Echo Messenger
I got a Motorola DEFY a few months back largely as I had decided to ditch my Nokia, but also with a view to do a bit of Android app programming. The development process was not too complex; while it's been years since I did any significant about of Java programming, it come back quickly enough and the Android SDK integrates well with Eclipse... most of the time.
So after writing a few small 'learning' apps, I took it upon myself to write something more substantial and picked upon the idea of a replacement SMS client that would give one the option to send out outgoing SMS using one of the many Web-based SMS providers out there.
As such, it had to integrate with Android's own SMS management, have a look and feel that approximated the built-in SMS client, integrate seamlessly with Web-based SMS providers and then ideally I would add... More...
Last Course Correction Before the Iceberg
Nokia is sinking fast and knows it.
In the last year, it has hemorrhaged market share in the smartphone market and its belated introduction of the Qt platform (to simplify and unify development in both Symbian and MeeGo) has failed to woo back the development community.
The problem appears to be that neither Symbian nor MeeGo come close to either iOS or Android in terms of user experience. Symbian is particularly bad - having an N97 myself was the last straw and after something like twelve years of being a loyal Nokia customer, my next phone will be something else.
And as smartphone users abandon Nokia, demand for applications dwindles, which in turn causes development for those platforms to also dwindle. It's a vicious circle, not helped by the Ovi platform, which is a poor competitor to either the iPhone's of Android's online app stores.
And it's a spiral that Nokia... More...
Cross Platform, Cross Purposes
It's like the browser wars, except considerably worse. Mobile development firms appear to be caught in a strategic resource conundrum at present, uncertain of what bandwagon to jump on, how best to jump on it, how much to invest if they do or if they should jump on several. Or only one.
A year or two ago, it was easy - the iPhone was the only game in town and you could safely ignore all the others, because even if they could run third-party apps, no one actually used them.
Now the landscape is getting a lot more complicated, largely due to the rapid uptake of Android, and even Nokia could be deserving of a second look, although I wouldn't hold my breath on this just yet. As a result, many firms are quietly beginning to tentatively hire Android development resources, porting their existing iPhone applications to this... More...
Is Nokia Finally Getting its Act Together?
I attended a Nokia Developer's conference last week and drew the following three conclusions from it.
Firstly, Nokia realized that it really screwed up when it seemingly dropped Symbian last year. Regardless of whether this was actually its intention or not, it's what the industry read into their move and so it was not terribly surprising that open source developers did not rush to get involved in the Symbian Foundation as a result - who wants to become an expert in a technology you believe has no future, after all?
Of course, Nokia has now corrected this misunderstanding, and to underline this, spent most of the first hour of the conference discussing how Symbian was still core to Nokia's future - "the lady doth protest too much", came to mind.
Secondly, of... More...
The Long-Expected Arrival of the Mobile Virus
It really was only a matter of time.
Tech journalists have actually been waiting with bated breath for the emergence of mobile exploits, viruses and Trojans, but we needed for two things to happen first; firstly that the technology get sophisticated enough to support such malware, but also that the environment reach a critical mass that would allow their spread in the mobile ecosystem.
The first really began with the introduction of phones that allowed the running of third party software. In it's truest form this probably meant on OS's such as Nokia's Symbian, however exploits have been possible since WAP phones first came out over ten years ago. Around then, many phones included rushed and often flawed implementations of the various WAP stack of API's, and in a number of these cases exploits were theoretically possible.
I found one example of this in 2000 with the More... |