android

Takes me back to 2004 (or was it 2005?) when I used to manage Bryght Light servers using SSH running on my Nokia 7610 with a bluetooth wireless keyboard. The WYSIWYG editor doesn't work of course :-) ! WYSIWYG didn't work in 2004 either BTW!

I'd like to edit text (no formatting required except maybe Markdown or simple HTML) using my Android phone and my Android tablet with a Bluetooth keyboard.

What are the best text editors or text editor webapps for Android phones and Tablets?

Speakout Wireless no catches, unlimited but slow 3G data for $10/month, no voice plan required is my conclusion after a month. Slow means under a 1Megabit sometimes  64 kilobits! But more than good enough to run GPS and do maps and geotag photos. Recommended if you are cheap :-) and want pay as you go data! Or just want a second phone with data and don't require voice! Only tested with a Nokia N8 with Nokia Maps and Pixelpipe but other folks have got it working on Android and iPhone. (see my previous speakout post for setup details).

(should work with Android too if you are technical enough to map Symbian to Android; this post describes how to do it for the iPhone)

tl;dr: N8 auto config sets up a WAP access point. All you have to is copy the WAP Access Point to your Internet Network Destinations group and setup the Positioning Server to be that WAP access point and you are done.

Detailed Steps:

1. Settings
   
2. Connectivity
   
3. Settings (yes Settings | Connectivity | Settings i.e. a 2 level settings menu is something only Symbian has :-) !)
   
4. Internet
   
5. Create a WAP Access point under Internet configured as (or if you are lazy just copy the WAP access point from WAP Services to Internet)
   
6. I was lazy and copied the N8 autoconfigured one called "GoRoger"s so Symbian called the copy "GoRogers(01)"
   
7. Databearer: Packet Data, Access point name:goam.com, Username:wapuser1, Prompt pasword No, Password:wap, Authentication:normal, Homepage none
   
8. Advanced Settings: IPV4, Phone IP address:Automatic, Proxy Server address:010.128.001.069, Proxy port number:80
   
9. Next configure the GPS Position Server under Settings|Application Settings|Positioning

   

10. Positioning Methods
    
11. Check: Assisted GPS, Integrated GPS, Wi-Fi/Network, Network based
    
12. Settings|Application Settings|Positioning server|Server settings
13. Tap on supl.nokia.com
    
14. Change Access point to: GoRogers(01) or whatever you created the access point in step 5

    

On September 12, 2011 at the Mozilla All Hands all the employees (lucky us, thanks Mozilla!)  each received a Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 (or an ASUS Transformer). First impressions of the Galaxy Tab:

• Heavy but useful as a great Google Reader client (I truly am addicted to Google Reader on all platforms: Firefox desktop, Android phone, iPhone and now Android tablet)
• Great PDF displayer as a second screen for reading e.g. programming books while programming while using a computer
• Built-in touch keyboard is not so great for me. Investigating Swype and Swiftkey
• Needs a case, I am afraid of dropping it, can anybody recommend a good case?
• Not nearly as much software as the iPad (I'd love something like World of Goo and Flipboard; Pulse is alright but :-) !)
• Firefox Mobile Nightly with the new Tab interface is very sweet. I could happily just use it and no other apps except Google Reader!

The Android built-in keyboard like Symbian's is unusable for different reasons. The Android one has dead spots (e.g. try hitting the space bar on the Nexus S; enjoy the dead zones :-) !). Symbian's is unusable because it's two step (you have to tap a checkmark and then tap again to get the keyboard input recognized) not to mention the fact that pre Symbian Anna the portrait keyboard is a touch version of T9!). I am exploring different keyboards and hopefully will find something decent for both Android and Symbian and then I'll blog about it.

I have Nokia Cameraphone Stockholm syndrome :-) which means I neglect the (un)usability of Symbian in order to get fantastic photos like the ones above! I can't stop taking photos with the Nokia N8, and I can't repeat it enough, the photo quality is amazing, thanks again to the Nokia team responsible for the N8!

My question, who will top the Nokia N8 in cameraphones? Will it be somebody on Android, Windows Phone 7, WebOS, or will Canon and Nikon or some camera upstart like Panasonic do the right thing and incorporate 3G connectivity with software programmability (I love Eye-Fi but unless it's built in it's a kludge! And the built-in WiFi in various Nikons and other cameras from traditional camera manufacturers is unusable since it's not programmable and not flexible) so that an ecosystem of cameraphone apps can spawn around a fantastic cameraphone (the iPhone4 has an excellent ecosystem of cameraphone apps but without a dedicated camera button, I can't use it as my goto cameraphone).

My guess it will be be an Android cameraphone with a dedicated camera button that will top the N8 but I'd love to be proven wrong by HP, or Panasonic or other upstart. (And feel free to think that my obsession with cameras with built in connectivity that is programmable is crazy but I think there are many 1000s of people like me!)

Hard to believe but true: iPhone Google Reader web app is faster and smoother than the Google Reader App on my Nexus S. Anybody know why? Is the Android Google Reader App Java or an HTML 5 web app? I am guess it's a Java app; if so shouldn't Java apps be faster and smoother than web apps in Android?

Not sure why the Blackberry Playbook is on the front page of the Globe and Mail today. Like the iPhone or iPad it's just a gadget :-) !It's not my kind of gadget because it doesn't have the compelling developer and user experience of other gadgets but time will be the real judge of that; from early reviews it sounds like it's full of potential in spite of my misgivings about the  decision to support Android apps.

I wish the RIM folks success but I think much more coverage should be extended to the Canadian startups that going for it & innovating i.e. the companies that will become the next two or three RIMs or how about the story of how acquisitions of Canadian startups by foreign companies prevent Canada from nurturing more companies the size of RIM.

I agree with Ewan. Symbian Anna is the kind of revision that we needed to see about 1.5 years ago. We'll see when we get the N8 firmware update (late this quarter or next quarter, too late!) to Symbian Anna if the browser is really modern and supports HTML5 and all the other browser goodies that Android, Maemo and iPhone browsers do; I think it does. Symbian Anna is a great update for those who live in a bubble and don't know about the move to Windows Phone 7 or Android or iPhone or if the phones that have Symbian Anna were priced really low e.g. under $200. Unfortunately the X7 is almost 400 Euro and doesn't have a decent camera instead it's the 8 megapixel EDoF camera (but perhaps normal people will be happy with a non auto-focus camera, call me crazy but in 2011 I don't think people will be happy with that camera)

Geeky, hard to use, but continually updated and getting better and tied to compelling services like Google Maps and gmail. That's my summary of Android after playing with my Nexus S. This could have been Symbian or Meego or Maemo in an alternate Nokia universe. Oh well. Hopefully Nokia survives Windows Phone 7 long enough to launch something that's a truly useful and compelling total mobile experience and that allows them once again to be master of their own destiny.

And doesn't understand why the UI is not as responsive in general e.g when playing Angry Birds on the N8
or why the N8 Angry Birds sometimes displays black blotches instead of the correct graphics.

Ah the current sad state of computer software, hardware and experience where only a few companies like Apple can make a compelling, complete experience. (i.e. beyond the Fisher Price iPhone experience; I love Fisher Price Ewan, I also love computer power tools like Ubuntu and Emacs) . I am looking forward to trying out Android in depth but it feels like Linux before Ubuntu rather than a compelling experience that can compete with Apple's.

It's time for real total mobile experience innovation. One that isn't tethered to a PC. One that helps me manage my life without drowning in a sea of overlapping and confusing apps or "ad driven where my data is sold to the highest bidder" web apps.

Perhaps I'll just give in to my geeky nature and run my own powerful but hard to use server for services for my mobile like I run this blog on my own server.

After 6 days with Color here are some musings:

• To me, the idea of a co-locative co-temporal automatically created without passwords and users social network aka "co-created photo and video commons" is great; not sure if that's mainstream, perhaps it will be
• The App is flawed: no obvious way to browse by users, no help information, no tutorial (there is one on the website, but since this app-centric, there should be a tutorial accessible from the app!)
• The App is flawed: no way to unfollow a user or at least delete a user's photos.
• The App is flawed: no way to "unPost". Would be great to be able to delete your photo or video within 10 minutes of posting it.
• There is no web presence. Why have a website if it doesn't have proper permanent links for each user? (is this unfriendly link my permanent link:http://color.com/s/6a0esD?)
• 10 second videos are cool, but 1 minute or ideally 1:30 like flickr would be great
• Color is yet another social media ghetto where you can't get your stuff out with full metadata. Please follow flickr's example and provide an API that allows full metadata to be extracted along with the photos and video.

No obvious utility even to digital hipsters as evidenced by its lack of takeup; not everybody is an environment of iPhone and Android users who will try and both use this app. Color needs to promote themselves at conferences or events where lots of folks use the app (e.g. a geek conference with lots of iPhone & Android users; perhaps Northern Voice but probably not because it isn't iPhone and Android-centric) and thereby bootstrap their network. I think with the improvements above and heavy promotion at events with heavy Android and iPhone usage, it could be big, but there's no evidence that this will happen so far.

Conclusion: Great idea, D for execution. Color will not succeed but somebody else who's hungrier will take this idea and do it right eventually. A "co-locative co-temporal automatic social network" aka "co-created photo and video commons" will happen with or without Color.

As I said in my interesting Vancouver 2010 talk, this is the golden age of computing NOT the 70s and 80s like lots of folks seem to think. Write an awesome Javascript app (or just a fun proof of concept like my flickr Average Geo Tagged real time photos from 18 cities hack) and it works on millions of desktops and mobiles e.g.:Android, iPhone, Meego, Maemo, Mac, Windows and soon Symbian once Symbian gets a modern web browser. Share the code on github and make a video on YouTube and you can get recognition you could never get in the Internet less days of Creative Computing and Byte in the 1970s. Sure there are compatibility problems but nothing like the differences between Applesoft Basic, Commodore Pet Basic, Basic on the IBM PC (what was it called)?

Hard to believe that I didn't make any predictions in 2009 (my 2008 predictions)!

Herewith again some randomly ordered Mobile predictions which are worth what you paid for them!

Mobile

1. Google will introduce a "comes with data" mobile phone featuring an easy environment to write HTML5 & JS apps
2. A Canadian mobile phone carrier will actually sell mobiles other than the iPhone that have current software & aren't 6-12 months old :-) The current "sell old phones with old firmware with bogus customizations" model of Rogers, Bell and Telus will be over in 2011.
   
3. Apple's tablet will be introduced, it wil be big seller and a great creator and consumer of multi-media and it will be closed and have the iPhone App Store model rather than the Mac app model.
4. Nokia will deliver Maemo 6 and an N900 successor but it won't be good enough for the mainstream but will be awesome for me & other mobile devs because mobile Firefox will offer superior HTML5 and JS experience (yes working for Mozilla I am biased :-) !)
5. The next iPhone will boast a 5 mega pixel camera and other still and video imaging improvements which will be more than good enough for old cameraphone snobs like me and accelerate Nokia's decline among mobile multimedia creators.
6. Mozilla Messaging (my employer!) will introduce a version of Raindrop that doesn't require you to do geeky things like install things like CouchDB yourself and it will rock on Android, Maemo and any other modern open mobile web  environment (sorry Blackberry, iPhone and Symbian but you lose since you are all neither open or modern or both :-) !) Just kidding, it will rock on any modern mobile web browser open or closed methinks :-) !
   

After some digging and research around the web, my ideal mobile mad scientist programming language would:

• have the 2D and 3D graphic manipulation power of Processing, Nodebox and Shoes
• be cross platform mac, windows, linux, maemo on mobile, iPhone, android
• be 'web native' i.e. REST, JSON, XML and all the other web API stuff built in and not bolted on like it is Processing, trying to use the flickr api from Processing is shall we say kludge-o-rama (awesome code from bryan chung but indicative of the unnecessary struggle one is forced to engage with in Processing and other non web native languages)
• not use a Java-like syntax, death to curly braces and wasted semi-colons
• be dynamic, death to the Java/C++ cargo cult of typing for no reason 
• be easily adaptable to new APIs and new sensors through the ability to create a domain specific language and/or easy to use and beautiful foreign function interface
• be open source, sorry but for my mobile art,  i can't use programming environments and languages that are not open source
• support the REAL loop, I don't want to spawn threads for the sake of questionable 'concurrency' like I am forced to with OSGI and the Bug Labs Bug

IF I were an idealist that pretty much rules out everything :-)

Fortunately I am a pragamatist. So I will continue my experiments in:

• Nodebox & Python on the Mac
• Cocoa Touch and Objective C on the iPhone

What about Processing? Sorry can't handle the Java syntax and the pain of doing XML and JSON and REST programming and the kludge-o-matic way to access Java libraries. processing.js? too early and too much impedance mismatch to use all the lovely JS libraries out there. And Shoes is promising especially if it were improved so you could easily use normal Ruby gems but given its current "hibernation" "post-Why" not sure it will continue to be improved.

What should I use on Maemo if/when I get an N900? Ruby plus SWIG or some such foreign function kludge er interface :-) to access the sensor APIs which I assume are only available in C and C++ ?

What should I use on Android if/when I get an Android device?

What should I use on Windows? Not that I really care :-) But it would be lovely to have Windows people join in my fun without having to do anyting. Eines Tages!

Somehow I think the "mainstream" world is moving towards my ideal solution and the mainstream solution for what I want will look more like processing.js and ruby-processing or smalltalk i.e. scratch then it will look like Processing, Nodebox or CocoaTouch

See the accompanying UBC mobile brief wiki for notes to this presentation which I gave to the UBC Faculty of Land and Food Sciences on January 13, 2009 (note that this presentation was prepared using the 280 Slides web app which i highly recommend!)