Mike Rowehl: This is Mobility

Well this is certainly bad news for those of us with a developy bent and a lust for gadgets. A conversation with some senior folks from Apple confirms that “It isn’t OS X proper, as you’d expect. And like an iPod, it won’t be an open system that people can develop for.” Which I’m kinda confused by the first part of, cause sure I didn’t expect it to be “OS X proper” but I did expect it to be “OS X sorta” - and this sounds like it might just be an OS skin on a completely different OS? What’s with all the Jobs pontificating about being able to use “real apps on this thing” cause it’s OS X. What’s not proper about the OS X on it? Sounds like it was proper enough when they used it, but it’s not proper for me?

It certainly does shift the conversation around this thing though. The primary question is now how long till we can get Linux running on it? And will this prompt Nokia to kick things up with the N800? I liked the 770, but the lack of cellular interface, crappy battery life, and underpowered processor kept me from doing a lot of what I would like to with it. The N800 looks better, but hardly better enough given how long it’s been since the last release. I’m expecting them to double down on this and come up with the real update and quickly. Stop pussyfooting around and just make a damn Linux based cellular device, we all know you want to.

Trolltech has a few more ideas in the works as well, I think they would do well to take a look at the design here and “emulate” it. Except put some 3G in there and keep the Wifi. We’re starting to get close to devices that could start to really make some progress, but we’re not quite there yet. If the rumors are right we’ll be seeing some interesting handsets all this year.

Take a look back over device releases for the last few years and there’s little that really stands out. There are a few Nokia devices that stand out, but generally they stand out because they’re only slightly smaller than a breadbox if they’re capable. Or something that’s got a compelling design aesthetic but is a crap platform. Hardware is difficult to get right, certainly. But it feels like the whole environment had deadlocked around a design for mediocrity. Hopefully some fresh blood will liven things up a bit.

I’m not going to choose a place to link to for it. I would like to talk about the iPhone, and I have to assume that anyone interested in finding any info about it at all will have no trouble doing so. I imagine that even if you don’t want to hear about it you will. Do I want one already even though I know little about the device? You bet. Would I knock over my grandmother to get one, probably. There’s nothing sadder than missing out on being the cool kid on the block with a new device. Except maybe drowning puppies. And it would have to be a lot of them.

Do I think the iPhone will end up being a revolutionary device that transforms mobility. No idea. I leave speculation about things like that up to people like Omar and Carlo, who have proven themselves much more insightful when it comes to overall market understanding. Me, I understand pretty much just technology and how to make it do stuff. And around the iPhone I haven’t picked up anything yet.

So is the “platform” of the iPhone pretty much the same as the iPod? Could be, like Carlo said, a kick ass iPod with a phone built in. It’s not really a mobile platform the way we think of Symbian or Java as a platform, but a media delivery platform the way people think about the iPod? That would make me cry. I want some sleek OS X love that I can slip in my pocket. The mobile gardens have been tending toward unwalling, and unfortunately this sounds a bit like a move in the other direction. I hope I’m wrong. Really hope I’m wrong. Cause I know I’m going to have to get one of these things either way. And I would love it to be something I’m proud of rather than a guilty pleasure.

Tonight is the January Silicon Valley Mobile Monday, the focus is dealing with device proliferation. Barbara Ballard is going to be one of the speakers, she’s been posting online for a long time and recently has been posting a series of mobile design patterns. I just discovered that there’s a mobile design patterns wiki up on the site as well.

There’s an ITU Internet Report for 2006 that got posted recently (hat tip Enrique). Looks like great info says me!! However I know I’m just too busy right now to dig into it, and it’s a PDF so I can’t just chuck it into my bookmarks on my phone browser for later digging up.

Not to fear!! I have an acrobat reader on my phone. So I Bluetooth it over. Acrobat fails, not enough memory. I’m no S60 newbie however, I know that trying to launch a viewer app from within messenger eats up extra memory. So I do the magic necessary to be able to save a file off to another area (zip the file, Bluetooth the zip over, and use the archive manager to open the message in messenger, and extract it where I want - nice trick - pathetic that after all these years one still needs to do it, but a nice trick none the less). Still Adobe isn’t able to startup with the file, apparently all that jazz about “easily navigate and search words in any PDF file” should be amended? The “any” part in particular seems a bit suspect. This is just a two and a half meg file, relatively small as far as their document format goes.

So instead of being able to read the International Telecommunications Union 2006 report on digital.life on my phone, I’ve printed it out and I will be reading it as hardcopy. That’s so ironic that I think it might actually go straight off the bottom of the scale and come back at the top. So according to the classic forms, this should be either a romance, comedy, or a tragedy. I have my opinions about that, I’ll leave you to form your own.

There are a couple of scripts and tools for Ruby that work with the WURFL data, but there didn’t seem to be much for ruby based applications to do what most web apps really want to do: lookup device capabilities based on the user agent of a request. I was doing some ruby WURFL stuff at work, and I’ve been playing around with a mysql backed WURFL lookup for PHP called tera-wurfl. And then I got to thinking “Hey, for most of what you would want to do with WURFL you would just need to load the device entries and capabilities into two simple tables and it should take like a dozen lines of ActiveObject hackery and some string comparisons to make a WURFL lookup for Rails apps”.

Looks like I was just about right, though I haven’t checked the line counts to make sure the estimate was on target. It’s still pretty rough, and inefficient enough that it might actually deserve the term “belligerent programming”, but you gotta start somewhere: ruby-wurfl-1.0.tgz. There’s a README file in there that describes how to get it working, which could probably be hooked into all kinda of slick rails coolness. But it’s not.

Getting command line access to the Greenphone is pretty trivial through the development environment. However there doesn’t seem to be a terminal application for the phone. While I would definitely like to make one I may not have the time to for a while. So I hacked up one of the samples from the Qtopia source to just take a command to run from a text box and write the output back to the textbox. It’s a hack of the textviewer app, and shows up as textviewer in the app launcher still. Source code is here.