I’ve read a few things in the last week about Oxford’s Mobile App – mainly tweets about #ucisa10 and various follow-up blog posts – so thought I’d have a look. I am particularly pleased to see that their well put together and well received mobile provision is a web app rather than a native app or proprietary service offering.

Critically this development route and the technologies applied affords them every opportunity to improve, amend and react to criticism and suggestion both quickly and simply.

Even better, they’re using services such as Open Streetmap for their location services, various location code mechanisms and the supplemental use of QR Codes and barcodes.

Looking around the m.ox.ac.uk app site you find some interesting solutions.

For the Iphone and browsers such as Opera Mini (for Windows Mobile), they’ve re-used their homepage iconography to create short, meaningful breadcrumb navigation as you drill deeper.

The risk of lengthy trails is eliminated with the use of ellipsis characters ( … / …).

They’ve a desktop site for previews, information on data costs and usage. A very thorough approach.

More info’ about developments on m.ox.ac.uk can be found at: http://m.ox.ac.uk/desktop/#blog.