Archive for July, 2008

101 Ways to Make Your Smartphone Smarter

This is a great collection of tips to let your smartphone do more useful stuff for you:
101 Ways to Make Your Smartphone Smarter

It has links in the following categories:

  • Communication
  • Finance
  • Travel
  • Media & Entertainment
  • Organization
  • Information
  • Utilities
  • Utilities
  • Convenience
  • Hacks
  • BlackBerry
  • Windows Mobile
  • Palm
  • Symbian
  • iPhone

Metro Subway ticket via cell phone and RFID

People in Guangzhou, China now are able to use their cell phones as subway passes, thanks to RFID technology. You can recharge tokens over the air.

Via 163.com.

What linux (and Firefox) runing on my N810 and laptop?

N810:

~ $ cat /etc/issue
Internet Tablet OS: maemo Linux based OS2008 \n \l
~ $ uname -a
Linux Nokia-N810-23-14 2.6.21-omap1 #1 Tue Jul 1 12:22:23 EDT 2008 armv6l unknown

My laptop:

~$ cat /etc/issue
Ubuntu 8.04 \n \l
~$ uname -a
Linux wendong-laptop 2.6.24-18-generic #1 SMP Wed May 28 19:28:38 UTC
2008 x86_64 GNU/Linux

And the user agents for Firefox:
N810:

Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux armv6l; en-US; rv:1.9a6pre) Gecko/20080606 Firefox/3.0a1 Tablet browser 0.3.7 RX-34+RX-44+RX-48_DIABLO_4.2008.23-14

My laptop:

Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux x86_64; en-US; rv:1.9b5) Gecko/2008050509
Firefox/3.0b5

Linux tips from Inside Out blog

Two new mobile development tools - TagsMe and Cascada Mobile

TagsMe has a list of very impressive demo videos to show how easy it is to develop mobile applications using its GUI Editor and XML-based language. I am impressed not only by its mobile client, but also its Netbeans based IDE. Everything seems to be well polished.

Cascada Mobile takes a completely different approach. Instead of letting the developers deal with mobile geared markup languages, they can just use standard xHTML, CSS, and Javascript to write applications. Cascada Mobile provides tools to convert them automatically to mobile Java applications (MIDlets). Interesting enough, the development tool is an Eclipse plugin.

Back to the year of 2003, I read an article on MSDN, which was talking about why a startup company should avoid entering development tools (IDE specifically) market. I was kind of involved in mobile development tool at that time, so I remember that article very clearly. I could not find the original article now, but the main reasons are:
(1) IDE needs heavy investment and
(2) the customers for IDE are very picky, because they are developers themselves
With über IDEs and RCPs like Eclipse and Netbeans, the situation has been changed dramatically now days. The barriers to entry for development tools are much lower.

Flixwagon client

Flixwagon, a similar service to the popular Qik and the open sourced Movino, now is officially open to everyone. A mobile client is also available for download at m.flixwagon.com/nokia. Flixwagon blog gives a list of new features of the mobile client. However it is only for S60 devices. I am wondering where is the Java ME version.