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Mobile devices (phones) have become devices for both the production and consumption of rich media–augmenting their original purpose as one-to-one communication devices. In this course we will explore the technology that enables the consumption and production of media on these devices with an eye towards how that media can be used in conjunction with the devices' original social and communicative purposes. In short, this course will examine social and participatory aspects of mobile media consumption and generation. Students will create projects that utilize the available technology to explore new forms of social media creation and consumption.
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A how-to the hottest code management system on the web.
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Facebook offers some API functionality which requires specific opt in from the user. These methods are specific to certain use cases and require a greater level of trust from the user. They therefore employ a secondary opt-in flow, and the user may only opt in to one such permission on a single page view.
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If you’re a freelancer incorporated as an LLC, there are certain business deductions you should include on your 2008 tax filing. As an LLC, you enjoy the benefits of owning a business, but you do not incur a double tax. Below is a list of forms and specific line items you should be cognizant of as a business owner.
links for 2009-03-16
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This plugin loads a CVS file (e.g. created using Excel) and creates a table with the contents in that CVS file.
Quick Hack: PhoneGap + FourSquare = FourDroid
You may or may not have heard of a new service called: FourSquare http://playfoursquare.com, but I am sure at some point in the next year, you will!
It’s from the guy who made (and sold!) Dodgeball (a pre-Twitter mobile social service) along with another super-sharp mobile guy in NYC, and it’s launching at SXSW…. well, at least the iPhone app is.
Feeling left out, I decided there should at least be a basic offering for Android, and realized I could just wrap and tweak the mobile web service they offer at http://m.playfoursquare.com
Hence, FourDroid was (quickly) born, thanks to the always awesome PhoneGap Framework and the built-in WebKit browser on Android.
The benefit the “app” version has over just pointing your browser at the site:
- the app keeps its state/page separate from any web browsing you might do
- You can easily add the app icon to your home screen for quick access
- the browser font size is increased by default (the size for the mobile site is very small)
- a bottom button/tab bar provides quick links to often used screens
- it is just so much hotter to have an “app” than to try to explain how to type in a mobile URL
At some point, PhoneGap can also be used to tie in GPS location detection, photo upload, accelerometer and more, but for now, I’ll just settle for the benefits listed above.
The best part of this whole story is that I wrote the app this evening while I was waiting for other work (well paying work) to compile… so about two hours total interleaved into what I was actualy supposed to be doing. Yay, for PhoneGap on Android!
Search for “fourdroid” or “foursquare” in the Android Market today to try the app out for yourself
links for 2009-03-14
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We have designed a basic set of desktop icons that follow the style guidelines. The set has been created as a proof of concept for the style, but works rather well as a replacement for the base theme under GNOME and KDE.
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If you looked at OilCan – a Greasemonkey-like browser extension for Android – and Mosembro, you’d quickly realize that they have a lot in common. Both are experimental browser extensions which run on Android, both aim to make websites friendlier, both support installable actions written in JavaScript, and both make it possible for those scripts to modify web pages and launch other applications. And since looking at OilCan’s source code has allowed me to avoid reinventing the wheel at several occasions, some pretty obvious similarities can also be spotted at the source code level.
links for 2009-03-12
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Hpricot is a fast, flexible HTML parser written in C. It's designed to be very accommodating (like Tanaka Akira's HTree) and to have a very helpful library (like some JavaScript libs — JQuery, Prototype — give you.) The XPath and CSS parser, in fact, is based on John Resig's JQuery. Also, Hpricot can be handy for reading broken XML files, since many of the same techniques can be used. If a quote is missing, Hpricot tries to figure it out. If tags overlap, Hpricot works on sorting them out. You know, that sort of thing.