Roland Tanglao's Weblog

cool! Shozu slideshow - another viral attractor for ShoZu. Now if only Cognima and the ShoZu team would fix the crashing bugs that I experience when there are over 200 or so photos on my Nokia N93 (which I think is an S60 problem but what do I know? As always willing to run debug versions to help fix this and to act as a tester for S60 and ShoZu teams)

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ShoZu is soon to launch a web widget that runs on all major social networking sites as well as other online services such as blogs. ShoZu Slideshow creates a virtual photo frame for camera phone pictures and videos, that anyone can create and anyone can post to any web page on the internet. The content can be updated at any time directly from the mobile phone and updates will be seen immediately by anyone who has a copy of your Slideshow.

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Here's my ShoZu slideshow widget:

I hope the increased N81 and N95 RAM (it's doubled) means I can finally run ShoZu, Jaiku (and heck maybe even a VOIP program) simultaneously and have hundreds of pictures and a few videos without S60 crashing with out of memory errors. Fingers crossed.

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Q: How much RAM does the N81 have, and has there been any improvements in sound quality? A: the amount of free RAM will be ~90MB

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Russ Beattie agrees with me that Nokia should adopt an open source core.

FROM Nokia and The Next Gen Mobile GUI

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Point 4 is something I’ve written about before: Symbian had its chance to reach critical mass, and didn’t. It may continue to gain developers and new phones, but they’ve hit the high water mark in terms of rate of adoption and units… From this point on, Symbian is going to be doing that slow fade into technological obscurity. Let me put it like this: Symbian is not a platform that any true innovators would ever base their ideas on going forward, and without innovation an OS is dead. Once Nokia moves on to something else, it’ll quickly go away forever. And what would Nokia move to? Linux of course - as shown by their two outstanding web tablets the 770 and N800. The quicker Nokia starts moving that OS to their top-tier mobile phones, the better, IMHO.

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<armchair ceo>
One sentence: “Nokia buy ShoZu”

Fix its memory issues, make it work with absolutely everything (it already works with many many sites) and then make it part of S60
</armchair ceo>

This Twango acquisition makes no sense to me; buy a service nobody uses!?! A ShoZu acquisition makes much more sense; it's a great albeit flawed app (S60 memory issues) that works with all the cool services like flickr, blip.tv, any MetaWeblogAPI enabled blog, etc, etc.

From atmaspheric | endeavors » Blog Archive » Why did Nokia acquire Twango?:

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If Nokia’s tag line is Connecting People, why are they going out of their way to develop new stand-alone services, rather than working with what’s already present and being used by communities globally. They could really just focus enabling the experience from Mobile to web and back. From a user perspective, I would much rather have an application or service that could talk with everything else I use to make it simple for content to go back and forth. This would make it easy for me and easy for my friends to stay in touch. We already know Facebook is working on the connection with the desktop and Jaiku, Facebook and even Plaxo offer ways to have content from other syndicate-able sources appear in your profile, but no one has come up with way to link with your mobile.

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I couldn't do the most basic thing and connect my terminal.app with my Python running on my Nokia N93. Aaargh!

I followed the Using the Python for Series 60 Bluetooth Console from OS X HOW TO from Erk Smartt but was unsuccessful.

Invoking the Bluetooth console from the python app on the Nokia N93 worked but then after typing "screen /dev/tty.BT_CONSOLE", I get the following error messages: "Cannot open line '/dev/tty.BT_CONSOLE' for R/W: Resource busy " followed by "Sorry, could not find a PTY. ".

What am I doing wrong? I know I had this working with my Mac and Series 60 Python on the N70 back in the day so it's a bit frustrating!

Awesome vision (I am not a fan of Lifeblog (his previous vision) but I am fan of Christian! And of course I am a fan of Series 60 which was one of Christian's first visions!). Go Christian go! Wouldn't it be cool if Christian Lindholm built this OS at a startup around an open source core like Linux and wouldn't it be cool if Nokia bought that OS and used it on future phones? This would blow the iPhone out of the water. In the long run, this is what has to be done if the iPod-ization of mobile phones is to be avoided IMHO (but hey I could be wrong :-) !)

FROM ChristianLindholm.com: My speech at MEX, The SW Transformer A Vision for a mobile OS:

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I was asked by Marek Pawlowski from PMM to give a keynote at the MEX conference, a small mobile user experience conference. It is great small conference with key people in mobile user experience.

My brief for the talk was this manifesto:

"Manifesto point #4:

Handsets, applications and services should be more aware of the user's physical environment and adapt to provide the most appropriate interface for sound and visual conditions. We think multi-modal interfaces should be supported on many more mobile devices and can dramatically improve the user experience."

Summary:

We are at a stage where a new mobile operating system should be created. One that enables the creation of a cheap monoblock enabling best of breed convergence of mobility and computing. I envision an OS that morphs to accommodate both moving use and mobile use. Focused use and multi-tasking. I call it a Transformer OS.

One way to think of this is to think of RSS in terms of comand. Each command or feature in the user experience is wrapped into a meta language of context. This language of context will drive the use cases and the rendering. We do not only separate funtion and presentation we make function and context interdependant.

With such an operating system we would tear down classic application boundaries: like calling, camera, idle, and calendar into a fluid dynamic environment. The operating system is broader than the footprint of the silicon. It extends into the environment and the network.

I think this kind of device and system could be a massive hit in emerging markets where they choose a mobile before they buy a computer.

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This might eliminate the need to run Nokia maps to get ShoZu to put GPS coordinates in photos. Need to try this. Cyprien can I borrow that GPS again :-) ?

FROM Nokia S60 3rd Edition Applications Review » Tips & Tricks: Accessing Hidden Apps (Navigator, Landmarks, etc):

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One last thing to note is that some people may have experienced problems when trying to use apps that require an external bluetooth GPS receiver. Within s60 3rd devices there is an app called Positioning that allows you to enable/disable your GPS methods. My N80 for example, shipped with bluetooth GPS disabled and I wasn’t able to use any navigation apps with my Nokia LD-3W until I enabled it.

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Don't usually play these tag games, but this will be the exception that proves the rule. My first Symbian device was the Nokia 7610 which I bought unlocked in August 2004 from a Vietnamese grey market vendor here (thanks Harry!) in Vancouver.

I bought the 7610 because of its 1 megapixel camera which was fab for its time and also because S60 was and is a platform where I knew I could get 3rd party apps and possibly develop my own. I bought the 7610 as a belated 40th birthday gift to myself (much better than a sports car :-) and much cheaper!). I was was smart enough to also buy an unlimited GPRS data plan for my phone which is no longer available in Canada and allows me to monthly use about 250 MB of data traffic photos and videos which is a lot over GPRS.

Took plenty of photos and uploaded many with HuginAndMugin (which my friend Simon wrote in Java; the Java mobile platform annoyed me back then because it couldn't take 1 megapixel photos and it annoys me now because there is a new JSR released seemingly every month and every phone has a different implementation of the Java mobile platform but I am still willing to be convinced that Java on mobile is actually a viable platform ) and via ShoZu.

Went to BloggerCon III where I spoke about HuginAndMugin at the mobile session and met Andy who later became the man behind Nokia Blogger Relations.

From there, the rest is history. N70 and then N91, N93 and N73 and many, many photos and videos taken with all of these phones. Hopefully N95 soon. Oh and I also had a Newton 2000 and one of the first Palm Pilots. I used the Newton alot and the Palm for about 3 or 4 months; never liked Palm; too simple, really ugly fonts compared to the Newton :-) and didn't meet my geeky needs!

Except for the memory problems and the user interface problems of S60v3 (both of which can be fixed or improved, more on that later in a future post), I am quite happy with Symbian and S60.

I truly believe that if the iPhone is 1/4 as usable as it appears and ships 1/2 of the units Apple expects to, then this will be great competition and cause S60's memory problems and usability to be fixed rapidly. Vive la competition!

FROM atmaspheric | endeavors » My Symbian History:

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Ok - that was probably far too long and rambling, but I suppose that’s the point of this exercise. For the next round, I will tag people from my Twitter and Jaiku contact lists and ping Matthew Miller, Roland Tanglao and Ken Camp.

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OK, the N80i is not supported. I hope the N93 is supported! Sorry about those having comment problems; I need to upgrade to Drupal 5 to fix it. Soon!

FROM Geotagging not working (Nokia N73):

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You won't need to wake the GPS antenna, ShoZu will do this when necessary so you don't need to do any more than pair the device. What you will need, however, is a very strong GPS signal. ShoZu will wait until you have signal from 5 or more satellites before tagging your images because any less than this can produce inaccurate results. You'll notice sometimes on weak signal that your navigation software will jitter for a moment, if we tagged images at this time they would be way off. So please make sure you don't just have signal, but you have a very strong signal. We've done this because we figure geotagging is no use unless it's 100% accurate all the time!

By the way Roland, the N80i is not supported as yet and there are a lot of memory issues on this phone so just be weary of this also. Tried to post a reply on your blog but it had an internal server error and now I'm listed as a spammer and it won't let me post! Now's the time I finally get to ask you for support :-D

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Using a borrowed Tom Tom Navigator 6 GPS from Cyprien (thanks!), I did a little outdoor GeoWalk from Bryght at 1 Alexander to the Vancouver Art Gallery, I took 29 photos with my Nokia N80i. Only roughly 50%, 15 out of 29 were geotagged, shouldn't that number be 100% or closer to it?

Is this a S60, N80i, ShoZu, or Tom Tom bug? Suggestions to make this closer to 100% gratefully received.