Mobile

The latest Android app I’ve been working for Runloop, the hugely successful iOS interval timer Seconds Pro, is now live. Packed with the following features: • Quickly create timers for interval training, tabata, circuit training • Save your timers, as many as you need • Organize Timers into groups • Text to speech • Install timers from the timer repository • Send your timers to your friends • Full control over every interval • Assign music to intervals or timers • Large display • The choice of personal trainers up and down the country ...

A tutorial I wrote for .NET Magazine is now up on their site. This tutorial takes you through the basics of getting NFC working with Android 4.0+ with a “Top Trumps” like demo. It covers both reading and writing data to/from NFC tags, stickers or cards. Head over to .NET Magazine to read the tutorial!

We had what was probably the first BBQ weather of the year over the weekend, but I wouldn’t know about that. Instead I spent the time coding away at the NFC Hackathon (sponsored by O2) with my fellow team members George Medve and Aaron Newton. The idea was to spend 28 hours designing and coding something that made use of NFC (Near Field Communication). We were supplied with NFC enabled Galaxy S2s and some useful SDKs from Proxama and BlueVia for tracking NFC campaigns, making payments and tracking users. ...

I’m pleased to announce a game we’ve been working on is now out. A collaboration between The Creation Agency and Bitmode (my previous home), we bring you The Great Snowball Fight! The game is played over Google Maps, launching virtual snowballs at unsuspecting players in order to rank up, earn points and even win prizes from retailers you hit. You can also add buddies, connect via Facebook and receive special powerups. ...

I was lucky enough to receive one of the first waves of Nexus One’s (N1) from Google’s direct online shop. Before I go on, the shopping experience was a little too slick IMHO. I signed in with my Gmail account, clicked buy, clicked confirm and it was shipping, if you’ve used Google Checkout before they will likely have your card details and address. You do have 15 mins to cancel the order though. When you see Google’s ever growing list of properties getting together you can see why they are so immensely disruptive. ...

I’m just watching the seminar (recording here) about Sony Ericssons project Capuchin. It looks incredible. Ask anyone that’s developed with Flash Lite and they’ll tell you that distribution is one of the biggest problems they face. The problem is that traditionally SWF files have been treated by some as nothing more than animated gifs (this is particularly the case with a lot of the older Sony Ericsson phones), and treated by others (for example Nokia) as applications that run standalone (and more recently as a web plugin). This makes it tricky to classify how to treat a SWF when it comes to getting it on a phone, particularly when you haven’t been able update your software anywhere near as easily on mobile as on the desktop. Do you run it from a browser link? do you bluetooth it from a PC or to a friend like an image? or do you go ahead and “install” it somehow, to get an application icon? Of course until now every manufacturer has dealt with the problem differently. ...

A huge challenge when developing web sites for mobile phones, either as a separate entity, or as a gracefully degraded version of the “desktop” version, is sniffing just what features the device has. This might include support for XHTML, JavaScript 1.5, Flash Lite (standalone or embedded in a page) and so on. I just caught a post on the Flash Lite Google Group regarding a new site, handsetdetection.com, which provides a free API for sniffing over 7000 devices. The API is available through XML or JSON and the list of features the API documents is exhaustive, from screen size and streaming video support to HTTPS and SVG capability. ...

There are a few posts out there relating to Shantanu’s disclosure of a standalone Flash Player being developed for the iPhone using the newly released SDK, but of course that doesn’t answer the question as to whether people will be able to browse the web and view Flash content in-line, given that Flash makes up a huge chunk of the web, and also provides the revenue for a great many sites through advertisements (fallback GIFs are not what advertisers are paying so much money for). ...

In a press release today Nokia announced that Symbian OS will include Silverlight. This includes both high-end S60, and low-end series 40. Silverlight is of course the cross-platform RIA runtime from Microsoft, that can be considered a subset of WPF (at least with version 2.0 which has a substantial feature list). I wonder if Microsoft charged a per-device license fee to Nokia like Adobe did, and if so what the difference is. On top of that there was of course the controversial price to pay for the developer edition of the Flash Lite runtime for Series 60 which is thankfully now free. Clearly there is a fierce competition to be had in this space as the web continues to leak out onto what we currently call “devices”, and Microsoft have made it crystal clear Silverlight is high on their list of priorities. ...

I recently posted on using a mobile phone’s data connection with Mac OS X, and I’ve just had some sucess with my new eee Linux based laptop, again on Vodafone (but I imagine other operators will be similar). To dial up a connection, plug the phone in via USB and setup a new Dialup Connection in the Network Connections manager with the following information: Phone number: *99***internet# User name: web Password: web The difference here is that I’m putting the access point name in the number to dial, no doubt the script I was using on OS X was doing this for me. These settings worked on a plain vanilla eee PC without messing around in /etc/ppp. So that might vary operator to operator. Best of luck, please post in the comments if your process varied for other operators or devices.