Proof of Concept: Shopper App

I often get people ask me to develop phone applications based on an idea and with little other input besides the idea itself. I usually ask them to write me a proposal and send that to me, knowing that most people will procrastinate – as it turns a fun idea into work – I rarely hear anything back. Not so in this case, a friend brainstormed a shopping application and we made the following rough mock ups using OmniGraffle.

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Image source: me

Phone Apps could use Interaction Designers #crackberry #rant

I’ve had my new CrackBerry with BES for 2 weeks now, and installed the FourSquare, Gowalla, GMail, LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook and Seesmic applications on the first day. After 2 weeks of using them all I can say is these phone app builders need to talk to interaction designers.

I think it had been said by somebody else some time ago that there should be consistency between the actions that are performed between the applications, scroll down should always be one button and scroll up a different on. I didn’t expect that these consistency issues would have been solved, but it would have been nice. What I find most problematic is that most don’t have any form of statefulness in their application.

Nokia Advertising with fring support? #skype

I just saw that Nokia was advertising their C7 in the Netherlands with support for fring, I wonder what the Dutch telecom providers thought of Nokia advertising their new phone with Skype support. I wonder if T-mobile will continue to give prepaid users an unlimited data connection for €5 and make Skype available.

Image source: mine

Mobile Monday #19 – Mobile Stories (cont.) #MoMoAms

Part 1 of Mobile Monday can be found here.

Initially Ben van der Burg‘s presentation using DiskSlideJockey failed, so Ville Versterinen presented ShadowCities, which I discuss here. Ben’s discussion centered on the disappearance of Story Telling, and the creation of Emotelling and the pornofication of the story. Lastly Ben Scott-Robinson of We Love Mobile proposed the exact opposite and discussed how important story and narrative are to getting your message accross.

Shadow Cities #MoMoAms #game #mmorpg

Another update from Mobile Monday:

Ville Vesterinen presented ShadowCities (twitter) is a location based MMORPG for iPhone, it was launched in Finland in Q4 of 2010. Ville calls it: “Bringing the magic into the real world.” Have a look at the trailer:

Mobile Monday #19 – Mobile Stories #MoMoAms

A post modern irony story would be to go to the Mobile Monday Meetup in the Duif – an Amsterdam church and have the church using the technologies that are spoken about in the Meetup used by the church to reach their followers. Sadly this is not the case, although the church is forward thinking it’s not that forward thinking.

The subject of the Meetup is Mobile Stories, and the first session was very nice. Luc van Donkersgoed spoke about the development of FML – Fuck My Life. Lucas Tieleman spoke about his way to create digital scarcity, which looks a lot like Geo Caching. Sander Veenhof spoke about his project in Cameroon nbeep. And Yuri van Geest spoke about NeuroSky/Xwave.

To be continued…

Sync Web with Phone #html #javascript #scratchpad

Having some fun today with QR codes, JavaScript and the Google Analytics URL Builder to produce an image which can be used to sync the webpage you are on to your phone using a QR code.

document.write("<img src=\"http://chart.apis.google.com/chart?chs=150x150&cht=qr&chl="+ escape(document.href) +"&choe=UTF-8\">");

Naturally the Javascript code should probably be more DOM oriented, but this was just for fun!

FindMe #geolocation #facebook #crackberry

I discovered findme (links to FaceBook) by way of FireEagle. A different application to update my location to FaceBook.

First you need to register it to FaceBook before you can use it. It registers the cell location, rather than the GPS location, and allows you to tag the Cell with a location tag. It runs in the background. According to FireEagle:

Automatic operation is currently available for BlackBerry …

Click here for FindMe OTA Download.

Technorati Tags: geolocation, facebook, fireeagle, crackberry, blackberry, yahoo!

CrackBerry MindMapping #blackberry #mindmap #crackberry

Somebody was nice enough to tag MindBerry in my del.icio.us inbox. So I installed the 4.5 version, initially I got an COD error, but the second time it installed fine. I needed to make the decision to remove something I didn’t use very often, so Opera Mini has left my CrackBerry. 😦

It’s possible to export the mindmaps to an external tool FreeMind making it possible to share your mindmaps to your colleague’s and friends, at least until your 10 day free trial is up.

MindBerry Mindmap App Now Available for the Storm

Technorati Tags: mindmap, crackberry, freemind, mindberry, blackberry

Gmail/CrackBerry Security #google #blackberry

I use BIS – BlackBerry Internet Service – which collects my mail from my Google Mail account and forwards it directly to my CrackBerry.

I changed my password for Google quite some time ago, at least 4 weeks before I got the message from BIS that they couldn’t collect my mail. Which means that for at least 4 weeks my mail was being retrieved from Google and forwarded to my BlackBerry after I changed my credentials. I use the IMAP option for GMail, which means that there is a persistent connection between Research In Motion and Google. It also means that Google violates security best practice by not requiring re-authentication.

technorati tags: risk, bestpractice, security, google, rim, crackberry, blackberry