Mike Rowehl: This is Mobility

Tom has a great post about lightweight apps and upgrades, do widget framework applications or runtime environments like FlashLite change the way folks could distribute content, “even if it duplicates some of the functionality of browsers”? My take on that is absolutely yes, with the extreme example being Opera Mini. The functionality completely overlaps the browser, but by shifting some of the work to the server side and running the app within the Java environment it can effectively upgrade lower end phones to at least part of what is normally considered a smartphone experience. Plus you get the benefit of accelerated cycle time on browser upgrades, without having to reflash firmware. Apparently other folks think it’s a fantastic way to solve the problem as well and some direction competition is evolving.

One of the problems is that as a Java app with most of the smarts on the server the support for AJAX style functions (a primary mechanism for application development on the desktop side that’s already creeping across to mobile) is mediocre at best. Not that I think that’s a crippling problem, just one of the early spots in terms of obvious divergence between what’s happening and what some of the leading edge crew seem to be calling for.

So does the future of mobile as a platform look more like a runtime environment or more like a browser? The one area where I can see something like a runtime environment making some real inroads would be to structure the components that go into that application like the pieces that make up the Facebook platform. It’s one of the few places where I’ve seen components/widgets/applications spread like wildfire and really benefit from the underlying platform. Most examples of “sharing” I’ve seen in other mobile platforms is really a far cry from the kind of thing that happens on Facebook, and generally limit the pace of adoption rather than foster it. Can that happen in a runtime environment on mobile devices? I don’t see why not if you had the right players involved and everyone aligned to growing the system as a whole. But then again, the same should go for a browser based environment for this stuff.

Russ has raved about FBReader, an ebook reader for Maemo, in the past. I had installed it before and tried it out, but had problems with the format of the books. He walked me through the stuff he was doing and gave me his FBReader config files, I’ve been trying it out since. I still have format problems, unordered lists in HTML seem to become just mashed up text without and formatting. Which was what really turned me off about it before cause it’s normally the first thing I see. But I’ve grabbed a few HTML based books and read a ways into them (seeing as how I’ve spent the last week lying on the couch rolling around in some half conscious state of delirium, it seemed like a good use of time). There are still some formatting quirks later on, but normally most of the nastyness is up at the start.

Here’s a shot of FBReader running on my N800, with the screen rotated and all so that pretty much the equivalent of a “small paperback” worth of text fits on the screen. It works out pretty well. I’ve grabbed a few online novels from random places, but most of my downloads have been from Project Gutenberg. The site is pretty usable from the built in browser. I select the compressed HTML version of the book whenever it’s available, and compressed plain text when not. Lots of them have three or four pages of unformatted cruft before the book starts, but once you make it past the table of contents the books are pretty readable.

I was fooling around with the layout of the home screen on my N800 last night:

Awww, pretty. I found a bunch of great info in this post on TabletBlog.com and got some tips about statusbar management through Flickr comments on another screenshot image post.

I had installed Simple Launcher from the app manager after grabbing it from the application catalog, but that one didn’t have the option to make the background transparent. Just go directly to the Simple Launcher homepage and use the link to the deb package there, that version has a bunch of new options and looks mighty slick. The other non-standard applets I have on there are omweather set to display my home town of San Mateo. And the Yellownotes applet (with color and font size preferences changed) to give me a place to jot down reminders.

I’m not a huge fan of the RSS reader, I want a way to sync the device RSS reader to the reader running on my server. So for now I just use that from the browser. I would also love to have a way to sync the contacts and calendars from my E61 directly over to the device. Contacts wouldn’t have made a huge difference before except for use in the email client, but with Skype available for the device I would like to have the phone numbers there as well.

We just opened the registration for the Mobile 2.0 2007 event. It’s a reprise to the event we did last year. Overall the event last year was a great gathering of the best and brightest in mobile, however there were some things that didn’t turn out fantastic in my opinion. We’ve tried to do what we can to correct. For instance there are no slides for a majority of the sessions in the agenda. Last year we tried to allow a few slides per panel member as a way of introduction, and that didn’t work out well. We also made the full lineup and filled all the seats before we went out looking for sponsors, something that has really helped us to keep control of the event and the agenda in particular.

There are a few other things I would personally like to do with/around the event, but it’s a big job putting an event together of this size “in your free time”. The Open Group has really been amazingly helpful in getting done what we needed to make this happen, putting their necks on the line to make upfront payments so that we could make this happen. Tremendous thank you to Gregory for making that happen. So first we need to make sure we get done what we owe to them and don’t leave them holding the bag.

There are a few additional things we would like to do. But we are running the event at cost again, no one is making any money off of it despite it not being a central part of what any of us are supposed to do as part of our day jobs. In particular I would love to get some additional space to leave free for people who want to do either informal breakout discussions or just peel away for a while to talk with friends. If you or your company is interested in sponsorship or donating to the cause, let me know. mike at rowehl dot com.

The September Silicon Valley Mobile Monday meeting is focused on mobile social networking. And the lineup for the event is just insanely fantastic. I’ll try not to break my arm patting myself on the back. But it’s going to be hard. Especially with the broken shoulder really limiting my movement and the amount of patting this demands. If you don’t come out for this MoMo and you’re a mobile enthusiast anywhere even vaguely in the Bay Area you must be insane. Totally, certifiably, straightjacketly, raving-from-a-soapbox-at-6-in-the-morning-on-a-Thursday insane. That sounds like a horrible thing to be, so of course I hope to see you all there!

Just playing around a bit with the Maemo SDK. I almost forgot about the DNS issue under Ubuntu (maybe others). You need to change the /scratchbox/etc/nsswitch.conf file in order to resolve hostnames from within scratchbox.

I just got a note from the folks at the Silicon Valley Linux Users Group saying that their meeting tomorrow is focused on Maemo. Excellent! I was just rereading the 3.x version of the Maemo developer tutorial this weekend in preparation for some hackery. Here are the essential details for the LUG meeting, in MoMo standard format (PATENT PENDING!!):

• What: September 2007 Silicon Valley Linux Users Group (Maemo)
• When: September 5th, 2007 7:00pm
• Where: Symantec VCAFE Facility, 350 Ellis Street, Mountain View, CA 94043
• Who: Anyone interested in Linux
• Cost: Nothing!

I’m going to try to rip myself away for a bit to make it down there. It’s been way too long since I’ve been to a LUG meeting.

I’m sure the chorus of “I totally called that months ago!!!” from the blogospere is going to be deafening on this one, but apparently Palm has decided that the Foleo product doesn’t make sense at this point. Apparently they still believe in the market category defined by Foleo, which as far as I’ve been able to tell is a crap simple and overpriced PC driven into the market using a hype machine and some clever catchphrases. They could be right there. But at least we won’t have to deal with it over the short term. Great news, cause I totally called that months ago!!!. My recommendation to Palm: stock more highly caffeinated drinks for your engineers. This whole ugly issue might have been avoided. All it took was an extra double espresso or two that night and I was able to see right through all the crap.

The last few weeks I’ve been operating at less than full capacity. In particular, while I heal up I’ve had to sleep a lot more than I normally do. The result was just under three thousand messages in my email inbox as of midnight last night. Seems like the email backup happens about once a month or so these days. This time it just got even worse than normal. So I bit the bullet and just dug into them last night. My apologies to the folks who are getting an email response a week or two later than you should have.

It’s not like I can trim down the email flow really. All of the stuff in there is worth attention of some kind. Either info from coworkers, messages from folks about conferences or Mobile Monday events, responses or follow-ups to blog posts, personal correspondence, or announcements. It’s all stuff that I want to know and need to digest in some way. So it’s not something that I can just script away. At least not until someone comes up with an effective API for loading information into your head. Kinda sucks that it’s a closed system like it is, huh? Someone needs to come up with a good unlock hack for it.

In the meantime I’m considering what I could script out of it. It’s not like I can pluck the messages out and discard them or act on them automatically. However I could do something like coming up with a better visualization method for them. Say a tag cloud view of the messages currently in my inbox for example. Which probably wouldn’t do much good, but gives an idea of the direction I’m thinking in. Of course, once I started to I realized I probably wasn’t the only person thinking in that direction. I ran across what looks like a pretty interesting Python based tool for visualizing your Thunderbird inbox. I haven’t tried it out yet. But hopefully some time before the next excessive email backlog happens I’ll have some time to experiment with it (and maybe a few others, seems like it’s a pretty common theme).

Just trying out a post from the Python based Maemo WordPy client. I was also fooling around with Minimo, but was having a bunch of issues with the UI. Fortunately it looks like the Maemo version of the Minimo source code seems to be uploaded to the garage. Not that I really think I’ll have time to hack on it, but it’s nice to see that the option exists.