Imagine the scene.
You are sat at your computer, reading a fascinating article online.
You’re about halfway through reading it when something comes up and you need to leave your desk.
Wouldn’t it be great if you could finish reading the page on your mobile? (Without needing to remember how you found the webpage, or what the URL is?)
With this Firefox extension, you can. 🙂
I’ve recently picked up my the code for my Windows Mobile Twitter client again.
It was originally written back in April as a hackday idea. The code posts Twitter updates using a variation on the twitter-from-curl approach of HTTP POSTing “status=MyTweet” to the twitter update url.
I started with the update URL, and appended the message I wanted to tweet. This is fine for a quick hackday demo, but it did mean that you could end up with a URL like:
http://twitter.com/statuses/update.xml?status=Hello (twitter) world! Special chars = a problem?
Which fails if you want to post characters such as accents or characters which have special meaning in URLs, like + ? / & etc.
I was encouraged by a number of users to have another look at this, which I’ve done now, and hopefully version 1.1 solves the problems.
A quick Google turned up that a number of other Twitter apps share at least some of the same problems that mine had, so thought I’d share the fix here.
I’ve mentioned a few times before that I use a personal wiki-based notetaking app to keep myself organised.
In GTD-speak, I use it to store project information, track my actions, store reference info, and lots more. Everything I’m working on will have a set of wiki pages where I’ve written up what I’ve done so far, linked in to my other work and where it fits in with my goals.
So it’s useful to have it with me even when I’m not at my desk. I’ve got the wiki app installed on my ThinkPad and three of my mobiles (HTC Advantage, HTC Universal, and the Treo Pro).
The problem is keeping them all in sync.
The old way
The wiki stores the pages as normal text files. So I have a copy of all of these text files on each device.
Using a freeware app called MobSync, I can sync a directory of files on my desktop with a directory on the mobile.
If I want to use the Treo Pro, I need to make sure I get an up-to-date copy of the files on there first by booting up my PC, connecting them by USB cable, and running the sync app.
I’ve had a Treo Pro for a couple of weeks now so I thought I’d write a post about what I think of it.
If you’re the sort who likes to skip to the end of stories, let me save you a little time. I’m loving it. It’s awesome.
I’ll try and explain why in this post.
My last two Windows Mobile phones have both had GPS, so I’ve played with code to get my location from the GPS a few times. These have generally been quick hacked-together bits and pieces. In all of them, I wrote my own GPS code. I knew that the GPS device would be accessible through a serial port, so I just connected to the relevant COM port and started reading. It’s easy to parse – NMEA sentences are written with an update on each line, in comma-separated strings.
After sharing my OpenCellId client last week, I was encouraged to try rewriting the GPS code for it using the Windows Mobile GPS Intermediate Driver. So I had a quick try. I was vaguely aware of it before, but hadn’t taken a proper look. In this post, I’ll describe briefly what it is, it’s benefits over home-grown hacks such as my own, and share a couple of things that I had to do to get it to work.
I talked about this yesterday, but it’s ready for sharing now.
What is this?
It’s a OpenCellID client for Windows Mobile
What does that mean?
It uses the GPS device connected to a Windows Mobile device (either internal or connected over Bluetooth) to identify exact latitude / longitude coordinates.
It combines this with the cell id of the GSM tower that your phone is currently communicating with.
These two measurements are uploaded to the database at OpenCellId.org
Why?
Because if enough people do this, then we will be able to build up a picture of where each GSM cell is.
Then people without GPS (either because their mobile devices don’t have GPS, or because their indoors) can work out where they are by looking up their current GSM cell in the OpenCellId database.
It is great to see a revived buzz around mobile location based apps and services. There are lots of new services to try. I try loads of them, the most recent was Moot just a few days ago (I love their video which I’ve embedded here – very cute), but there are way more than I can keep up with.
One problem they all share before they get to offer you their variations on useful location-based services is how to figure out where you are in the first place.
GPS is an obvious response, but not everyone has it on their mobile, and even if you do, it has some big problems – it can take a while to get a fix, won’t work indoors, etc.
Good solutions supplement this with other sources of information. Skyhook is getting a lot of attention at the moment for their service – mainly due to it being used in the iPhone. It means that the iPhone (and other devices using Skyhook) can work out where it is using GPS, but if a GPS fix cannot be made (or in the interim time while waiting for one) it can give an approximate location almost instantly using cell-tower triangulation and/or known WiFi access points.
Apart from adding the ability to initiate an internet connection, my Twitter widget for Windows Mobile Today screens is still virtually the same code as I wrote in a few hours overnight at the Over The Air hackday.
Which isn’t great – as I know there have been a bunch of people waiting for me to make some fixes and add some basic features.
Tonight I had a bit of time to spare, so I finally dug out the code to start making a few improvements:
That might even be tolerable with most websites, but with twitter – which is known to fall over from time to time! – it means TwitToday could effectively hang your phone for ages until the HTTP post timed-out.
Not good. Now it does all the HTTP work in a background thread, so you can get on with other stuff while it tries to send your tweet.
I’ve added a setting now that lets you programmatically show the SIP keyboard when you tap on the text box.
If you want to try the new version, you can download it from here. If you want to see how I did it, read on.