http://lew.io/headers.php

It is worth noting however a lot of mobile network operators wash this information about or have it hashed into some other form (which means it can still be used as a unique identifier)

So whilst you are using Lewis’s tool you might want to keep an eye out for some of the popular headers, that this information is contained in

X-UP-CALLING-LINE-I

X_NOKIA_MSISDN

X_H3G_MSISDN

MSISDN

X_MSISDN

X_NETWORK_INFO

X-WAP-MSISDN

X-UP-SUBNO

Request headers dump in php

<?php

$headers = apache_request_headers();

foreach ($headers as $header => $value){

echo ”$header: $value <br />\n”;
}
?>

Nokia 1610

First phone, eventually given to my younger brother

Ericsson T10i

This phone was purchased with my first taste of “internet money” during the dot com boom with gains from alladvantage.com (living in student halls with free internet really was a bonus when coupled with the affiliate scheme!!)

Nokia 402

When the T10i broke my flatmate gave me his old Nokia as he had upgraded to a t28 that he held onto for many years and I believe still owns!

Nokia 6100

I had been convinced by mobile Java and this was my personal phone, as it ran the apps I was writing in glorious colour!

Nokia 7610

With a 1MP camera on a phone, a large screen and lots of memory to run the apps I was writing it was a fairly easy sell!

Sony K800

The Sony K700 and K750 were the darlings in the office as they had made our life so much more simple and were a pleasure to write apps for compared to others, so when it came time for me to upgrade this was an easy choice.

iPhone

After meeting @elroid at the Moto dev conference where they demo’d multiple developer platforms, I had lost faith in them with this strategy as it felt blunder buss. I also had my barrier to the price reduced by drinking some beer with Elliot and Stuart. The first time I had purchased a full price brand new Apple product was in Euston station on the launch day after leaving the moto event and heading home.

iPhone 3g

Upgraded with 02s offer fairly close to launch.

iPhone 3gs

Purchased on PAYG due to being an avid Google maps user and by this time the SDK was in the wild so the extra memory and speed was most appreciated

TMobile G1

Still having a large soft spot for Java on mobile, I had followed Android for a while before there were phones and we were just playing with the beta SDKs. I got involved with the London Android meetup group after delivering the Future of Mobile workshop with Carl

Blackberry Bold

Forcing myself to try and see what the fuss was about I purchased and used this device for about 3-4 months after concluding that for me it was as unpleasant to use as their developer tools. It was therefore swiftly put onto eBay. I am fairly sure the dev tools had just left too deep a scar for me to ever get on with it!

Nexus One

Google were kind enough to hand out this device and I have used it as a second phone ever since

iPhone 4

Bit the bullet and upgraded the 3gs to this to truly experience the “retina display” which I had seen technically realised many years earlier on the Nokia N80. Praying for better battery life it has delivered and for the amount of use I give the iPhone it has been a worthwhile upgrade

However one number and a couple of announcements that really did stand out for me, was the fact that Apples push notification service has now sent 100 billion messages, the other was iMessage allowing free and interoperable comms between iOS to iOS device, much like RIMs Blackberry Messenger Service and the deep integration with twitter which will effectively allow a similar service between iOS and twitter users.

Some quick jungle arithmetic

Launched 2009 June so 2 years old

200 million iOS devices sold

so roughly 500 push messages per device in 2 years, assuming all those devices are still in circulation

Factoring in some growth from MDAs data http://www.themda.org/mda-press-releases/the-q4-2009-uk-mobile-trends-report.php

UK SMS = 120 billion a year

UK MMS = 700 million a year

60 million people in the UK ~2000 messages per person per year

Now add in Twitter and iMessage to those 200 million iOS devices……

Maybe its just a rising tide and users are using notifications by either bearer more and more, hence the introduction of easy to use notification bars into iOS much like Palm and Android had before them, however maybe just maybe the juggernaught train of sms maybe starting to slow down

Despite having had a busy but productive week I went along with the hopes of some sort of inspiration would hit me at the event itself, that could possibly lead to something productive being produced. Thankfully even if this had not been the case the event would have been worth attending just to talk with and meet some of the people there and share some experiences of developing on Android and mobile in general.

My initial idea was to produce something utilising the Lovefilm API to start streaming movies instantly on the tablet, one advantage of having flash is if there was a direct link to the stream files it could be started instantly, my searching at 10pm didn’t lead to anything that would solve this problem.

After a few drinks a far more “hack friendly” (read stupid)  idea was born, Lolcatz, which basically would be a simple game where balls of yarn would be introduced into a central play area and 2-4 players would control a pair of cats in an attempt to grab them all for themselves, the thought being that tablets open up an opportunity for multiplayer games on a single device that can be more engaging than something you could achieve on smaller devices

Using the Corona SDK it was possible to get a very rough proof of concept in the time left and still manage to grab a couple of hours sleep, providing much amusement whilst we literally threw it together, in particular when the cats arms were not made static so “blew” off the minute they connected with a ball of yarn

Its been added to my list of hacks to polish up and stick into the store, but it will need some time to do that so watch this space for its release on both Android and iOS phones and tablets

Android Bloke has a good write up of the event and a screenshot taken of my Mac in the morning of the state of lolcatz

If you got this far you should probably follow me on twitter

• iPhone SDK 3.1 with XCode 3.2.1
• iPhone SDK 3.1.3 with XCode 3.2.1
• iPhone SDK 3.2 with Xcode 3.2.2
• iPhone SDK 4.0 with Xcode 3.2.3

https://dev.twitter.com/pages/application-permission-model

“we have created a new permission level for applications called “Read, Write & Direct Messages”. This permission will allow an application to read or delete a user’s direct messages. When we enforce this permission, applications without a “Read, Write & Direct Messages” token will be unable to read or delete direct messages. To ensure users know that an application is receiving access to their direct messages, we are also restricting this permission to the OAuth /authorize web flow only. This means applications which use xAuth and want to access direct messages must send a user through the full OAuth flow.“

“Applications that use “Sign-in with Twitter” or xAuth will only be able to receive Read or Read/Write tokens.

What this means is only applications which direct a user through the OAuth web flow will be able to receive access tokens that allow access to direct messages. Any other method of authorization, including xAuth, will only be able to receive Read/Write tokens.”

This probably particularly affects a lot of iOS applications that have made use of the xAuth. Several popular, well crafted apps made use of xAuth because of the lack of a decent mobile sign in page for oAuth, thankfully this has changed, Twitter do now have a very good mobile experience and fast app switching on iOS has at least made the problem last of a jarring experience for the users.

Unfortunately changes to t+cs like this can be problematic especially when there is at least a  one week delay in getting an app approved for the app store, meaning that whilst Twitter have offered some grace until the end of this month, it actually only leaves four working days, if you want to allow Apple five working days to process the update. A particular problem if you do not have your own iOS developers in house that you need to contact and schedule time with

Update and correction: Matt Harris from Twitter pointed out that if you have a read/write token you will still be able to send DMs, so I have altered the title of this post from cannot send DMs to cannot read DMs. The main problem being of course this still only leaves a few working days for applications such as Tapbots Tweetbot or the Icon Factorys Twitteriffic client, which will need to update accordingly to retain the functionality.

Being in mobile I spent most of the time in San Francisco attending sessions and side events to do with Android the main two being the Adobe Android Mixer and the Android track at IO itself

Android Mixer

Held in Adobes offices we were handed a perfect T-Shirt to enrage any Apple fanboy

There were 5 organised talks from

• Adobe, on their Flex framework
• Sony Ericsson, on developing for xperia, however this was really a basic Android tips session
• Paypal, all about their x apis for payment
• inmobi, in app advertising
• Papaya, taking your apps to China

Google I/O

The keynote introduced some impressive stats for Android developers on the growth and traction that Android is gathering

• 36 OEMS
• 312 Devices
• Passed 100 million activations
• 112 countries shipping Android based devices
• 200k apps in Market
• 4.5 billion app downloads

One negative is that the announced new service Google Music, like Google TV, is US only due to I assume legal issues with EU law on copyright and fair use

The sessions I found most useful from the 2 days were as follows:- (thankfully where these clashed or the room was full I was able to watch the videos which are already available)

• Reto Meiers protips
• Memory management for Android
• How to NFC whilst it seems like it will always be the year of NFC on mobile, I remember having a great conversation with Stuart and Elliot at motodev, the day the original iPhone came out that NFC would be big next year. I am still a believer and really looking forward to the opportunities it will bring as more Android handsets and maybe iOS bring support in
• Ignite This format really works and was a great close to the day
• As recommended to me by Mac, the session on how Pacman was built is well worth watching

On the conference organisation itself

+ Far more room for the Android talks, which were still crowded even though held in rooms which were at least double if not triple the size they were previously were still overcrowded (I really wanted to attend the ADK session but was late after a great lunch time chat with Carl, Kenton and Tor)

+ Registration was painless

+ The main after party on day one with all the crazy tech and rides (the less said about the bikes welded to a merry go round and my two broken toes however the better)

+ The smaller after party on Thursday at Thirsty Bear

+ Catering was brilliant but lunch had long lines.

- WIFI basically failed, which for those of us not wanting to pay roaming charges whilst abroad was very irritating. Despite the signs asking people not to run MiFis it seems many did and soaked up all available spectrum. This was of even more annoyance for the people who were in the sandbox trying to run demos of connected applications such as the UK company Lightbox

If you are a developer and get the chance to go next year even with Flights from UK + hotel cost making this ~£1000 event, the knowledge gained and people met is easily worth that alone any freebies should be for developers who will make use of them (I for example will probably do little to advance ChromeOS with the free netbook, hopefully offset though by what I will do with the free tablet!)

Then again maybe leaving an Adobe+Android t-shirt behind and a mifi is a good idea

It seems the industry wires and the social media are ablaze with the supposedly breaking story that iOS devices are tracking your every movement

Alasdair Allan and Pete Warden announced this at Where2.0 and also made a nifty little application that will visualise the data that is stored in this sqllite database, mine for the UK is above.

One point on the big brother aspect of this scare mongering, that some of the press have taken to, is that the network operators have had access to this information for years and as they know exactly where their cell towers are will be able to locate any phone simply. This is why Google, Skyhook wireless and Apple are going through growing pains as they map this information out via vans, mobile handsets etc, when really the network operators should have cashed in their position and sold it to these parties, that are now building up better databases and it just takes a little time before the network operators value in this location information becomes a footnote.

What I do think is incorrect is that Apple have left this information unencrypted, it shouldn’t really come as a surprise this information exists on the phone, all the tutorials and information Apple release about CoreLocation hint to its existence to achieve course cell positioning and fast location lookups.

MBProgressHUD is an iPhone drop-in class that displays a translucent HUD with a progress indicator and some optional labels while work is being done in a background thread. The HUD is meant as a replacement for the undocumented, private UIKit UIProgressHUD with some additional features.

Sharekit

If you only need to post updates to Twitter or Facebook or any of the other supported services, then Sharekit is almost drag and drop  and works extremely well on both the iPad and iPhone

Facebook iOS SDK

If you need to do more with your application than simply just posting to Facebook, then you are likely to want to go deeper and make use of the Facebook iOS SDK, which provides support for both the older Facebook connect API and the latest Graph API

MGTwitterEngine

Again as with Facebook if your app needs to go that bit further with its Twitter integration take a look at Matt Gemmells excellent twitter library. This library will work equally as well for a Cocoa app for the Mac app store

JSONKit

A very high performance JSON parsing library for Cocoa apps

ASIHttpRequest

ASIHTTPRequest is an easy to use wrapper around the CFNetwork API that makes some of the more tedious aspects of communicating with web servers easier. It is written in Objective-C and works in both Mac OS X and iPhone applications.

Some of the main advantages of ASIHttpRequest is its ability to cache responses, have multiple delegates for differing web calls, throttling of connections and easy web form data submission.

Google Data APIs

Integration with Google services made easy, it includes support for

• Google Analytics
• Google Base
• Blogger
• Book Search
• Calendar
• Code Search
• Contacts
• Documents List
• Finance
• Health
• Maps (deprecated)
• Picasa Web Albums
• Spreadsheets
• Translator Toolkit
• Webmaster Tools
• YouTube

Flurry

Rolling your own analytics can be tedious so make use of this library and you can have meaningful stats in your application quickly, it is as easy as integrating with Google analytics

gtm-oauth

The Google Toolbox for Mac OAuth Controllers make it easy for Cocoa applications to sign in to services using OAuth for authentication and authorization.

Features include:

• Complete embedded user interface using WebKit
• Works with Google APIs and with any standard OAuth provider
• Handles sign-in, keychain storage of authorization token, and signing of requests
• Independent of other projects

CHCSVParser

For those times when you were told there was an API only to wake from your beautiful RESTful dreams to discover you have to parse a monster csv file, still it could be worse it could be SOAP

SudzC

In which case SudzC can sometimes help when you really do have no option but to integrate with a SOAP service

Tapku and three20

Both of these libraries provide very useful UI components that either mimick existing Apple applications or provide easy UIComponents to make use of

MTLogging

Whilst the debugger is always preferred, having a console log of whats happened is both useful and quick, MTLogging combines three popular projects to super charge your console window

MapKitDragAndDrop

iOS/iPhone OS MapKit sample for draggable AnnotationView with CoreAnimation pin lift/drop/bounce effects.

I am sure there are loads of popular ones that I have missed out, if theres any you find really useful please let me know!