Emerging Tech – Page 6 – nathan's open ideals

iUI and Android: Automagic Mobile Web Fun

Earlier this yaer, Joe Hewitt released a great library named iUI for easily developing iPhone-friendly mobile web applications using a basic set of HTML tags. Here’s a brief rundown of what it does:

* Create Navigational Menus and iPhone interfaces from standard HTML
* Use or knowledge of JavaScript is not required to create basic iPhone pages
* Ability to handle phone orientation changes
* Provide a more “iPhone-like” experience to Web apps (on or off the iPhone)

The good news is that since the Android platform uses the same WebKit browser, the iUI library works automagically with devices such as the T-Mobile G1. I had assume this, but to see that it basically works perfectly without changes, is great news. The only issue is that iUI obviously mirrors the user navigation elements and general interaction model of the iPhone native user experience. The iPhone model is highly usable and easy for most users to pick up, so I don’t think that is an issue, especially with the general lack of specific set of user interface guidelines for Android.

So, if you are looking for a quick way to build a usable, friendly, attractive web application that will work on iPhone AND Android, for now at least, iUI is your answer.

Here are some screenshots of the mobile site I developed earlier this year for Globalgrind.com. You can try it yourself by pointing your mobile device (it supports blackberry, wap, sidekick, etc as well) at: http://m.globalgrind.com or texting “ggrind” to 41411

view the full screenshot set here….

Diagramorama: Sending Download Links to Mobiles

Email to SMS Technique

Originally uploaded by nathanialfreitas

I recently had someone ask about sending video download links to mobile phones. Mux does this using the “your phone number”@”your mobile carrier”.com approach, otherwise known as the SMTP Email Gateways.

Every carrier has a different way to do this, with different limitations, but it does essentially work, and as long as you aren’t spamming people, it is a good solution.

Here is a mostly complete list of the gateways from SMS411.net

Android User Interface Code is Not Easily Reusable

I’m ideally looking for someone to correct or enlighten me here, so please do!

The basic premise I want to put forward is that user interface components and libraries developed for the Android platform are not as easily reusable as standard Java Swing-based UIs. As opposed to simply linking a JAR file as you would in a J2SE or J2ME application, an Android developer must deal with the following files:

An XML layout definition
An entry in the R.java resource file
The class definition(s)

It isn’t just the variety of files, but the process of integrating the third-party code into your application in a clean way that I am concerned with.

Am I missing something here? Is there an easy to just import a JAR into your lib, and load all of this up at once, possibly referencing a resource file and a separate set of layout XMLs within that JAR?

Maybe I need to go back and re-read the Building Custom Components section of the Android Developer Guide. Hmm.

Four Years of Videoblogging

You may have heard, I recently got married, and as part of that spent an inordinate amount of time dealing with photo and video archives. I’m not much of a “filmmaker”, but Micaela and I have had fun sharing some of our personal adventures with our family, friends and the world.

What I appreciate the most was the fact that we hadn’t set out to document so much of our lives, we just did it, in true blogging style. What we ended up with was a wonderful retrospective of some of the amazing days that led us to our wedding day.

And now for your enjoyment…

TiVo helps Cruxy get into your living room

Great news. TiVo, the set-top DVR time-shifted media innovator, announced at CES yesterday that any video podcast will be able to be viewed on their boxes. This means that the DRM-free video you purchase from Cruxy or convert with Mux will be able to be fed directly to and watched on your TiVo box in your living room.

Here’s a bit more on this announcement:

Yesterday, at CES, they announced that all their subscribers will soon be able to select Internet video podcasts for playback on their set-top boxes….The new offering will be available under the “Season Pass” feature, and will apply the function to video content available through any RSS feed.

This is great news for independent creators and distributors, and is well timed with the ongoing WGA strike. The less steps it takes to get a video from Cruxy playing on the nice big screen in your living room, the better!

Read the full post on Mashable.