Category: technology
Ok I’ll give the iPhone this one
From Ben Metcalfe on the unified mobile platform or why the iPhone is really important,
The reason why the iPhone is an important phone is not because of its shiny gadgetness or its touch interface. It’s not even important because it’s the first serious media player to be combined with a phone.
It’s important because of its web-based approach to application development. I believe this approach will spawn other manufactures to follow suit and in turn we will find ourselves with a truly unified development platform not owned by any single vendor or manufacturer.
Right now developing applications for mobile phones is a pain with no single way of rolling out an application to every phone (or even the majority of phones) on the market. Sun’s J2ME was supposed to solve all this but instead we still have a chaotic environment of different MIDP profiles, screensizes, capabilities and even carriers who prevent unsigned (read: approved) java applets from running on some of their phones.
This is kind of what the world of computing was like before the Internet – when Macs wouldn’t read files created on PC’s and vice-versa. The internet came along and a common set of standards were created that allowed documents to be interchanged between any computer. Later on we managed to coerce those standards into lightweight applications that more often than not provide all the functionality we needed.
I believe we are finally going to see this happen on the mobile phone. Apple is leading the way by promoting the iPhone’s Safari browser as the development environment for the iPhone – but there is no reason why this can’t be emulated on other phones too.
He's right but I'm sorry this doesn't go far enough for me. I would like to see much more in the browser API. Access to the GPS and Camera, Offline storage like Google Gadgets, Widgets? Opera are best placed to do this but they cover so many phones. The Mozilla builds of the Mobile Firefox (Minimo) could be the perfect platform to do this, as its open source and could be adapted by every single manufactor to boost the sales and power of there own mobile device. Safari sucks and we all know it. Yes its built on webkit but geez what the hell did they do to it?
iPhone this iphone that
So I'm in Toronto and theres no iphones. But theres a stupid amount of coverage online including unboxings and taking apart the iphone. Here's some interesting things I've found while browsing around my aggregator.
LG Prada vs Apple iPhone
Bear in mind the LG Prada came first and was announced long before the iPhone.
iPhone touch typing.
Just as I thought, it was going to be bad but seriously its worst that I'd actually imagined. I thought if worst comes to worst you could use a stylus type thing but nope its made for thumbs and a little pressure. I have heard reports that it can be used in landscape mode while browsing the web but still. I know I can easily type faster on my stylus. Theres also some kind of bug with caps lock?
Engadget first hands on in HD
This one covers the keyboard a lot better.
iPhone Live Disassembly
How to take the iphone to pieces. Theres some interesting facts in this too like memory sizes and sim cards.
3G iPhone for Europe to be announced Monday?
Apple is set to announce a four-way deal: Vodafone and T-Mobile on the carrier front with Carphone Warehouse out in front as the MVNO. Hmmm, well, this kind of deal would certainly provide Apple's upstart mobile phone with far broader coverage than a Vodafone exclusive could muster while providing a solid brick-and-mortar base on a continent (mostly) void of Apple stores. Best of all for Europeans, the announcement expected on Monday will be 3G. That's right, while you're queuing up for EDGE data, Europeans might be unwrapping an HSDPA iPhone in a 4-way press release. Here's the rub, bub: do you really think Apple will provide Europe a 3G iPhone before the end of the year and not release it in the US at the same time? Now the tough choice: stand in line for your 2.5G iPhone or wait and see what happens on Monday with this rumor (and we repeat, it's just rumor at this point).
If this is true, I'll be quite shocked for those who bought the EDGE phones. EDGE is ok but yes no match for 3G speeds.
Generally, the iphone seems to working as expected but I've not seen much information about 3rd party applications in Safari. The landscape mode doesn't always work but hardware H.264 playback is good. Also heard little about battery life.
Its simply a expensive beast. If it comes to Europe with a price tag of 350+ pounds and 2 year contract of 35 pounds or more a month. Its not going to go down well. Get the price down to 200 with a 25 pounds a month contract and Vodafone and Tmobile will sell them like hot cakes. I won't be switching to a iphone when it comes here.
Wetherspoon’s free wifi with your pint
Only found this thanks to Dave, now I know where I'll be drinking from now on.
Thanks to a partnership with ItBox, all customers with a Wi-Fi-enabled laptop will be able to connect to hi-speed Internet – free –for 30 minutes.
It really couldn’t be simpler, power up the laptop, order your drink or food from the bar and ask for a Wi-Fi voucher; this contains an access code for your computer. You will then connect to a network free for 30 minutes – order another drink and go on line for another 30 minutes.
Wetherspoon’s head of purchasing, Paul Hine, explains why the scheme has been introduced: “We really are in a mobile environment at the moment, with more and more people using the Internet for business and pleasure – 24/7.” “We felt that our pubs offer comfortable and private surroundings, to come to enjoy a drink or a meal and also connect to the Web.”
The service is available throughout the day at all Wetherspoon pubs and Lloyds No.1 bars. Leaflets detailing the new service are available at the bar.
meta-technorati-tags=wifi, weatherspoons, wireless, free
iTunes support comes to the Nokia N series phones
Sam points out that Nokia have just released a beta application which connects to iTunes. Great for Nokia owners and about 1 year ago I might have said wheres the Windows mobile version. But with the obvious support from Windows mobile and the recent support in Winamp 5 I can finally say nice stuff but I don't really care (in a nice way). But I'm most of my friends care…
Orange’s unlimited (1gig limit) data only 5 pound per month
Orange are insane. After charging me a stupid amount of money for using mobile data while roaming in New York. They fail to mention the fact that they now have a reasonable flat-rate mobile data plan.
5 pounds a month for all you can eat (1gig limit a month) off-peak mobile data. How did I find out? Well I went into a Orange shop and complained that Tmobiles data plans were much better and after a while he mentioned it.
It seems this has been in place since the June 1st.
Orange UK has followed the other major operators in simplifying its data charging tariffs, and opened up unmetered data access to non-panthers as well as those on pre-paid contracts.
The new bundles include free evening and weekend browsing for £5 a month, or £8 to be able to browse during the day too. Pre-paid customers can pay £5 for seven days unlimited browsing. The new tariffs come in on 1 June.
Since I have a work phone for daytime use, the off-peak one will work for me. There is a clause about not using it for VoIP and other stuff.
Orange is very careful to say that the service is “browsing” and not “internet access”, leaving it plenty of room to block services it doesn't like the look of.
Its previous unmetered data terms and conditions were pretty clear on what services were frowned upon. “To ensure the fair allocation of network resources for all customers the offer may not be used for: modem access for computers, internet based streaming services, voice or video over the internet, instant mssaging, peer to peer file sharing and non Orange internet based video.”
But, unlike Vodafone, Orange seems to accept the impossibility of enforcing such restrictions: “We would discourage any customer from using VoIP through the mobile internet due to the quality of service they may experience. We are looking to launch our own high quality IM service in the next few months which will deliver a far superior customer experience to currently available services
I'll be using mine for im (twitter and jabber), Googlemaps, Email and RSS reading.
iPhone hype is getting tiresome
Apple heads! give me a break…
Since Apple and Cingular announced the date of the apple iphone (29th June) and the rumour there will only be 4 million made this year. All I hear about now is the iphone. At the girl geekdinner the women from google who presented made a joke about the iphone which clarified in my mind that the hype is getting stupid.
Slashdot lead today with some good news that the iphone will allow 3rd party developers to build on it.
In an exciting shift from previous statements, Apple CEO Steve Jobs revealed at the D Conference that 3rd-party development will be supported on the iPhone. Questions remain as to whether the opening of the platform, slated for later this year, will be through Dashboard-like widgets or a separate SDK.”
But what gets me is the silly comments afterwards. People were suggesting Skype on a phone would be good, another person a wifi detector and then finally wrote this.
Cellular networks are fragile. Much more fragile than the larger internet. They tend toward monoculture and proprietary systems, and haven’t had the shakedown that standard internet network hardware and protocols have had. So Jobs’ quote about him ‘not wanting third-party apps bringing Cingular’s network down’ actually makes some sense (some mobile phone applications have more-or-less done this in the past). AndBullshit. Utter crap. Why is there this paranoia about the iPhone, when Symbian, Windows CE/Mobile have allowed this for years? There is no way an application on a device should or could bring down a base station, let alone a cell network.
Oh, and as for this gem:
bringing Cingular’s network down’ actually makes some sense (some mobile phone applications have more-or-less done this in the past)Cite. Go on. I would so so love to see a citation of any evidence of this. Any, whatsoever.
Thankfully someone with some sense.
What kills me is there are some great phones on the market including the Nokia N95 and of course my phone the SPV M700. Both have GPS, 3G, Wireless b/g, Bluetooth 2.0 and mass storage via flash memory. They both play music and video very well and this is the best part don't cost a bomb to get on contract. We know for a fact this isn't true of the iphone, which looks like the price of a ipod plus a expensive 24month contract.
I could rant on about the iphone all day but I just want to point out that if you avoid the plain old phones and look into the smartphone market you will find phones which can do everything the iphone does. Symbian and now Windows Mobile developers are very good at creating and hacking around with these phones now. Theres huge catalogues of software which have been developed which also makes these phones rich too. I think Apples SDK will be messy and full of holes. I'm not saying the others are any better but there SDKs have been out for a long time and there quite public.
Liberating my machines with Ubuntu
I saw this Ubuntu Propaganda sticker via Digg and it made me think, I need to do a update on my Linux switch over.
I'm having problems with Azureus on Ubuntu, a couple of the profile files keep screwing up after a restart (not that Ubuntu really needs that many restarts). So currently I have a duplicate profile folder which I use when Azureus borks. I can't work out what has caused the problem, except maybe my upgrade to Ubuntu 7.04 fiesty. The upgrade also caused some confusion when I found out ipodder was no longer supported. In the end I found icepodder which is exactly the same but has a couple more features and a different name.
I have still not found a audio player I'm totally happy with yet. Currently I'm using XMMS for playing podcasts. Icepodder has a nice view where it shows you the recently downloaded podcasts and you can just click and play that podcast. This is the opposite of my windows setup where ipodder would just download the files and winamp would create a recently downloaded smart playlist. So for now this works ok, but yep it would be great to organise my music and podcasts with something like winamp. Reminds me I need add last.fm plugin to xmms.
I still have Windows XP on my Dell laptop. I was talking to George and keeps wondering why I don't just upgrade to Ubuntu on my laptop too. I've been looking through my start menu trying to work out what I would miss if I upgraded. Heres a small list.
- Winamp, like it or not winamp 5 is awesome and the amount of plugins and themes is insane
- Launchy, recently installed and wow I love it. Its starting to change my default behavior now
- Particls, no linux support yet
- Decent RSS screensaver (useful for life feeds)
- Hamachi, I have it installed but for some reason linux can't communicate to windows and reverse
- Outlook 2007 with Plaxo and Activesync, I know about evolution which supports ical but what about my windows mobile phone?
- Greatnews RSS reader, I've gone through many of them and Greatnews is light, handles 400+ feeds really well and supports tags. Although I am watching the RSSOWL 2.0 alphas which will run on Linux.
- Virtual DJ, although I have yet to try out Terminator X or Mixxx
- Experiemental applications like Joost, Proto, Sailing clicker, Twingly, RSSbus, Google Gears, etc
Keepass
I know its a little unfair, but the fact is that most experimental applications are build for windows first. How to get my Windows Mobile phone working with Linux is still up in the air. If that could be solved I would gladly drop Outlook 2007. Although I would miss the Plaxo support.
There's a side to linux which I'm starting to dabble with now. The home server setup. It started when I tried to install Windows Home server on a old box up in my loft but saw the system requirements. 1ghz processor minimum! Why? Its a bloody home server, the most taxing thing it will do is server media. Anyway, it got me thinking why don't I just add the core functionality I wanted in windows home server into my current ubuntu box? So I got Samba working correctly now, I just need to add more hard drive space and add some kind of network backup service.
I found Bacula which looks really good because it has support for everything I use but I couldn't get Bacula working from the package selector in Ubuntu. So it looks like I'm going to need to install it manually. Amanda was another option but doesn't seem to as simple.
So generally, I'm quite happy with Ubuntu on the desktop but I don't have the time to invest in getting my laptop converted quite yet.
Interview with Chris DiBona and Ed Parsons of Google
While at Google Developer Day, I caught some time with Chris DiBona and Ed Parsons from Google. Chris is well known in the Open source and Free software worlds for his work on Google summer of code and the book Open Sources: Voices from the Open Source Revolution. Recently he's (sometimes) hosts a great podcast with Leo Laporte called FLOSS weekly. Its hardly weekly but worth subscribing to anyway. Ed on the hand was the key man at the Ordnance Survey and tried to kick start the mapping craze well before Google maps hit the net. It made sense for Google to poach some a key man such as Ed.
Anyway, the interviews are up on Blip.TV as usual, and filmed with my Sanyo camera.
- Interview with Chris Dibona at Google development day
- Interview with Ed Parsons at Google development day
A couple of new things came out of the Google Developer Day. Google Mapplets, Google Mashup Editor and Google Gears.
First up is Google Gears, an open source browser extension for enabling offline web applications. Now developers will be able to create web applications that don't need a constant Internet connection to work. Users, meanwhile, can interact with Gears-enabled websites anywhere, whether they're on the couch or on an airplane. With this early release, we hope the community will provide feedback and move towards an industry standard for offline web applications. Read more on the new Gears blog.
An experimental product debuting today is the Google Mashup Editor, an online editor that enables developers to create, test, and deploy mashups and simple web applications from within a browser. Now developers can turn out those weekend projects more quickly. We've also launched a new blog where you can learn more about the Google Mashup Editor and get the latest news.
Finally, we released Google Mapplets yesterday at the Where 2.0 conference. Mapplets are mini-applications that any developer can build on top of Google Maps so that users can easily discover the creative genius and usefulness of the mashup development community. You'll find more about Mapplets here. And we're also quite excited about the interest that has been shown in Google Web Toolkit (GWT). Since its launch last May, there have been over 1 million downloads. You can read more on the GWT blog.
Mapplets is interesting but what makes me excited is the Mashup Editor which somewhat fits in area of Flow* and Gears, which seems to be the final step in the move towards the Google Operating System. I would usually say who cares but Google Gears will be a open source project and they already have Adobe, Opera and Mozilla on board.
Generally Google once again made it clear there commitment to open-source and developers. I look forward to hacking about with this stuff really soon.
My current development setup
I was asked today, what kind of setup I use for developing web applications. I tried to explain but failed because of the lack of common development tools and services. So I thought I'd try and blog it instead.
On my desktop I run,
- XMLSpy 2005 Home Edition (discontinued the free version I think. Might switch to Oxygen XML soon)
- Notepad++
- WinSCP
- Putty
On the server I run,
I tend to do lots of stuff in Cocoon and am slowly starting to use ZK for my front end display. Cocoon is perfect for the plumbing and ZK means I don't need to screw around with Javascript and DOM scripting. If I was deeply into the Ajax stuff, I might not need ZK but frankly I don't have the time.
Yeah its very odd but it works for me.