorizons.com, as I hadn’t spent much time viewing the site from a mobile device (I realise that this is a crime but the site total time spent creating the web site was less than eleven days from first idea to the site going live, which didn’t leave much time for testing on multiple devices). On perusing the research section I noticed a duff link (horror of horrors) in the article about seeK, how it slipped by I’m not sure but that wasn’t the issue causing me to frown, no the problem was that:
I was ill
It was 9pm on a Friday night
My laptop was downstairs
It was dark and I was wearing Sunglasses.
In short I had three options, one forget about it and leave it until I was back at work (unprofessional), crawl downstairs and log into the server (in my then state, unlikely) or find someway of amending the issue with the tools available at my disposal. My mobile phone a (A Sony Eriksson W890i), is not the most advanced bit of kit in the world, granted it can surf the internet quite quickly thanks to HSDPA and has a somewhat decent web browser but that’s about it, so it would not be able to aid me in my quest, so I turned to my ipod touch. With its fully featured web browser, touch screen, WiFi connection and functionality provided by third party applications, surely I could not fail.
Initial confidence was soon shattered by the fact that I was unsure how I was going to even connect to the servers, let alone the problem of amending the aforementioned dodgy link. On my laptop I would use RDP to connect to the server and then edit the file Visual Studio, but my laptop was far, far away and all I had a was a mobile device running OSX which can’t download files or really edit text, not a good start. My only option was to bet it all that some intrepid developer has created an RDP app for the iPhone, that it would work on my iPod Touch and the demo version did not enforce ludicrous restrictions (like two minute sessions etc, or local sessions only).
It was with some trepidation that I browsed the Apple application store.
A light at the end of the tunnel?
On searching the store I found an app called RDPLite and best of all it was free! (what? in this economic downturn being miserly is in fashion!) , in a couple of seconds the application was downloading and auto installing, within moments I was entering connection information and in mere seconds I was connected to our web facing server, from my bed, via wireless technology on a mobile device, with no traditional input devices like a mouse or keyboard
And whilst I was ill in bed.
I then had one of those moments that geeks and techies get, the one where you say (or in with my sore throat squeak), “that’s so cool!” The sheer impossibility of achieving this 6 years ago (granted windows mobile probably had it back then, but using it is so infuriating that I would have thrown the PDA against the wall and gone back to sleep) is tantamount to what incredible devices mobile phones/mp3 players have turned into.
Out of the frying pan
So I had achieved step one, communication with the live servers, now what? The iPod cannot download files and it only supports one application running at a time dragging and dropping to edit would be out of the question, the application did not support multiple touch to move windows etc. So how was I going to edit that link? If I couldn’t edit the file on the iPod, it meant I had to edit the file live (yes a horrendously bad idea, but I was stuck between a rock and a hard place on this one), so how was I going to do it? What does a web teacher tell you to use to write HTML code on your first day on an entry level web developer course?
Notepad
I opened up notepad and navigated to the ICTHorizons.com directory, luckily the plucky little application had no issue opening up aspx pages and so I thumbed my way through the file (Even running RDP over WiFi it still takes some time for the window to refresh), luckily for me the broken link was right at the bottom, so it took a good minute or two to locate it. Once I’d found the link, it took about three seconds to amend it so that it pointed to the correct location and save. I checked the link to ensure it worked which it did, logged of the server and contemplated how far technology has come.
All in it took about eight minutes from finding the link to fixing it, not a great amount of time, but it did get me thinking, even in my befuddled state the possibilities of mobile devices to help those people and learners who are long term sick or are undertaking a course via Distance Learning.
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