Mike Rowehl: This is Mobility

Just ran across the online SIS file debugger whythefuckwontmysisfileinstall.com. Pure genius! I think that’s exactly the phrase I’ve used about a dozen times in the past trying to figure out what exactly might have gone wrong with an application install that throws just a generic error. The E61 has actually been pretty good in this respect, I have it set to allow any installs. Not all devices are that nice however.

Symbian Freak posted about the Symbian based BitTorrent client, and I tried it out on my E61. I only tried a relatively small test, about 80 megabyte download, only one running at a time. Didn’t open up ports in the firewall to allow for outbound connections as well. But my download came through fine and ran pretty quickly over wifi. Great, and it’s open source, fantastic. One thing missing from the article is the project page however. I did a few searches on Google and SourceForge and Freshmeat, nothing. Anyone know where the project is hosted? I would love to take a look at it.

Up until a few days ago I wasn’t able to use Google Local for Mobile on TMobile (or the other Google Maps app Mobile GMaps. Which I found very very odd. I had Mobile GMaps installed for months before the Google offering came out, it was part of my standard “show off mobile apps” lineup so I pulled up the app relatively frequently. But then when the Google offering came out, and it didn’t work, I turned to someone and said “that’s dumb, I have this other app by a third party that does the same thing pretty much and it works”. But sure enough, starting right then the Mobile GMaps didn’t work either.

Suspicious, very suspicious. But earlier this week one of the guys at work who also has TMo said he tried out Google Local for Mobile and it worked. So I started up mine and sure enough, yep, it works now. And yes, Mobile GMaps is working also. Just thought there might be interested parties out there. Google will probably want to change the header on this page too, which says that Google Local for Mobile doesn’t work on T-Mobile. At least I hope they will, cause it would suck if this is a temporary glitch that’s allowing it to function.

I’ve had Yahoo! Go on my phone for a while now, trying it out for syncing my address book and calendar in particular. But I’ve been having a bunch of trouble with it. Today it’s refusing to sync a calendar entry that I added earlier this morning. The entry is on my calendar online, but it’s not appearing on my phone. So maybe I’ll use the app every once in a while to push my calendar and contacts online, but it’s not working for syncing. Here’s the breakdown, for anyone at Yahoo who might be interested in a list of gripes:

• It’s too big for the memory profile of the phones you’ve chosen. If I’m running just about anything from the Yahoo Go suite I can’t take a picture with my phone. Because Go really wants to keep itself up and running all this time this is very annoying.
• The initial options for setup are hidden. When I reinstall the app there is no setup for username and password. You need to hit one of the icons on the Go screen to get into the setup dialog. Why completely hide this? It’s just confusing for folks who are familiar with the app and think they know what to expect.
• It’s not “just working” for the calendar stuff at least. Why aren’t my entries from online getting pulled down to the phone? I have no idea, and as far as I can tell there’s nothing to give me additional info. The transfer says it worked, if I add a test entry from my phone it shows up online. But not vice versa.
• I want a simple “manual sync now” option. The “manual” option allows me to set options when to sync myself, not explicitly request syncs directly.
• The inter-application communication could really use some work. The tool seems to be structured as a set of apps that try to communicate with each other. And if you try to set options in one app and then go check on another, the status isn’t synced up fast enough. Sometimes I would go into Go and set an option, and then go to the connection app and check on the status only to find my recent changes weren’t reflected. So I’m stuck killing everything off, starting up Go to set options, and launching Connect just to make sure my tests are really running with the options expected.
• Along those same lines, having the options within the Go app be dependent on if Connect is running or not is problematic. First of all it’s just confusing to change options in one apps softkey menus based on if another app is running. Second, what if I want to change my filter options BEFORE I start to connect? I launch connect and it connects when it hasn’t been up for a while. Put that filter options dialog in the Go app itself and allow it to be used without Connect running.

So for now, unfortunately, Go just doesn’t work out for me. I have it disabled, and given how much of a pain doing a manual sync is I probably won’t use it. Can’t wait for the next release though. I would love to use the app, it’s just currently too much pain to do so.

The good folks over at AllAboutSymbian.com pointed out a new freeware screen capture program for Series60 - Best ScreenSnap. Very nice little program, I just tried it out on my 6680 and it’s been working great. Start it up and set some of the settings. I have a 256 meg MMC card in mine, so I put pretty much everything there. Background the program and it watches for hotkeys (default is pen and asterisk at the same time) and takes a capture when it sees them. Makes the shutter sound to confirm the capture. Image is written as a standard jpeg that I’m able to bluetooth back to my PC and view directly. Nice!

There’s a beta release of TCPMP for the Series60 and UIQ up online now. Very much beta quality still, but it rocks being able to download normal avi vids to my phone and watch them play! I’m really looking forward to the evolution of this app, keep up the great work folks!

I didn’t have any time to fool around with it yesterday, so I just installed the Yahoo! Go app I posted about the other day. It’s a huge install (1.8 meg .sis file) so I wasn’t sure how it would fare on the 6680, but it worked out okay. I currently have it setup to sync everything: mail, address book, calendar, tasks, and photos.

The mail, address book, calendar, and tasks items seem to work out. The address book and calendar in particular I think I’m going to be really happy to have. I’m going to have to spend some time playing with it long term to see how the syncing works out. One of the common problems with apps like Go is that waking up the phone every now and then to make a data request tends to drain the battery quickly. And the phone becomes sluggish and unresponsive when the background task is running, and there’s no good way to make the user aware that something else is going on.

The photo part is really a problem though. With the app installed I can no longer take pictures with the 1.3 megapixel camera in my 6680 consistently. Even with all the interface components of the app closed I get an out of memory when I snap a pic sometimes. I can use the VGA resolution camera as far as I can tell. But the camera I actually use, the 1.3 megapixel one, is even more unreliable than it was before. I keep changing the settings to see if I have problems after turning off photo sync, but apparently the app is doing something and not paying attention to me when I change settings. Not sure what it’s doing. Hope it’s something important though, cause I don’t like it when my phone ignores me.

I’m gonna try out the calendar, tasks, and address book for a while and see how they work out long term. And I have some other testy type stuff I would like to try out on this thing. Hopefully I’ll have some time this weekend to try some of it out.

This should be out on the wires today (Friday), Yahoo! Go is coming out of wraps. They’ve had their full set of services well represented on the mobile side for longer than just about any service, so there should be some good stuff in there. I assume it’s all gonna be Windows and/or Mac centric stuff, so us Linux users will probably loose out for a lot of it. Certainly seems so for the TV integration. And the mobile end seems to be Series 60 only. At least I have one of those.

Luckily all those Yahoos are into web services, so we’ll see this information base open up so that we hackers can put together out own endunits for this stuff, right? Supposedly the stuff is built on standard technologies and protocols with some custom client work to make it all seem magical. The question is which of the interfaces get exposed to the public and how are they thrown out there? Will I be able to write an app for my mobile that sync contacts? Cause I would like to also pull that into Evolution on my Linux lappy, and down to my Treo 650 as well. It would be nice to sync my 6680 with my Yahoo contacts, but ultimately something I’ll walk away from if that door isn’t completely open.

A while ago Opera released their mobile platform, which generally speaking is a tool for developing applications for mobile devices using web technologies. AJAX figures prominently into the mix, of course, that being one of the watchwords of the day. I’ve mentioned the whole AJAX and mobile consideration previously. I’ve run across a few more recent posts about the topic though, so I took another look.

What confused me the first time I looked at the Opera platform was that it didn’t appear to be a regular use browser at all. From what I can tell it’s more like the Yahoo Widget Engine (formerly Konfabulator), an execution environment for Javascript. What gets me all hot and bothered about web apps is tied very closely to the distribution model. And the Opera Platform just confuses me in that respect. If I want to write some slick little app that can run in either desktop browser or mobile phone can I just toss the thing up online? I’m not so sure.

Their heart is in the right place though. Allowing mobile apps to tie into the same information sources that are driving the wired web is a good idea. Totally behind you on that one. But allowing use of browser resident apps that make use of AJAX is the other side, and it’s really necessary. So on a whim I downloaded the latest Opera for Series60 to my 6680 and tried out my little AJAX test. It worked! I had tried the test app on a bunch of different browsers on Series60 before, a few Sony phones, and the Palm devices. Nothing else had come even close to working.

Okay, so now we’re cooking with gas at least. I think the Opera Platform is just meant to extend the browser to interact with data on the phone, which is the reason for drawing the distinction when marketing the Platform. Personally however, I just found that confusing. Opera has a pretty kick ass mobile browser there, which I am very happy to now pimp thusly: Go grab the Series60 version of the Opera browser if you have a phone that it works on. Try it out. Some very impressive stuff going on there.

If you want to fool around with some of the stuff, or find out exactly what it was that I’m playing with, I put up my test setup on Ning. If you sign up for an account on Ning you can view the source of the files, and if you want copy my app and try out your own tests. Russ wanted to know if the JSON inclusion techniques work, but I have a ton of other stuff to do so I’m not gonna play with that now. But I have to admit I am curious about it. If someone tries it please leave me a comment.

Niall hooked me up with a Wordpress.com invite, which I converted into miker.wordpress.com. I wanted to check out how they had it setup, there seemed to be some interesting slickness in and about the admin area. It’s a nice setup, but I’m a pre-biased Wordpress fan. I didn’t want to just use up an early invite to play with stuff, so in the interest of helping out here’s how to setup Vagablog to post to a wordpress.com blog:

• Go to the Server settings under the Options menu. The Host to enter is the domain name of your blog (in my case this was miker.wordpress.com), set the URL to “/xmlrpc.php” (don’t forget the leading slash), and set Type to Wordpress.
• Now go to Identity, also under Options. Set your username and password.
• Tap on the Blog List button, and then the Refresh button on the screen that pops up. Refreshing the list of blogs is the first time Vagablog actually hits the server, so if you now see the name of your blog in the list everything should be working fine. Select your blog in the list, it’s probably the only one, and tap OK.
• Now you should be able to enter in a post title and text and post it. The category stuff should work, though I haven’t tried it. It used to be that the XMLRPC calls expected the number of the category and name didn’t work, not sure if that’s the case still or not.

There ya go! Image upload would rock. It would rock like ten times as much if someone else wrote it and gave me a patch for it. I’m kinda busy these days.