Apple iPhone Tech Talk Amsterdam

...took place in Delft (Dear Apple. Delft is not Amsterdam...) yesterday. Since a nice apple employee told us that blogging, photos, recording, (fortunately not breathing) is forbidden, I will not share much with you. Am I allowed to say something about the sandwiches? Probably not.
Fun is different.

Anthony B

...concert in the live station, Dortmund, was the highlite of the weekend. Anthony B and the band rocked the crowd with massive sound. I think his dance style is quite cool, he can throw legs and arms in unbelievable ways ;)
We got a good look at the stage from upstairs and enjoyed the sunday evening...

Patrice concert

... in cologne was awesome. Really. Excellent sound, great atmosphere. What I really like is that Patrice and his band are true musicians. Their live gigs are full of improvisation and peppered with spontaneous elements. This is true live music. Great!

The next generation... fragmentation?

A lot of people argue about JME fragmentation. And about JME, Symbian, Windows Mobile development in general. Too complex, too time-consuming, too fragmented. I agreed. And it seems like most of the people are looking for Web-style, Widgets like solutions for this. I support that "hype", but only to a certain extend. No doubt, it's nearly 10 times easier building a User Interface on a capable(!) browser using XHTML, SVG, ECMA script, rather then using the paint(Graphics g) Method in JME. Agreed. But when it comes to questions like: "How do I get the GPS-location in the browser-based application?" it's getting interesting.... Currently everyone wants to introduce his own solution in that space. Gears (from Google), Mozilla, LocationAware, OMTP, W3C, OpenAjax Alliance, just to mention a few examples. That's fragmentation at it's best. When people talk about fragmentation in the JME space, they usually mean that there are different APIs available on different devices and that the APIs behave differently (due to bugs or bad Spec). What is currently happening in the "browser-world" is even worse. They will have the same problems like JME (bugs, availablility of APIs cross devices) PLUS they don't even have consistent APIs yet. I hope that people start recognize this, and feed their proposals into a standardisation body to get a consistent API out as soon as possible...

Convergence

I'm a fan of Sony Ericsson devices as you might have noticed ;) I also like the DLNA media server integration of my Link Station and my PS3. Now the guys from Sony Ericsson did me a favour with their C905 device. It has WiFi and a build in DLNA compliant media server. When it connects to your WLAN, it will instantly show up in the Crossbar of the PS3 and you can view the pictures taken with 8.1 megapixel camera directly on your TV screen. Cool! Really, really cool.

Summerjam 08

...took place last weekend in cologne bay. we put up our tent next to the lake, stored some beer, a shisha and barbecue stuff there and had 3 very relaxing days on the jam. It was a great and peaceful atmosphere and not as crowded as last year. Even the lineup was not absolutely first class, the music, the sound and the performance was excellent. Stephen Marley, Patrice, Jah Cure and many more...
In my view, Summerjam is the best festival to go to, it's 100% easy going and relaxing with excellent music and jamaica feeling :)
Check out some pictures below or some youtube clips here.

p@rty 3.0

As last year, conny, marcel and I organized a party for family and friends. I still think that the location of a good party is a very important piece, so we spent some time to spot the right one. This year we decided to rock-a-boat on the rhine river. So we set up our equipment on the top deck of the nautilus boat and had a lot of fun until the early morning. Thanks everybody for showing up there, and let's see where we will rock next year ;)

Motion sensor fun

I played around with the accelerometer in my Sony Ericsson W910i phone which is accessible for JME applications via JSR 256. I took the physic engine from Marcin Ploska and extended it with accelerometer support. See the results here:

Marathon

On Sunday I finished my first marathon in Duesseldorf. Crossing the finish line was a strange moment between happiness and exhaustion. Not sure if I will do this again ;)

JSR 226 Demos

I gave a speech at JAX this year (on the mobility track) regarding JSR 226 and the usage of SVG for the UI of mobile applications. I think that SVG is still a bit underastimated at all. The scalability features of SVG are very useful especially on the various screen sizes on mobile devices.
To show the audience the features of SVG on pratical use cases, I created some demos which I'd like to show you here. Static images can't replace the animations of course, but it should give you an idea what SVG can do for you ;) I should mention that the SVG artwort was created by our graphics team, I'm just doing the java piece :)

Java on iPhone

It looks like some guys really make progress on this.
JamVM is already available as posted here and here.
SUN announced to port it, and it looks like the guys from the phoneME team has taken this challenge and ported phoneME advanced (CDC) to it.
Cool guys, go ahead, the iPhone is definetly the coolest hardware platform you can run on currently!

Opera Mini 4.1 beta

...is out and it has pretty cool new features. My favourite is the graphical text-input of URLs including auto-completion and suggests. Very nice. Also the "save page" function is cool for saving time-shedules of trains or something like that. Good job opera!
Go to
http://mini.opera.com/beta/
for download!

How accurate is Google's My Location?

I've done some tests (with the help of some colleagues) with the My Location service of Google mobile maps. We know that the service works based on cell-id, means that there is cell-id database at google which maps the cell-ids back to coordinates. Question is: How accurate is the database? To answer that, we did some measurements in the 2.5 G network in germany.
We just compared our current location (via GPS) with the result of the My Location service and calculated the distance. We did 132 measures.

Here's the result as a graph:



To summarize, My Location is 707 meters inaccurate on average.
80% of the measures are less then 1075 meters accurate.

So this is (of course) far away from GPS based LBS, and it depends on the use-case of a service if this is sufficient.

on my run yesterday...

... I took this picture. I wish my mobile would have a better camera, the quality is really disgusting...

Android on Mobile Monday

I joined the android part of the mobile monday in munich this week.

Nothing really suprising happened there, but I collected some facts from the Q/A which might be interesting for you.

• A new SDK is on the way with a complete new User Interface
• The first mobile will have a H-VGA display
• The D-BUS system will be kicked out in final release
• Applications will only be self-signed by the developer
• Minimal hardware requirements for an android platform:
• 200 Mhz ARM 9
• 64 MB RAM
• SD-Card
• QVGA or bigger
• WIFI/bluetooth

JavaFX Mobile on DevDays

Unfortunately I'm not able to join the first Java Mobile & Embedded Developer Days in Santa Clara but I decided to watch the live stream of the session "Developing Applications for JavaFX Mobile" to find out a little bit more about Sun's mobile operating system.
First of all: The live stream worked really good, and there's also a chat attached to the session you're watching where you can ask questions. I took the chance to dig a bit deeper into the Web-side of the story and asked for SVG and Java PlugIn support of the WebKit based browser. Unfortunately Sun is not implementing this in their first release.... too bad. I'm wondering why they are putting so much effort on their new Java Plugin of the update N release if they don't put it into their mobile platform...
Anyway, the whole JavaFX Mobile operating system is clear competitor for android with the huge advantage that Sun is able to run 100% pure Java SE on it.
Check out the slides of that session, it's really worth it.

W910i review

I can name a SE W910i my own for some weeks now and I really like that device. I would like to show some pretty nice features I like most. First, the RSS ticker on the idle screen. Really usefull if you have a data flat fee. You can add the news or flickr (or NoseRub) feeds you like and the phone will display the latest news in a carrousel like ticker on the idle screen like this:
Nice. I really like to make more use of the idle screen, so I used the ability of the W910i to create an idle screen midlet, which you can do on many of the latest SE-Phones (most JP-7 and all JP-8 phones). My first midlet just displayed pictures from my picasa web album on the idle screen like. A bit boring over time. Now I use JSR 184 to map those pictures to a cube and do some nice 3D-transition effects like this:


I also checked out the SenseMe function, but I'm a bit disappointed especially by the horrible Windows application from Sony Ericsson. Not useable at all. The Media Player is pretty nice, it rotates the pictures and videos depending of the orientation of your phone. Cool.
Overall a cool phone with only few negative aspects: No GPS, a bit unstable firmware and a plastic cover. Hopefully the announced W760 will overcome those issues ;)

DLNA Media Server for my PS3

Do you remember this device?

Yes, it's a Linkstation and I never found a very useful job for mine... Until today :) I bought a PS3 some days ago mainly because of all the cool media features. I used my PC as a media server first, but I didn't like the idea that it has to run all day and night long. Then I remembered my Linkstation... The main problem is that it runs on MIPS architecture and it's not that easy to cross compile new software for it. After some research I found the TwonkyMediaServer which claims to support MIPS. And it's true, these guys have ported their software to a bunch of target platforms and architectures. Great! Now my Linkstation has something useful things to do, while my PC can look for more interesting stuff ;)

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