Jul

22

On less of a rant tip compared to that last post, I have seen more and more mobile positions being posted lately. Macromedia is hiring quite a few people to the mobile and devices group. Microsoft has positions open as well. And more so than ever, I have been contacted by a lot of start ups recently. It’s making for a fairly positive feeling about the space going into 2006. In addition, I had a Bay Area recruiter contact me the other day and she is looking for someone with Windows Mobile experience out in the Bay Area. Here is a brief description:

1. Job Title Handheld Applications Architect Bay Area
2. Full time or contract? Contract preferred
3. Compensation range: The above are different so depends on salary/bonus or hourly/per diems, etc. $120 max
4. Description (what they are responsible for, what product/service they will be working on, what technologies (Symbian, J2ME/etc.) : Design and some implementation of healthcare applications for Smartphones and other handheld devices. Initially C++ for Windows Mobile; potential for Symbian work after that.
5. Requirements: this is background employment experience and skills and what they need to come to the table with to perform Significant (1-2+ years) developing applications for Windows Mobile, preferably apps that access the internet wirelessly; Substantial (7+ years) C++ development experience and object-oriented design experience; thorough knowledge of and experience (8-10+ years) with commercial software development lifecycle.
6. Works in team (size/existing or needs to hire) or autonomously? Joining existing team of 2 people.
7. Reports to position : Director, handheld application development
8. Education Requirements: BS required, MS preferred.
9. Years of Experience : See above.
10. Citizenship requirements : None for this consulting position.
11. Relocation offered? full, partial, none : None; local candidate preferred, but superb candidate might be offered the option of working remotely as long as periodic trips (expensed) to Bay Area can be made
12. List skills (architect, J2ME, etc.) with minimum years exp. and level needed (intermediate or advanced) : see above
13. Size of company – 130 people.

If you’re in the Bay area and interested, send your resume to liz@huffordassociates.com. Good luck. Part of me wishes I were in the Bay Area again so I could explore some of these opporunities. Maybe one day, for now working remote is my choice.

Jul

22

Why is it that the music industry hasn’t started deploying RSS yet? It makes perfect sense. Almost all artist’s sites have news sections, or at least tour sections. Some even have member blogs. Why not make an RSS feed and have fans become subscribers so you could push new album release dates, new shows scheduled, etc… I was just checking The Shins site to see if they were on tour and see that they are in the studio. If they had an RSS feed I would be able to subscribe and read their notes from the studio too. Sign me up. Just my quick rant for Friday afternoon. It’s been a long week.

Jul

8

Resulting from a discussion on the Flash Lite Yahoo Group back from a couple of weeks ago, I finally got around to creating a benchmarking app for Flash Lite 1.1. There isn’t as much native math operators in Flash Lite as there are in other languages and runtimes, so the scope is a bit limited, but the results are still entertaining. Perhaps in the future they can be directly compared to J2ME.

The testbed runs a couple of scripts including: frame rate, 1000 step incremental loop, random number generator between 0 and 1,000,000, search for a substring, and find all prime numbers between 2 and 100.

Richard Leggett is hooking up the scripts to his already existing capabilities.swf so we can store the device specific results with the variables he was already capturing.

Finding the primes was the biggest indication of processor strength. My 6680 showed close to twice the speed of my N-Gage Classic. Pretty cool!

Jul

6

I just finished listening to the Gillmor Gang Podcast from June 3, regarding the war on the desktop. The Macromedia Flash platform announcement was raised, along with Microsoft’s announcement that Office 12 was going to move to XML. Glad to see that the A-Listers were taking notice and giving Flash the same relevance as Office. Although I am not sure that is an equal comparison.

I have a good deal of respect for Steve, Jon Udell and the other A-Listers on the Gillmor gang. They make some great points about the industry. I mostly agreed with them regarding XML and ubiquity and that Macromedia and Adobe have their work cut out for them.

At one point, the gang discusses the relevance of Office. Obviously the majority of the enterprise uses Office. My wife lives and dies by Outlook, Excel and Word. I can see dropping Word and using something else to create text documents. Excel on the other hand, I think just wins the category. And then there is Outlook. I used Outlook when I was on a Wintel machine. I tend to like Outlook even. I have never tried Thunderbird, maybe it is better. I’m not totally sold on Gmail. But a big piece of that puzzle was the syncing Outlook provided with my Windows Mobile devices. Gmail and Thunderbird can’t really provide the same functionality. So to me, the mobile device strategy is a huge reason for enterprises to keep upgrading and sticking with Office. Office moving to XML will probably only increase the span Office can have as far as syncing with other device platforms. This could be a really good thing.

Also regarding mobile devices, Steve kind of suggested that Flash was going to have a tough fight against Java. Not sure I agree there. Flash Lite is just getting started and we are already seeing applications created that outperform and provide a better user experience than their Java couterparts. Sure it has its shortcomings and doesn’t have the marketshare, but it is only the first release. Flash Lite 2.0 is going to do wonders for creating mobile device applications. I don’t dislike J2ME, I use it for somethings as well because technically it provides some functionality that Flash Lite does not (yet). However, J2ME is much harder to develop in compared to Flash Lite. I think Flash Lite has the momentum, and we are going to see great things happen with the next release. I have some apps planned already.

Thirdly, I just want to say that I tend to agree with the gang that I like Web based apps. It just makes sense to me that if it can happen in a browser using client to server communcation, than so be it. I’m not entirely convinced that AJAX is the answer, but we’ll see. The point has been made that AJAX is 1997 all over again. I completely agree. I remember pouring over JavaScripts and tweaking DHTML over and over and over again. Problem with that is, something better came along â?? Flash. Better is an easy word to use there because of the hardlined proof â?? achieved ubiquity. The Flash runtime can provide some amazing opportunities. Google Maps is cool, but it could be achieved in Flash as well, and would probably perform better. I wonder if Google considered it. My guess is probably not because it is proprietary. Open source in a browser wins again.

Good podcast by those guys though. If you are looking for something interesting to listen to, I suggest checking it out.

Jul

1

In a project that I am currently working on I have compiled an ActionScript Library for Flash Lite 1.1 features and syntax.

I am going to post a couple snippets here that I find myself re-using over and over (especially with applications that load data over HTTP). If you have something similar, leave it as a comment. Also for other resources on Flash Lite, check out the Flash Lite Yahoo Group and the Flash Lite mailing list.

Here we go (beware of line wrapping):

/**
* fscommand2(”GetNetworkConnectStatus”) : Function; returns a value that indicates the current network connection status
*
* @param String
* @return Number
*/

connectstatus = FSCommand2(”GetNetworkConnectStatus”);
switch (connectstatus) {
case -1 :
/:myText += “connectstatus not supported” add newline;
break;
case 0 :
/:myText += “connectstatus shows active connection” add newline;
break;
case 1 :
/:myText += “connectstatus shows attempting connection” add newline;
break;
case 2 :
/:myText += “connectstatus shows no connection” add newline;
break;
case 3 :
/:myText += “connectstatus shows suspended connection” add newline;
break;
case 4 :
/:myText += “connectstatus shows indeterminable state” add newline;
break;
}

/**
* fscommand2(”GetNetworkConnectStatus”) : Function; returns a value that indicates the current network name
*
* @param String, String
* @return Boolean
*/
statusnetwork = FSCommand2(”GetNetworkName”, “networkname”);
trace (networkname); // output: T-Mobile

/**
* fscommand2(”GetNetworkRequestStatus”) : Function; returns a value indicating the status of the most recent HTTP request
*
* @param String
* @return Number
*/

requeststatus = FSCommand2(”GetNetworkRequestStatus”);
switch (requeststatus) {
case -1:
/:myText += “requeststatus not supported” add newline;
break;
case 0:
/:myText += “connection to server has been made” add newline;
break;
case 1:
/:myText += “connection is being established” add newline;
break;
case 2:
/:myText += “pending request, contacting network” add newline;
break;
case 3:
/:myText += “pending request, resolving domain” add newline;
break;
case 4:
/:myText += “failed, network error” add newline;
break;
case 5:
/:myText += “failed, couldn’t reach server” add newline;
break;
case 6:
/:myText += “HTTP error” add newline;
break;
case 7:
/:myText += “DNS failure” add newline;
break;
case 8:
/:myText += “request has been fulfilled” add newline;
break;
case 9:
/:myText += “request timedout” add newline;
break;
case 10:
/:myText += “no HTTP request has been made” add newline;
break;
}

/**
* fscommand2(”GetNetworkStatus”) : Function; returns a value indicating the network status of the phone (this is, whether there is a network registered and whether the phone is currently roaming)
*
* @param String
* @return Number
*/

networkstatus = FSCommand2(”GetNetworkStatus”);
switch(networkstatus) {
case -1:
/:myText += “network status not supported” add newline;
break;
case 0:
/:myText += “no network registered” add newline;
break;
case 1:
/:myText += “on home network” add newline;
break;
case 2:
/:myText += “on extended home network” add newline;
break;
case 3:
/:myText += “roaming” add newline;
break;
}

I have a few more, so I’ll try and post again sometime soon.

Jul

1

Congrats to all the Macromedia Pocket PC Flash (Flash Lite) contest winners. I am going to have to download these apps and check them out. My focus lately has been on the phone handsets, but I still have Pocket PC or two (or three) laying around here.

Go check out the winners here.

Jul

1


Back in April, I built an application and wrote a corresponding tutorial for Macromedia to include in their DevNet subscriptions using Flash Lite and eBay Web Services. The companion application allows a user to log into their “my eBay” account and check the status of the current auctions they are watching or running. The tutorial includes descriptions on how to build the Flash Lite application along with how to use eBay Web Services using PHP. If you have a DevNet subscription and receive the DRK CDs, check the last one.

There are plans to post the article on the public Web site as well sometime in the future. If you are interested in using Web Services (or dynamic data) with Flash Lite, check back and I will post when the article goes live on the public Web Site for everyone to access.

If you are interested in exploring eBay Web Services check back as well. I clearly outlined how to set up an eBay account, and how to use the XML APIs. eBay’s developer program is pretty cool. The documentation they provide regarding their APIs are pretty well done. There isn’t a whole lot of information out there for deploying it in any given language so I think the tutorial will be a good starting point for anyone that wants to start using them, whether you use PHP or not.

Flash Lite is evolving as a great client side technology for building these companion apps that utilize Web Services. Flash Lite doesn’t have built in functionality for handling Web Services, but building a proxy in PHP, etc… isn’t hard to do. I am sure the engineers have already started thinking about better dynamic data support in the next version of Flash Lite. Can’t wait for 2.0.

I’m finally beginning to dig myself out of a heavy workload, so I am going to do quite a few posts here to unload everything that has been kicking around the last few weeks.

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