Choffee Trail
This is a trail that I have made as I go across the internet, it includes bookmarks to sites I have made and links to articals that I have read and think are interesting.
Shared by choffee
Google gears for mobile could really change how people think about mobile apps. As the browser in the phone gets more powerful it becomes more realisitic. Things like accessing the phones functions, addressbook, calls and gps info could be tricky.
"Google Mobile are moving all development away from downloadable apps to the mobile web"That's a message mjelly records Charles Wiles, product manager for Google Gears for mobile, as making at this week's ?MoMo London event.
I was at the same event. I'm not sure I remember hearing quite such an emphatic message as mjelly reports, but I do remember hearing the following:
- Eric Schmidt (Google CEO) has been asking the Google Mobile team why they only make one app release every six months, whereas development of apps for PC web-browser happens much more quickly
- Downloadable apps for mobile devices are fraught with problems - including BIG issues with device fragmentation
- Taking Google Maps for mobile as an example: there are 10+ platforms to support, requiring 100's of builds in total - it all adds up to PAIN
- There must be a better way!
- The better way is to deliver services through the mobile web, instead of via downloadable applications.
I've heard this kind of message at previous ?MoMo London events, from lots of different speakers. Downloadable applications (whether written in native C++ for in Java) introduce lots of problems with development, deployment, and usability, whereas mobile web apps are a whole world simpler. The message that comes across is: If you want rapid development that in turn allows rapid innovation, stick with the mobile web. It's not a message I've enjoyed hearing, but I can't deny that lots of speakers have said it (in various different ways).
But what made the presentation from Charles Wiles all the more interesting was that, after highlighting difficulties facing downloadable mobile apps, he was equally critical of mobile web applications (which run inside a web browser environment on the device):
- Mobile web apps suck too!
- Javascript takes time to execute on mobile devices, and since it's single threaded, it blocks the UI
- There's often high network latency
- The mobile web apps lack access to location, the address book, and camera, etc.
It's for this kind of reason that Google has continued to release downloadable versions of their most popular applications. (Incidentally, pride of place on the Quick Access bar on my Nokia E61i idlescreen are the native C++ versions of Google Search and Google Maps. They're in that pole position because I find them both incredibly useful.)
It's also for this kind of reason that Apple's initial message about how to develop apps for the iPhone - that developers should just write web applications - was so poorly received. Would-be iPhone developers strongly suspected they could achieve better results, in many cases, by writing downloadable apps. This expectation has been vindicated by the heady events around the recent launch of the iPhone application store.
Four challenges facing mobile web apps
The four factors I generally highlight as limitations in mobile web applications vs. downloaded apps are:
- The UI provided by a web browser is general purpose, and is often sub-optimal for a more complex application on the small screen of a mobile device (an example of the unsuitedness of the web browser UI in general is when users are confronted with messages such as "Don't press the Back button now!" or "Only press the OK button once!")
- Applications need to be able to operate when they are disconnected from the network - as in an airplane or during a trip in an Olde World London underground train - or whenever reception is flaky. On a mobile device, the user experience of intermittently connected "push email" from the likes of ?BlackBerry is far more pleasant than an "always connected web browser" interface to server-side email
- Web applications suffer from lack of access to much of the more "interesting" functionality on the phone
- Web applications are often more sluggish than their downloaded equivalents.
Exploring two routes to improved mobile apps
So what is the best answer? Improve native mobile app development or improve mobile web app development? Unsurprisingly, the industy is exploring both routes.
To improve mobile web app development:
- Google Gears is providing offline functionality, and more besides
- The OMTP has unveiled the important BONDI initiative: "Leading Mobile Operators Collaborate to Enable Rich Mobile Web Services"
- AJAX supports improved user interfaces in web applications.
Each of these initiatives (and I could have mentioned quite a few more) is significant, and each deserves wide support. Each of them also faces complications - for example, the more AJAX is included in a web application (addressing problem #1 of the four I listed above), the more sluggishly that application tends to run (exacerbating problem #4). And as web applications gain more access to underlying rich phone functionality, complex issues of security and application validation rear their heads again. I doubt if any of these complications are fatal, but they reinforce the argument for the industry also looking, in parallel, at initiatives to improve native mobile app development.
To improve native mobile app development, Symbian has been putting considerable effort over the last few years into improved developer tools, developer documentation, APIs, and so on. The results are encouraging, but the job is far from done.
Quick recipes on Symbian OS
One of the disincentives to doing native application development on Symbian phones is the learning curve that developers need to climb, as they become familiar with various programming idioms. That's a topic that Kari Pulli (Nokia Research Fellow) discussed with me when he visited Symbian HQ back in Fall 2006. Kari had in mind the needs of people (especially in universities) who were already good C++ developers, but who don't have a lot of spare time or inclination to learn brand new programming techniques.
We brainstormed possible titles for a new Symbian Press book specifically targeted at this important developer segment:
- "Symbian progamming in a hurry"?
- "Hacking Symbian OS"?
In the months that followed, this idea bounced around inside Symbian, and gathered more and more support. The title changed in the process, to the more 'respectable' "Quick Recipes on Symbian OS". Michael Aubert stepped forwards as the lead author - you can read an interview with him on the Symbian Developer Network. Happily, the book went on sale last month. For my hopes for the book, I append a copy of the foreword I wrote for the book:
Posted Tue Jul 22 16:09:03 2008This book has been designed for people who are in a hurry.
Perhaps you are a developer who has been asked to port some software, initially written for another operating system (such as may run on a desktop computer), to Symbian OS. Or perhaps you have to investigate whether Symbian OS could be suited to an idea from a designer friend of yours. But the trouble is, you don’t have much time, and you have heard that Symbian OS is a sophisticated and rich software system with a considerable learning curve.
If you are like the majority of software engineers, you would like to take some time to investigate this kind of task. You might prefer to attend a training course, or work your way through some of the comprehensive reference material that already exists for Symbian OS. However, I guess that you don’t have the luxury of doing that – because you are facing tight schedule pressures. There isn’t sufficient slack in your schedule to research options as widely as you’d like. Your manager is expecting your report by the end of the week. So you need answers in a hurry.
That’s why Symbian Press commissioned the book you are now holding in your hands. We are assuming that you are a bright, savvy, experienced software developer, who’s already familiar with C++ and with modern software programming methods and idioms. You are willing to work hard and can learn fast. You are ready to take things on trust for a while, provided you can quickly find out how to perform various tasks within Symbian OS. Over time, you would like to learn more about the background and deeper principles behind Symbian OS, but that will have to wait – since at the moment, you’re looking for quick recipes.Congratulations, you’ve found them!
In the pages ahead, you’ll find recipes covering topics such as Bluetooth, networking, location based services, multimedia, telephony, file handling, personal information management – and much more. In most recipes, we provide working code fragments that you should be able to copy and paste directly into your own programs, and we provide a full set of sample code for download from the book's website. We have also listed some common gotchas, so you can steer clear of these potential pitfalls.
Since you are in a hurry, I will stop writing now (even though there is lots more I would like to discuss with you), so that you can proceed at full pace into the material in the following pages. Good speed!
Shared by choffeeHi all!
I think that the tablet can do most of this already.
Great news - Fring is now available for maemo platform. Fring is an application that combines a number of protocols such as Skype, ICQ, GTalk into one handy program. You may find it following this link. Here is the screenshot I took from Fring's russian blog. It should work for both chinook and diablo. The announce says about N810, but I'll give it a try tomorrow on my N800.
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Posted Tue Jul 22 15:37:42 2008
Shared by choffee
This is becoming more real and with the support for DMA in CF 4.0 it may be of good performance too. I wonder when 128Gb CF cards will be out?
So I buckled under temptation and bought myself a 32GB CF card and a CF-IDE converter board off eBay just now; whole lot came to about 74 pounds including postage, which I think is not too shabby for what should be a fairly good 32GB SSD solution.
Claimed read/write speeds for the card are 36/40MBps which would be very nice if true, but I’m expecting it’ll probably be around half that at best. Still, I’ll do some rudimentary tests with hdparm to see how it is; hopefully it won’t be slower than the 4200rpm 1.8” disk that’s currently in there!
I also hope the battery life improves… I’ve only ever had the X40 down to about 7 or 8W power consumption at minimum; with this setup I hope to inch an extra watt out of it!
Posted Wed Jul 16 14:35:10 2008Shared by choffeeHi folks, Many of you might have been aware about the Pys60 Tutorial on http://croozeus.googlepages.com/py60 We just launched our new venture : croozeus.com ; the site contains extensive tutorials on Pys60, that means we have more code snippets, more articles and more Pys60 applications ! The Pys60 tutorials on croozeus.com are indented to new beginners of Python [...] Posted Tue Jul 15 14:24:21 2008
Great guides for scripting your mobile phone.
Shared by choffee
Get your nokia account now. You can never have too many web accounts.
Nokia is going to unify its Ovi and other online services using a single login system called Nokia Account. In theory you can already register your Nokia Account username on the official website, though the registration section seems to be down for maintenance right now so you may want to check back later (it did work yesterday and many have already registered). At the moment Nokia Account is only being used by a few services, most notably Nokia Chat, but eventually it will be used by the entire Ovi suite including Ovi Share, Nokia Maps, Nokia Music, N-Gage etc. We've mentioned this before in other recent AAS items, but a lot of our readers apparently still don't know about this unification, so we thought it deserved a bit more publicity.
Posted Tue Jul 15 14:17:41 2008Shared by choffee
Apparently these are the people three use for their mobile mail platform.
All I can say is thank you, SEVEN. Since taking delivery of an N78 a while back, it has really been growing on me. At the same time, I never take it out of my house. Why? For one reason and one reason alone in fact: email. Among the many things I use a mobile phone for, email is very much at the top of the list.
Nokia’s OEM S60 email app has always been pretty bad and as far as my experience goes, it has never been worse than it is in my N78. IMAP idle simply will not stay connected. EVER. This means that I have to poll every X minutes. Since the email app won’t keep my connection alive, when I do get a new email notification I have to click on the new email at which point the N78 has to reconnect, download the message body and then open it. If I take too long reading an email the connection is dropped again and I have to go through the same thing all over again to read the next new message.
I get anywhere between 30 and 60 new emails on an average weekday and busy days can get well over 100. As such, the email issues on the N78 make it impossibly unusable. The solution I use (and love) on other s60 handsets is SEVEN’s beta email app but as of now it does not support FP2 due to changes made to active plugin support. Whatever the case may be, SEVEN has just almost-officially announced that it will release a new client this week or next week with FP2 support. Awesome.
If you are an email user and you don’t currently use SEVEN’s app, I can’t recommend it enough. If you’re already a SEVEN user with an FP2 device, keep your eye on the forum.
Shared by choffee
Nokia 6220Classic. Nice N series Nokia in a cheaper box. Same spec as a N95 but you trade the Wi-Fi for a Xenon Flash which is great for me. The is my newest fave phone now.
Never before has cutting edge (5mp/Xenon camera, GPS) S60 hardware reached this price point - the 6220 Classic aims to be all the man in the street will ever need in a phone. What compromises, if any, have had to be made to get to this design? Is this really the poor man's N95? Find out in my detailed review of the Nokia 6220 Classic.
Posted Mon Jul 14 13:11:31 2008Shared by choffee
Nice little app to copy google maps locations to your phone.
Before I travel to an unfamiliar place, I usually look up the address on Google Maps on my computer. With Map 2 Nokia created by Justin Hourigan, I can send the location of that place to my Nokia phone that have Nokia Maps. I’ll show you how simple it is.
Not only can we send locations from phone to phone with friends, but now we can also send locations computer to phone.
Steps
- Go to Google Maps on your computer and find the place you are looking for.
- Center in to the location by double clicking on it.
- Click on the “Link to this page” link
- Copy the link from the “Paste link in email or IM” box
- Go to http://map2nokia.appspot.com/
- Paste the link into “Google Maps URL” box and type a title and description accordingly.
- Press the “create .lmx” button to create and download the file.
- Bluetooth or email the .lmx file to your phone.
- Open the .lmx file and select options -> show on map.
- Done! You can save the location so that you can start navigating when you’re ready.
This works great on GPS-enabled phones like Nokia N95 8GB, Nokia N82, Nokia N78, Nokia E71 and more coming soon. Justin states on the site that he is still debugging it, so contact him at justin [at] scaryideas.com if you encounter any errors.
Sponsored By: FoneGrabber Check the lowest prices on the latest phones.
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Shared by choffeeWell, hello!
Would be great if this was available in the UK.
Recently, I began using Jott. It's amazing, first of all. Basically, it's super accurate speech to text from your cell phone. For free. That's right, it'll translate what you say and put it into an email, text message, or twitter/blogger/whatever and send it out automatically.
It can also read your favorite RSS feeds to you over your cell phone, again, for free. (You can now get RMUG through Jott! Check out the button on the right side of the site.)
I've been using it to call from my cell, then send an email to myself with any notes I might have. "Wow, Fernando Botero is at the Museum, maybe I should volunteer there again... Call and see."
Then, later, when I look at my tablet, it's flashing a deep blue. "Oh, I have a message." It's from me. Speech to text, there is my message to myself about that museum. Very, very nice.
And, since Jott has applications for the Blacberry and iPhone, I thought I'd write them about the tablets. This would make the N810 so. freaking. cool.
Hopefully they'll write me back and I'll post the scoop here. Until then, check out the site, sign up, and be amazed. (Oh, and don't forget to subscribe to RMUG so you can hear it over your phone!)
Until then, adieu!
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Posted Mon Jul 14 12:27:16 2008
Shared by choffee
I must eat more boiled eggs. Egg cups are always cool.
The surprisingly web-mysterious Alice recently found a lovely present for me during her visit to MoMA in New York (swoon!). She discovered this delightful combination of two of my favourite things: Trousers and novelty crockery. Thank you, Alice!
Do you like cookies? I like cookies and I like cook cookies.
Yes, I like cook very much and I like to have my recipes always to hand, but the paper is already gone out of fashion, so I wrote a new application to manage my cooking recipes in the Internet Tablet.
And today I have released Pyrecipe’s first version. It can create, edit and show recipes. Actually it can import recipes in the Gourmet and Krecipes formats. It can export to HTML, Gourmet, Krecipes and Mealmaster formats. More formats are coming.
It has other functions as Timer, where you will be able to
control the time you are cooking.
Also it has a small Shopping List. It has a basic interface, with
options to add, to delete and to mark items. You can save shopping
lists in a file to open them in another moment.
Pyrecipe is in beta state yet. Actually it only run in OS2008.
Soon it will support previous versions.
If you want to try it, you can install pyrecipe pressing in this
arrow in your Internet Tablet browser:
It will add the extras-devel catalogue with beta software to your application manager. I recommend that after installing pyrecipe you should deactivate this catalogue. You can do it with the following way:
- Go to the application manager.
- Menu ->Tools -> Application catalogue.
- Search the ‘maemo Extras Devel’ catalogue and select it.
- Press Edit button.
- Check Disable.
- OK and Close, and it’s all.
I would receive charmed comments about the application as well
as international recipes or even a lunch invite 
Ok, so as I'm riding the MBTA in to work this morning reading my
Metro newspaper, I come across the article "Court: Sex with corpses
is illegal"
Apparently until yesterday's ruling, sex with dead people was
technically legal in the state of Wisconsin.
The last sentence of the article was, in my humble opinion, the
most hilarious sentence I've ever read in my life:
In yesterday's 5-2 decision, the high court said
Wisconsin law makes sex acts with dead people illegal because
they are unable to give consent.
Yes folks, it was a 5-2 ruling. So 2 people ruled in favor of
allowing sex with dead people. W. T. F.
But to make it even more hilarious, the reason they
decided it was not kosher was that the dead people could not give
consent. L. O. L.
We live in a funny world...
Posted Thu Jul 10 19:07:47 2008Sam the American Eagle and The Muppets present “Stars & Stripes Forever”.
Shared by choffee
Another option for backing up your contacts and other info. No intergration with other services so is of limited use but works all the same.
So we've been waiting months for Nokia's Ovi Sync. And along comes Nokia Backup instead, ostensibly everything that Ovi Sync will be. The two have got to be linked, surely? I've been trialling Nokia Backup and it's a bigger and better system than you might think, with what I think is a world first. Read on.
Posted Fri Jul 4 13:54:57 2008Shared by choffee?LinuxDevices: Mobile Linux has Real Trouble Ahead. Posted Thu Jul 3 10:52:21 2008
While I can see his point I think that the OS will become less important. The apps will be the key and if it becomes simple to develop for a platform that will be the one that gets the best apps first.
Shared by choffee
Oh this is great. If your office is not already dry enough from the air conditioning then why not run a dehumidifier all day to get the last bit of moisture out the air. I can feel my eyes sealing shut already.
Filed under: Misc. Gadgets
[Via Tech Digest]
Shared by choffee
Good to see Polaroid are thinking things through. It seems so natural now they have made it.
Filed under: Digital Cameras
Hold up! Polaroid may not be dead just yet! A trusty reader was nice enough to give us some hands-on time with his new Polaroid Pogo Zink-based printer. The diminutive device is clearly meant to give us that old-school insta-print social feeling with its 2 x 3-inch photos, but results were less than a barrel o' monkeys. Engadget reader David says that while the unit is "cute," there's nothing very instant about it as prints take at least 60 seconds -- not including connection in or Bluetooth pairing time. On the plus side, prints are sturdy and don't tear easily, but David couldn't resist burning one of them just to see how the thermal paper reacted. In the end, he says this is a decent gadget for those in the know, but you're not going to put this at the center of a party like you would an old-school Instamatic. Peep the gallery for David's hands-on goodness.
[Thanks, David]
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Shared by choffee
Good to see wind power getting some real thought about how most people want to use it. Giving a choice of styles of turbine will make it more acceptable to the masses. Now if only the national grid was setup to work with local power distribution.
Filed under: Misc. Gadgets
Shared by choffee
Cool but I don't think that I need it for now.
Well hello, hello!
Another amazing feat by the master porter himself, Penguinbait. Google's Android is now as easy as installing an application. No command line. At all.
PB, we love you.
GET IT HERE WHILE IT'S HOT!
I've installed this little puppy and it's awesome. Touchscreen works. The browser is fully functional and pretty smooth. Maps, check. And, best of all, you can install more apps, although that may require a command line. This is an amazing step in the right direction.
In my almost-semi-professional opinion... Install now!
I still can't believe it was this easy to install! Thanks PB!!!
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Posted Wed Jul 2 14:23:49 2008
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