still dreaming…
Still some work to do, cleanup and some better javadocs, but if you are looking for Android code to help you record audio, take photos, get GPS location, upload via HTTP and more, then this is the project for you.
Git Code Repository (source access and zip/gzip download): http://github.com/natdefreitas/georeport-android
Slide overview download: http://olivercoady.s3.amazonaws.com/AndroidAdvancedGReporter030909a.pdf
Here’s the slides I presented today at Columbia University on this topic…
In recent months, I’ve been carrying around a Peek email device, or what I call the “One Hundred Dollar Blackberry”. It is a great piece of hardware, made by an honest-to-goodness New York City hardware company (not many of those!). I am also a big fan because I think their simple features and price point make this a great device for small business, non-profits and community/political/labor organizers…. all phenomenons of which I am a huge fan!
Peek has teamed up with Xtify to sponsor a contest, which should be a lot of fun… see the details below!
In full disclosure, I am doing some consulting for Peek right now, so I admit to a certain bias… but I’m definitely not getting paid to put this on my personal blog!
Dear Contest Entrants,
Thank you so much for your emails about signing up, there is a lot of interest in the competition!!! We have put up the official competition website here – http://contest.geekypeek.com. You can sign up directly in the contest forums.
The prizes are cool – fame, fortune and opportunity!
We tried to make things as easy as possible in terms of development. All you need is the Xtify APIs and whatever messaging/email API you want to use to send emails to the Peeks. We’ll post a lot more details on the forums to help you build your app but this should get you started.
To get your minds motivated here is a sample app built around location, www.meetmoi.com. Location-based dating!
All of us from Peek and Xtify will be available and monitoring the boards to help you guys build your apps.
Bon chance and I look forward to seeing what you all build!
Xtify & Peek
Tonight at the New York Tech Meetup, I, along with Greg and Chevon, demo’d the soon-to-be-released Coovents iPhone app (sign up to beta test here). David Oliver and I, through our mobile consultancy, Oliver+Coady chosed to work with Coovents due to their great focus on a killer app:
Coovents.com shows you which happy hours are going on today and shows you which ones are going on now. With one glance you can see happy hours in your hood! You can also send a text message to Coovents and we’ll send you happy hours to your phone! Bar hopping will never be the same.
Now, even if you aren’t interested in happy hours, you might be interested to know that this application was writtten using the PhoneGap Framework… in other words, while it may look like a “native” iPhone App, it is actually developed in HTML, CSS and AJAX, using Mobile Safari enhancements such as Scalable Vector Graphics, WebKit Transitions and HTML 5 Database support. The client app on the iPhone interfaces with Coovents via a JSON query interface, with all the rendering, requests and other magic shenanigans in the user interface happening via JQuery.
I’ve blogged about PhoneGap many times before here, but I have to say this is the farthest I’ve taken it both functionally and visually… perhaps it is because the app (happy hours) is an enjoyable problem to solve!
Watch the video below to see the app in action…
You can also checkout the Flickr Screenshot Set of the app…
Again, if you are interested in being a beta tester, please sign up here. Otherwise, the app will be in the iTunes store very soon!
Skadoo is a PhoneGap based application that is now available in the iTunes store. The app should be considered very beta… though (developers take note!) Apple doesn’t allow you to include the word “beta” in any graphics, description or application meta-data.
In short, say its “Phonegap-based” means that this app was built using HTML, CSS and Javascript, and then wrapped up in a native binary iPhone application. I’ve blogged about this before, when I showed how to turn a blog into a native iPhone app in 10 steps.
The full server app is still under development (server queries are VERY slow), but in short, it is a “people” search engine, for finding various profiles of someone online based on searching for their name. I, through my work with Oliver+Coady, was hired to build the iPhone App and get it into the App Store ASAP. PhoneGap was the best solution to get the job done quickly.
Development time was < 1 week... .it took longer to get the app into the store than it did to build it! The app uses JQuery for server interaction and the UI was built in Dashcode. Another quick interesting thing about this app, is that it uses HTML 5 Database to persist search results and Safari/Webkit extensions for CSS translation and transitions. Both working pretty well, though the translations are about 4x faster on the iPhone Simulator than on my iPod Touch. Get Skadoo for your iPhone today!
Just a few minutes ago, Palm announced their new pre device (that’s the name “pre”, I don’t mean it as in “preview” or beta). The device looks solid, like any state of the art mobile handset in the 21st century should. They’ve managed to innovate on the hardware, so it doesn’t look like a cookie cutter rebrand of HTC (cough..G1….cough).
courtesy of http://arvino.posterous.com
The big news for me was the Palm webOS… though its a bit like “Back to the Future”… Back in 1999, the Palm VII device launched with something known as Palm Query Applications (PQAs) – little compiled bits of HTML and images, as front-end local forms for submitting to remote web applications. It was a brilliant hack for the extreme low bandwidth of the Mobitex network.
Quick aside on my areas of expertise: I developed ThinAirMail, a POP/IMAP/Hotmail client for the Palm VII, that was the #1 PQA application for a long time, and eventually included in the box. This led to the acquisition of ThinAirApps, the mobile software company I helped found in 2001 by Palm. I worked there for about two years, until someone decided (probably correctly) that Palm shouldn’t be in the server software development business.
This new webOS echoes this approach, but is much more forward looking, and in fact completely inline with my own personal view of the world… it is a Mobile Web Client Stack. If you read this blog at all, you’ll have seen my previous posts on using PhoneGap to build “native” client applications for iPhone and Android using nothing more than XHTML, CSS and Javascript wrapped in a simple launcher. While I am happy that all the great Obj-C, Cocoa and Java developers have work in this mobile world, there is no need for mobile device development to be so difficult and proprietary.
The four zillion billion dollar question for Palm is, have you chosen wisely in the foundation of your Web OS? Pleeeeeaase, let the answer be “Yes, my son, WebKit is thy name.” At the least, tell me Gecko or Opera… I know standards are standards, but if this Web OS is built on yet another hacky mobile browser whose ancestry traces back to Access or Blazer, I am not going to be as thrilled as I am right now. WebKit is leading the way in amazing standards support, as well as adding the latest and great enhancements from HTML 5 (database, animations, transitions, etc). These are already shipping with iPhone OS 2.2, and lemme tell you – the things you can do with them will blow you away.