Posted by Kieran on July 21, 2010 under Android, Mobile | 
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My contribution from the Bathcamp evening meet #14 organised by Mike Ellis and Sam Machin
Posted by Kieran on November 5, 2009 under J2ME, LWUIT, Mobile, Uncategorized | Be the First to Comment
One of the great aspects of frameworks such as LWUIT and freely available information with regards to device groupings, is the promise of finally achieving the nirvana of “write one run anywhere” or the new idiom which seems to be “write once deploy anywhere”
Thankfully we do seem to be leaving the dark days of fragmentation in the Java mobile world behind us, it is fairly easy to get lulled into a false sense of security.
Shai’s closing comment on the article highlights the sort of “discovery” that device specific information, when not in the public domain, may cause many developers to burn time.
To quote Shai:
Applications are expected to explicitly declare their support for touch to utilize the full screen of the device. This is done using the following Jad flags:
Navi-Key-Hidden: true
Nokia-MIDlet-On-Screen-Keypad: no
MIDlet-Touch-Support: trueNotice that the last entry (MIDlet-Touch-Support) is required by current/older Samsung/LG devices but is illegal by the MIDP specification hence fails on Nokia etc. so for support on these devices you would need a copy of your JAD (only the jad) with this attribute added.
Read Shai’s full article, which includes some good tips on using LWUIT on touch devices http://lwuit.blogspot.com/2009/11/optimized-for-touch.html#ixzz0VvlYKZXm
Posted by Kieran on November 4, 2009 under Mobile | Be the First to Comment
A really useful website which monitors the cost of a mobile meg in the UK for those not on flat rate data plans
http://www.mobilemeg.com/compare_all_mobile_data_plans.php
and a great infographic on service costs and penetration rates from around the world courtesy of billshrink
Posted by Kieran on November 3, 2009 under Mobile | Be the First to Comment
A couple of posts that really show how far mobile has come in such a short space of time
http://www.webdesignerdepot.com/2009/05/the-evolution-of-cell-phone-design-between-1983-2009/
Nokia graphic showing them leading innovation,though sometimes maybe a little too early!
http://www.geekstir.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/10/evophones2.jpg
Seems a long time ago that I was developing on the Nokia 7210, for the simple reason, that although it was not the best phone available at the time, it was excellent to code for because Nokias emulator actually realistically emulated heap memory usage, which was the achilles heel at the time (along with 64kb Jar limits)
Posted by Kieran on November 2, 2009 under Mobile, iPhone | Be the First to Comment
One of the pains of getting the feedback from reviews on iTunes is that you would have to login into each country individually AppViz for $30 solves this problem, it also collates or your sales information (daily, weekly, monthly) into one place, far faster than you could possibly achieve using the iTunes connect interface
pretty indispensable in my opinion
Posted by Kieran on under Mobile, iPhone | Be the First to Comment
It has to be said that the current iTunes system for rating apps has a certain element of bias – the current methods means that probably the majority of people who are leaving a rating are doing so when they delete an application. However the code on the following page allows you to remind users from your application at set time intervals to leave you a review. Hopefully encouraging a more positive review bias.
Thanks to Arash for making this available in a simple package for integrating with your project
http://arashpayan.com/blog/index.php/2009/09/07/presenting-appirater/
Posted by Kieran on October 5, 2009 under Mobile, payment | Be the First to Comment
Great news for content owners who wish to charge via mobile applications, Amazon have today announced that the flexible payment system is going to be available via mobile
Ill simply let the pricing do the talking and you can decide which you want to use
Amazon
https://payments.amazon.com/sdui/sdui/business?sn=devpricing/fpspricing
Bango
http://bango.com/products/payment/payment_network.aspx
looks similar at first glance but then factor in Bangos minimums
http://bango.com/products/payment/world.aspx
Is operator billing worth the extra to everyday end users than Amazon? thoughts welcome in the comments!
Posted by Kieran on September 26, 2009 under Mobile | Be the First to Comment
For ten minutes we were pretty pleased with the speech that accompanied Buzzwordbingo which can be played here http://www.hypnotoad.co.uk/BuzzwordBingo/
Android, iPhone, J2ME and Blackberry apps go in app stores, which leverage the mobile ecosystem and allow developers to provide innovative software for global networks and also provide services that conform to Bondi, OMTP and W3C widget specs. This is not a hack that formed via colloboration on viral platforms like Facebook or Twitter it is in fact vapourware!
Posted by Kieran on August 5, 2009 under Mobile, payment | Be the First to Comment
Introductory video can be found here over at x.com
Interesting stats on Paypal:
on average more than $2,000 goes through PayPal every second of each day.
It has 75 million active accounts, and it’s available in 190 markets and 19 different currencies.
However whilst these stats seem impressive you can see where Paypal see room for their growth when compared with Visa and Mastercard FT article on PayPal opening up
From a mobile perspective obviously obtaining payment on device is something that until fairly recently has always been difficult, recent initiatives such as payforit which can be enabled by providers such as Bango and WIN, have improved the situation, but still only allow primarily “point of download” business models, which is cumbersome for many digital content apps such as ebook providers.
Indeed in app payment is pretty much still a nightmare for a developer, even the commendable carriers that do have systems to integrate with from an application; which have achieved the sort of scale that Paypal would be envious of active subscribers in the 100s of millions those numbers, however assume the API interface is the same across a given carriers territories. Fragmentation aside these carrier based solutions often suffer from the problem that if the user suddenly switches to a WIFI network then the billing system breaks down. People consuming data rich applications, and therefore probably the ones they are willing to pay for are probably likely to move to WIFI enabled handsets. Moving to WIFI handsets is something Bango highlight in their recent press release.
Even without the WIFI issue one of the problems has been scaling payment systems, something that RIM (using Paypal Screenshot of Blackberry app world payment system) and Apple have done better than most.
Googles checkout for Android unfortunately suffers from a couple of irritating problems in that the currency is fixed, so as a end user if I purchase something from the store it could well cost me a couple dollars, however many UK banks will then charge a overseas transaction fee of a £1 and 3% or more (useful comparision of overseas transactions fees from UK banks here) , as a developer this means you would have to present the user the item in a foreign currency, which is far from appealing! As the same developer looking to accept payment, scaling with each individual carrier is time consuming and difficult and becomes a project in itself and is in my mind one reason the advertising route for mobile applications has been so successful to date, because it achieves scale so much more easily.
So I am hoping that Paypal can provide the trusted partner that is needed in the mobile ecosystem to enable (preferably) micro payments from mobile websites and mobile applications whichever flavour they come in Android, Blackberry, iPhone, J2ME, Symbian or Windows mobile, as at the moment the only platform this is available for is iPhone with some restrictions on the inApp purchase side
Posted by Kieran on July 23, 2009 under Misc | Be the First to Comment
Lots of negative press today for Spinvox mainly coming from the BBC and Moconews. This strikes me a little odd, as whilst I have always felt that if Spinvox’s voice recognition software was half as good as the claims made about it, they would not be dealing with mobile carriers and consumers and only charging £5 a month for the service, when the medical and legal professions would pay vast sums for this service and not need to be “sold” the product, as they already know the problem exists.
The fact that it has come as a shock to people, must only be people who have never used the service as it was always plainly apparent that Spinvox were using the mechanical turk to achieve a lot of their message transactions. This makes me laugh much like the uproar a few years ago when it was “revealed” that the dictionary corner on Countdown were getting assistance from other people in the studio team! I am fairly sure Goldman Sachs and Spinvoxes other investors would have been able to do simple calculations as to whether the amount of people needed to transcribe the messages to text was above the break even point and therefore the business could scale.
For all the bad press it has received today, the simple fact is that they had an innovative service people were willing to pay for – unlike Twitter, Facebook etc which are struggling to find meaningful revenue streams from their user base. They have however misled the press and potential customers as to the power of their D2 technology and maybe this is why people feel their expectations have been betrayed.
