Mar

26

I’ve recently started working from home and the biggest perk so far has been listening to music aloud (not in earphones) the entire day. Because of the new found freedom I have expanded my music collection. No, I didn’t start using Kazaa. Don’t feel its right. I stick to old fashion, lo-technology, purchasing of CDs. One of the biggest things I miss from my time living in San Francisco is Amoeba records. Anytime I visit SF, I have to make a stop at Amoeba. It might possibly be the greatest music store in the world! Unfortunately I don’t live in SF anymore so I have to resort to local stores and the internet. My local music stores all kind of stink. They just can’t afford to stock a lot. Especially the Indie rock type of stuff I tend to listen to so I rely on online merchants. How wonderful is the internet? I’ve recently found one that almost satisfies my missing of Amoeba. Insound.com is amazing for Indie type of stuff. They specialize in it. I made my first Insound order the other day and now have a ton of listening to do. It won’t be my last order from Insound. If you’re looking for a good resource and online merchant, check it out. They carry lots of hard to finds, imports, singles, vinyl, you name it. As a note, I like the site so much I signed up to become an affiliate. Thanks Insound!

Mar

24

In my previous post I mentioned the MDC was underway. Bill Gates was present to give the main keynote of the conference. If you’re like me and not there to witness it, Microsoft has posted a press release on their site summarizing. The Map-Location Server is very intriquing to me and I hope to build something with it soon. I have many ideas.

Mar

24

Microsoft is holding a developers conference in San Francisco today specifically for their mobile technologies. Wish I could be there. Instead work calls. But news is starting to spread. Apparently, there will be a ‘preview release’ of the 2nd version of the .NET Compact Framework. Hopefully I can get it downloaded from somewhere for my Smartphone and Pocket PC Phone. Lots of new features, it looks like a big upgrade. Read all about it here.

Mar

23

My 12″ PowerBook’s hard drive has started failing this morning. On start up it sounds like a lawn mower on my desk. Sounds like it is trying to spin and can’t. Bummer. I like the machine, but it’s down and out until I can go down to the office and get it fixed. Sony Vaio is still going strong luckily. I use the Sony as my main machine anyway. Regardless, losing a hard drive is never fun. Please help Apple. If I lose the hard drive, what happens to the songs I bought on iTunes? Can I download them again onto my PC?

Mar

18

Just received an email from my Nokia job agent about a position open for a senior software engineer specifically working on Mobile Browser technology for Symbian OS platforms. Sounds interesting. I wouldn’t mind living in Boston from what I have seen and heard. If anyone else is interested, information is below:

–
Senior SW Engineer, United States / Boston

The work involves implementation of Mobile Browser on embedded devices. The Senior Software Engineer works closely with a project lead as a team member to develop and integrate the Mobile Browser onto SymbianOS platforms

More information and details can be found here:

-->

T-Mobile has reposted a revised installer for the Windows Mobile 2003 ROM update. See my previous post about last week’s installer going awry. I haven’t had a chance to re-try the install yet. But will sometime today (maybe at lunch while watching the tournament games). Finally I can try out some code I’ve written for the .NET compact framework.

Mar

11

OK, so I wake up this morning to a note from Bill Perry about T-Mobile finally releasing the upgrade to my XDA. Finally, I’ll have a 2003 device. So I thought. I started the upgraded, everything looked fine. It has two phases. The first gets done and all the sudden ActiveSync dies. The XDA goes black. I get an error message and resetting the device and restarting the upgrade process. On reset, nothing!!! So I try and hard reset and guess what happens. I get the Wallaby (old code name for 2002 OS) Bootloader screen. ROM is trashed.

I just got off the phone with customer support. They are being really cool about this. Apparently I am getting a new device. The upgrade has something wrong with it that only affects certain devices. Mine being one of them. So they are sending me a new phone. I send my old one back. Here’s the question: will the new phone have the new OS installed? I doubt it. Probably have to go through this again in three days when the new device gets here. The upgrade has been pulled from the site, with a new fixed upgrade supposedly coming next week. I think I’ll wait to upgrade the new device until then. So far T-Mobile’s customer service has impressed me. Thanks T-Mobile!

Yes, ironically the pictures of the broken MS device were taken with my 3650. 8-) I was really excited about the new Windows 0S too. Oh well I can wait a week. 8-(

Mar

11

Apparently a group has gotten together to propose the .MOBILE top level domain. OK, I am going to play devil’s advocate for just a second. First off, .mobile is longer to type using a phone’s key pad than .com (I know its only two more characters, but that matters). Secondly and more important, this promotes the use of sites to only being formatted for mobile phones. I guess this could be handy, but why not have the same domain (.com URL) work on both the desktop and on phones. Detection is easy enough to implement – leave that to the developers to implement. I’m afraid the general user might get confused. Is mikekrisher.mobile owned by someone different than mikekrisher.com? Is the content the same? I know mikekrisher.com on my desktop, why can’t I just go to that same address on my phone? Developers and Enterprises will be charged with detecting and delivering appropriate content to the device rendering it, but I feel that makes the most sense. I am building detection into this site, already have it in place for some devices. Could this method not be followed by everyone, especially with the use of CSS and the media attribute when more devices support CSS? Sure beats the price of having to purchase another domain. 8-)

In the coming days I will be announcing the availability of my site for numerous devices – first off will be support for MS Smartphone. Pocket PC support is already implemented. Nokia Series 60s phones will be coming secondly. The mobile content is different than the desktop blog. I got tired of looking for mobile content so I built my own CMS tool built specifically with mobile in mind. The portal not only delivers links to other mobile content, it also pulls in content feeds and formats them for display on devices. Announcement shortly as soon as I have detection implemented fairly securely.

Mar

4

Infosync has posted an article about the upcoming release of FlashCast. As of now there has been no official announcement of FlashCast from Macromedia. FlashCast has been shown during a few exclusive mobile industry conferences over the last year however.

From what I can gather, FlashCast is a content delivery system built on top of Flash Lite. Flash Lite is a small version of the Flash Player geared towards smaller mobile devices, like mobile phones and PDAs. These phones and PDAs don’t have the processor power and RAM like today’s desktops, so they require an optimized player.

FlashCast is interesting to me because it is extremely similiar to a product I worked on when I worked at Zing (now part of Ofoto), back in the day in San Francisco. We had developed a Push technology that delivered content behind the scenes for users with slow dial-ups. It worked like a TV in that it had channels. You choose to see content from a channel when you were waiting for a Web page to load. While a page was loaded and you were reading it, the Push technology would deliver more content and cache it on your system so it was ready the next time you needed it. It worked pretty slick. The content was all formatted in Flash movies. At that time, Flash 3 movies.

So it sounds like a similiar type of scenario with FlashCast. The user experience will be like a TV and have channels. You will view these channels and they will display Flash Lite content that has downloaded in the background while you were viewing other content. Hopefully Flex or something similiar can be used to make the SWFs on the server. Simple. I like it. Good user experience. Highly engaging and interactive content on phones. Sign me up. FlashCast sounds awesome.

Now I’ll just sit patiently and wait for the ‘official’ announcement…

UPDATE


Apparently, I had missed this press release from Macromedia regarding the demo of FlashCast at 3GSM.

Mar

3

Just ran across this article regarding Jabber clients being released for all the major devices out there. This includes RIM, Pocket PC, Smartphone, and Symbian/J2ME. This is great. We use Jabber for our enterprise IM system where I work. There are other IM clients out there for the various devices, but none reach across the amount of devices. Jabber is solid. I will be going to the site to download the clients and try them out on at least three different platforms.

Unfortunate thing is, I was hoping that Flash/Flash Lite and the Communication Server could be the first app of its kind like this. Jabber just beat MM to it. It would be easy to do with Flash/Flash Lite and Communication Server. Development time would probably be a lot shorter. But Jabber is a dedicated company to IM, it’s no wonder they came to market first. Maybe one day we’ll see a Flash Lite client for IM, like we have with the Central AIM API. Flash and Flash Lite can do many things on devices, its just a matter of time.

P.S. if you are going to FlashForward 2004 SF, be sure to stop by my friend Bill Perry’s Q&A session to get first hand experience with creating apps with Flash and Flash Lite for mobile devices. He’ll be armed with many new devices. Wish I could be there.

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