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Posts Tagged ‘obama’

Obama iPhone App Provides Platform for Supporters

02 Oct

I don’t know how accurate it is to say Senator Barack Obama is a Mac to Senator John McCain’s PC, but those convinced of this premise will either delight in or scorn the fact that the Obama for America campaign has presented a free iPhone and iPod touch-compatible application called Obama ’08 [iTunes URL] for supporters to use.

Having browsed the application myself, I can tell you that the experience is commendable. The 1MB download is thoroughly polished, and covers nearly everything its larger relative, BarackObama.com has to offer. Technically speaking, the development is appreciable.

Though it does not harbor a connection to the social network My.BarackObama.com, the application is, design-wise, very much in line with the campaign website. No question about that. But how it functions is far more noteworthy. If you wish to read news highlighted by campaign operatives, you can do so, with the option to specify a national or local view. If you want to browse photos and videos, you may. Events are posted, too, and the campaign’s stated issues and its positions on those issues are noted in full. (Nearly all of these items can be emailed at will.)

You can also sign up to receive email and/or SMS notifications, and call anyone within your phone’s contact list, with each noted as “have not called” until you connect with them. This is obviously meant to increase outreach. (Placing calls is of course not possible with an iPod touch.)

Digging into the menu is easy enough. There’s really no trouble to be had with navigation. You can never go deep enough to get lost, to be honest. Which is just as well, because it’s an application for a political campaign, after all. There’s only so much a user can do given the matter at hand.

Nonetheless, there are some issues to be had. Browsing media isn’t handled the best way possible. For one, it would of course be a great convenience to see video playback within the application itself, but interacting with titles simply brings you out of the Obama ’08 application and over to the device’s YouTube application. This wouldn’t be something to nitpick over, but when you do venture out of the latter piece of software and back to the Obama ’08 application, you’re shown the start page once more, not the menu of videos from where you originally departed.

On the photography side of things, the supply of images is all but useless. Not because the content or presentation of individual photos doesn’t satisfy, but rather because the sheer number that is uploaded on any given day hardly makes it worth your while. The menu only allows for twenty images to be viewed, and my own time spent with the application today has shown nothing but photos titled “YouthVoteSurrogatePic….” This is not something to enjoy with any measure of frequency, that’s for sure.

Be that as it may, visual media is not the main draw here. It’s more about what the campaign is doing now and in the next few weeks leading up to Election Day, not a compendium of the last year and a half of canvassing that’s been done. For that, it will likely suffice for most users. You might not enjoy having a ‘Donate’ button that simply shows a translucent pop-up asking you to connect by phone to a campaign representative. Nor will some users like that you can only call contacts, and not send them email or SMS messages. Still, it is for the most part a solid collection of information pertaining to the Democratic ticket, making it enough of a download for iPhone-wielding Obama supporters to draw interest in.

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Related Articles at Mashable | All That's New on the Web:

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McCain Vs. Obama on Science [Election 2008]

16 Sep

It's easy to know where presidential candidates John McCain and Barack Obama stand on ever-hot topics, like the war or abortion. But what about various areas of scientific interest? Science Debate 2008 has made it their focus to clarify each candidate's stance on issues like genetics research, energy and space. The full text is available at that link, but for those who enjoy abridged versions, the New York Times did a nice job of cutting the big block of text into bite-sized pieces.

The NYT points out that both candidates agree that global warming exists, though McCain would like to see carbon emissions drop by 60% while Obama aims for 80%. Similarly, both agree that genetics research is promising but frightening in its implications, assuring to fight workplace discrimination based upon one's genetic code and continue the genetic modification of crops.

The biggest difference I noted was McCain's interest in space. It's one of the few responses where McCain's opinion is lengthier and more policy specific than Obama's, assuring continued NASA funding and naming space exploration as a "top priority" while citing project goals like shortening space shuttle redesign turnaround. Obama feels it's more important to delegate the responsibility/policy, opting to reinstate a White House Space Council.

But there's lots of interesting stuff we haven't even mentioned here. [Science Debate 2008 and NYT]


 
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