If you haven't heard of Nuit Blanche all you need to know is that it's an all-night festival of the arts that started in Paris and has made its way to Toronto. Scotiabank was the sponsor of this year's event, and promised us no less than three mobile solutions for navigating the festival -- one "app" each for BlackBerries and the iPhone, and a regular mobile-optimized site for the rest of us.
I can't speak for the apps, but I can say that the mobile site was a big fail. Here's why:
In wandering around the downtown core (or "Zone A" in Nuit Blanche-speak) you literally couldn't take more than a couple of steps before stumbling over some kind of installation. Fortunately, each was marked with a flag and a unique number, which you could look up in your paper guide to read more about what you were looking at. Not so with the mobile site. Observe:
Nowhere on the mobile site is there any kind of utility to search for an installation by its assigned number, where the desktop version of Scotiabank's site at least had an overlay of numbered exhibits on a Google Map.
Would this be so hard to implement on a mobile site? Did the BlackBerry and iPhone apps have this functionality? I'd really like to know who was tasked with the Nuit Blanche site for mobile browsers, because it seems to me that they dropped the ball big time....
