Mash-up development for Mobiles – which method to choose?

Is the next wave of mash-ups rising with the advent of Android? The best known mash-ups are “Google maps”, which is everywhere now-a-days. However, it seems like these are all of olden days. A new dawn is breaking…
The new types we will see in future are mobile mash-ups. However recent announcement of “Android” from Google will definitely lead to the raise in mash-ups on mobiles.

What are the main motives to mash-up services on mobile devices?
One motive is similar to the “Google Maps” API. The other motive is to extend all services to the mobiles domain, because mobile era is started. Instead of engineering/migrating every application into mobile domain, just build it once as a core ability, and use as services which mashes up with other APIs. The mash-ups created for mobiles can blend enterprise and Web data to meet the specific needs of a user. This is the area now the business is focusing on.

What can we expect from Mash-ups on mobiles?
The next phase of mobility for business will go definitely beyond e-mail. Online interactive business applications need enterprise level modules which minimizes the application data management and ensures reduced costs related to maintaining and updating your own data repositories which suit mobiles. Getting these unlimited data sources is based on standards, since all providers are based on same industry standards, these advancements will promote a deeper partnership between businesses and operators who offer these new types of services and mobile devices.

What do you need to build a Mash-up for mobiles?
The first and foremost thing that we have to know is what kind of mashing we are trying to do. As per my knowledge we can try for the following mash-ups:
Front- end mash-up: building web front ends like dashboards using widgets/gadgets and little to no programming (iGoogle, PageFlakes)
Back-end mash-up: combining web-accessible data and services into more useful web services that can be called easily using a REST-full interface (Kapow, Yahoo pipes)
Integrated mash-up: building end-to-end applications that link widgets/gadgets to data and services.
Considering above points the core abilities that we have to build for mash-ups are:
· Register with each service provider
· Deal with service limitations and restrictions
· Learn the in's and out's of each data service
· Registering with mobile carriers.
· Pre-built components for customizing according to the mobile carriers. (end-user forms)
· Security(role) designer
· System orchestration designer

The steps are simple, but each one comes with its quirks.
We have so many tools (Kapow, Yahoo pipes) and platforms like JackBe, IBM or Serena to support above core activities, but unfortunately these are not reaching all the way down into unstructured content.

So which method/product is right for the development?
Though this is a tough question, my answer is certainly not to use the existing tools. Certainly these tools/platforms provide a good jumpstart for a limited community of mash-up builders, but they may not reach all the audience/communities. My view point is to recombine a host of disparate architectural mash-up patterns to benefit as large audience/communities as possible.

Touched by Technology

The latest buzz in the mobile world today is the touch screen phone which makes writing emails, sending text messages, surfing the internet and much more seem so easy! It’s literally at your finger tips and can be done by tapping your index finger (or any of the other four). But how exactly does your smartphone know where your finger is on the screen and how to respond to it? The answer may be a little more complex than you've ever imagined.

There are three basic systems that are used to recognize a person's touch:

• Resistive
• Capacitive
• Surface acoustic wave

The resistive system consists of a normal glass panel that is covered with a conductive and a resistive metallic layer. These two layers are held apart by spacers, and a scratch-resistant layer is placed on top of the whole setup. An electrical current runs through the two layers while the monitor is operational. When a user touches the screen, the two layers make contact in that exact spot. The change in the electrical field is noted and the coordinates of the point of contact are calculated by the computer. Once the coordinates are known, a special driver translates the touch into something that the operating system can understand, much as a computer mouse driver translates a mouse's movements into a click or a drag.

In the capacitive system, a layer that stores electrical charge is placed on the glass panel of the monitor. When a user touches the monitor with his or her finger, some of the charge is transferred to the user, so the charge on the capacitive layer decreases. This decrease is measured in circuits located at each corner of the monitor. The computer calculates, from the relative differences in charge at each corner, exactly where the touch event took place and then relays that information to the touch-screen driver software. One advantage that the capacitive system has over the resistive system is that it transmits almost 90 percent of the light from the monitor, whereas the resistive system only transmits about 75 percent. This gives the capacitive system a much clearer picture than the resistive system.

On the monitor of a surface acoustic wave system, two transducers (one receiving and one sending) are placed along the x and y axes of the monitor's glass plate. Also placed on the glass are reflectors -- they reflect an electrical signal sent from one transducer to the other. The receiving transducer is able to tell if the wave has been disturbed by a touch event at any instant, and can locate it accordingly. The wave setup has no metallic layers on the screen, allowing for 100-percent light throughput and perfect image clarity. This makes the surface acoustic wave system best for displaying detailed graphics (both other systems have significant degradation in clarity).

Another area in which the systems differ is in which stimuli will register as a touch event. A resistive system registers a touch as long as the two layers make contact, which means that it doesn't matter if you touch it with your finger or a rubber ball. A capacitive system, on the other hand, must have a conductive input, usually your finger, in order to register a touch. The surface acoustic wave system works much like the resistive system, allowing a touch with almost any object -- except hard and small objects like a pen tip.

As far as price is concerned, the resistive system is the cheapest; its clarity is the lowest of the three, and its layers can be damaged by sharp objects. The surface acoustic wave setup is usually the most expensive.

The LG Dare, Samsung Instinct, HTC Touch Diamond and many other phones use the most common of touchscreens built using resistive technology. Apple’s iPhone, the Google Android G1 and BlackBerry Storm all use the more sophisticated capacitive technology. Apple’s slick multi-touch gestures, such as pinching and spreading two fingers to zoom and reduce on-screen objects, are only possible on a capacitive screen.

To summarize the working of touch screens, there are several different technologies that power them, but here are the many things they have in common.

Firstly, almost all touchscreens in use today employ a three-layered system of operating. There is the glass layer, where the user will be touching his finger to the screen in order to implement the gestures he or she wants to perform. Then, underneath the glass layer is where the technology differs, but the technology between the glass layer and the bottom layer is to interpret the finger strokes in one way or another. Finally, the bottom layer of the touchscreen serves as the final point in the relay between your finger and the screen. This bottom layer is responsible for sending information to the device in a form it can understand.

And here is an outline of exactly what happens (in a matter of milliseconds) inside your phone.

1. You touch the screen at a certain place.

2. Depending on the technology, you either disrupt an electrical current or you create a voltage difference, allowing an electrical signal to be generated.

3. A sensor picks up this electrical signal.

4. The original signal is collected by the sensor and sent to the processor in its raw form.

5. The processor interprets the signal as a touch and starts to clean the raw data of any "noise".

6. Once cleaned, the processor then moves on to interpret where on the screen the touch was and determine exact coordinates.

7. These coordinates are sent to the software you're trying to use to determine where the "click" will be.

For something that is relatively complicated, it's amazing how easily it has invaded our everyday lives!

What is new in iPhone 3.0?

I hope you have seen my post on What do users want in iPhone 3.0?. Now that Apple has unveiled iPhone 3.0, let us see what users are really getting from it.
Below are some of the significant features of iPhone 3.0 with my ratings against each of them.

• Cut, Copy & Paste: Includes ability to copy & paste from one app to another and even from web ˜ ˜ ˜ ˜ ˜
• Voice Memo: To capture a memo/meeting/audio recording ˜ ˜ ˜
• MMS*: Include video, photo, audio and contacts in messages ˜ ˜ ˜ ˜
• Landscape Keyboard: This will help users who currently face usability issues using the small keyboard ˜ ˜ ˜ ˜
• Spotlight Search: One stop search for contacts, email, calendars, music and notes ˜ ˜ ˜
• MobileMe Find My iPhone and Remote Wipe: Security features which will be a big advantage over 2.0. ˜ ˜ ˜ ˜ ˜
• Better camera: Improved 3 Megapixel camera with ability to shoot videos and edit them ˜ ˜ ˜ ˜ ˜
• Internet Tethering*: Ability to share internet connection with laptop via USB/Bluetooth ˜ ˜ ˜ ˜
• Improved Calendar & improvements to Safari: Safari improvements includes faster performance, auto-fill of user name/password etc ˜ ˜ ˜
• Automatic Wi-Fi login ˜ ˜ ˜
• Parental controls: I personally don't know whether it is that valuable a feature because iPhone is not something that you want to give your kids to play around with. :) ˜ ˜
• YouTube & iTunes login ˜ ˜ ˜
• New Languages: Support for 30 languages (includes Chinese, Korean, Hebrew, Arabic & Thai) ˜ ˜ ˜

* - Dependent on the service availability from carrier

Windows Mobile 6.5 Unleashed

 

Microsoft has released Windows mobile 6.5 Developer Toolkit yesterday. It is available for download here.

Let’s see first what Microsoft has released in the Windows Mobile 6.5 Developer Toolkit from developer prospective. It contains:

Emulator Images

WM 6.5 Developer Toolkit comes with the following emulator images

• Windows Mobile 6.5 Professional Square Emulator
• Windows Mobile 6.5 Professional QVGA Emulator
• Windows Mobile 6.5 Professional WQVGA Emulator
• Windows Mobile 6.5 Professional VGA Emulator 
• Windows Mobile 6.5 Professional WVGA Emulator

Gesture APIs

A new set of APIs is being introduced that will enable application developers to take advantage of the new Windows Mobile 6.5 touch gesture framework. The gesture APIs allow an application to handle touch gesture input and provide a visually consistent experience with the rest of the device UI.

Widget Development

With Windows Mobile 6.5 emulator images in place, developers can start writing widgets for WM 6.5 devices. The new IE Mobile 6 is completely revamped and supports basic Ajax.

This is what is released in the Windows Mobile 6.5 Developer Toolkit for developers. I will add more to this section with future releases.

Now let’s explore what features Microsoft has updated in 6.5 and what you might expect from future WM6.5-powered handsets. It features significant changes over WM6.0 and 6.1 with greater emphasis on touch control, Cloud-based service integration and general UI attractiveness

• The WM6.5 Lock screen features new iPhone like sliders to unlock the phone. This screen also provides instant access to new voicemail, text messages and other important information.
• Windows Mobile 6.5 features significant updates to the Today or Home

  

Screen. The general look of the Today Screen has also been refreshed, with a focus on wallpaper and theme as you can see, the toolbars are now transparent, which allows the wallpaper to show through. Like most of the updates to Windows Mobile 6.5, the new Today Screen has a finger-friendly design with large active-touch areas which make finger selections easier and more natural. As you will see, this focus on touch navigation largely defines WM6.5.

• The Programs menu has the long honeycomb interface as you can see in the right screen. This allows easy app selection with your finger. You can also change the order in which programs appear in this layout.
• The new Windows Mobile Marketplace works much like the iPhone's App Store. It will provide users the option to browse, purchase and download Windows Mobile software without the need to connect to a PC.
• The media player has been updated in Windows Mobile 6.5, as has the bundled photo software. It has been revamped with touch-friendly controls.
• IE Mobile 6 is a completely revamped version of mobile Internet Explorer with swipe and zoom control and a more desktop-like experience (Screen below). Flash and Basic Ajax support is also included.

• Microsoft My Phone Cloud-syncing service with 200GB of storage for syncing photos, calendar entries, music, videos, documents, text messages, email. All data backed-up to My Phone can be restored to a new Windows Phone. This feature is free for WM 6.5 users.
• Voice-capable IM via Windows Live Messenger allows you to chat with voice clips.

 

But do know that Windows Mobile 6.5 is just a stopgap measure.  Microsoft claims to unleash a big change with Windows Mobile 7, but since that operating system isn't due until sometime well into 2010; WM6.5 is designed to lessen the technical divide between Windows Mobile and newer mobile OS competitors from Apple, Google and Palm.