Frank Carver's musings about software and life
Developing a consistent and appropriate look and feel on mobile devices is a tough job. It looks like Yahoo Blueprint is another attempt at cracking this particular nut.
Yahoo’s approach seems to be to write their own kind of browser as a J2ME application, and feed it with device-independent XML.
A quick Blueprint how-to – your first widget (Yahoo! Developer Network blog)
It looks like there is still plenty of grumbling about the new model of iPhone. Here’s an article pointing out a group of popular complaints and missing features.
Seven problems with the new iPhone : Christopher Null : Yahoo! Tech
A fairly comprehensive Wired article about Google Android
I like this. halfway between the complex and largely unsolvable world of natural language processing, and the currently trendy area of domain-specific languages (DSL) lies the more constrained and useful area of domain-specific-language processing.
Why not use a structured subset/dialect of a natural language as a control interface – it’s a natural fit for mobile interfaces, and hands-free interfaces generally.
When producing video for web or mobile you often need to resize the result to an appropriate size for the destination. This can sometimes be a bit irritating, and getting it wrong can result in a stretched, squished, blurry, or even jumpy video.
So a handy little Aspect Ratio Calculator seems like a good idea.
It’s a while since I saw one of those huge “brick” mobile phones in the wild, and it seems that they are now sufficiently rare to command collectors prices.
Shame. It would be pretty cool to take the guts out of a really ancient phone and replace it with a more modern interior just to puzzle people when you pull it out and take a call.
Sometimes it seems as if the practical difficulties of implementing mobile video outweigh its value, but it begins to look as if some operators and media providers have got it together enough to offer a somewhat compelling service. At least they seem to have gathered a creditable number of subscribers.
I’m currently pretty interested in how to model (and ideally predict) certain aspects of human behaviour, so I was particularly attracted to an article from the BBC about some information derived from recording the movement habits of a large set of mobile phone users.
Motorola are running a competition to win a Z10 phone £10000 by making some video and uploading it to YouTube.
Almost (but not quite) as barking mad as Guitar Hero mobile. Sigh.
Rowin’s blog » Blog Archive » Second Life on a mobile phone – part 2
A dynamic map of free WiFi access points in London Free Wifi in London…Mapped
While travelling on public transport, I quite like the idea of searching for restaurants, attractions etc. near the destination rather than near the current location, but that makes for some interesting challenges, too. More cities offer Wi-Fi on buses