Category: Mobile Mobile

Peek and Xtify sponsor "Cool Peek App" contest!

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

Coovents.com iPhone App Demo Video

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.

Coovents.com iPhone AppCoovents.com iPhone AppCoovents.com iPhone App
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: PhoneGap-based app now in iTunes

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.

Skadoo in iTunes

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!

SVG makes your iPhone webapps more "flash"-y

I’ve been doing some work on a iPhone webapp (natively deployed, wrapped in PhoneGap naturally) and decided to incorporate some advanced visualizations using Scalable Vector Graphics. Achieving robust SVG support in browsers has been a long struggle, and the good news is that the latest builds of both Firefox and Safari, desktop and mobile, do it well. Safari’s support comes from the excellent Webkit project – read more about the status of their SVG support. On the desktop, SVG hasn’t gained much popularity, mostly due to the presence of Flash and Java, the incumbents when it comes to advanced visualization.

However, the reason SVG should matter to iPhone developers is that, since there is no Flash or Java support, it is difficult to achieve rich, dynamically rendered interfaces – think charts, clocks, gauges and other visualizations, through CSS alone.

The application I am developing required a working classic clock with semi-transparent wedges overlaid on top of it showing different upcoming events. The implementation is nearly done, so you will be able to see it in action soon, but for now here’s a screenshot:

working clock rendered with SVG on mobile safari

And for those of you looking to do some rad geo-hacking and break out of the bonds of Google, how about moving towards OpenLayers based SVG maps? There are some links to great SVG map demos at the end of this article. Also check out James Fees GIS Blog for a whole thread on this topic.

Not sure if this works yet in WebKit on iPhone, but have you seen this cool demo of combining SVG with the new HTML video element? Perfect for the multitouch capability of the iPhone, no?

All in all, just food for thought, and an example of a great technology that might have finally found its niche!

Here are some great SVG demos, samples, tools that should all will work in the iPhone Safari browser… and hopefully the Android version of WebKit, as well!

Feedback on my TwitterVoteReport Talk at MobileCampNYC3

Eric Mill, of Mill Industries (a personal blog that has nothing to do with heavy machinery), attended my session at MobileCampNYC3 yesterday, and posted a positive note about it:

The first session I went to was awesome, about the Twitter Vote Report, which was actually not just a Twitter thing at all. Via SMS, calling in, Twitter, or native iPhone and Android(!) apps, you could report the quality of your voting experience on election day, even going so far as to specify a rating. In fact, they did an excellent job using hashtags on Twitter such that you could post “Had a #good time voting in #11216 no problems here #votereport” and the Vote Report project would pick up that someone had a Good experience in zip code 11216. Nathan Freitas, a cool guy, and Dave Troy, the guy behind Twittervision, were involved, and they have released as many visualizations and raw data as they can from it. PLUS, Nathan today released the source code to the Android app that he built in a day for it.

I felt a bit negative about the event at the end of the day (see this tweet) mostly because it seemd everyone either wanted to sell themselves or thought i was trying to sell them on something, instead of it just being an open relaxed forum for the exchange of ideas and knowledge. Fortunately, there are posts like this, which let you know people were actively listening, engaged and learning, that help make it all better.

Eric worked for Blue State Digital during the election and is now actively looking for his next gig, so if you are in need of a sharp, energetic thoughtful developer, mobile or otherwise, with political campaign experience, let him know!