UK readers will have noted today’s Google Doodle marking the visit of the Queen to Google’s London offices. I am personally rather interested to see if Google starts sporting a “By Appointment” Royal Warrant. It would be quite cool to be Her Majesty’s search engine of choice, after all.

I arrived at Airsource twelve weeks ago to begin my summer internship, and now — sadly — it is at an end. It has been an interesting time, where I have learnt a lot and contributed something I feel will be lasting. (more…)

Yesterday at CTIA Wireless IT and Entertaiment Yahoo! announced their contribution to the mobile platform wars in the form of an XML-based language named BluePrint. BluePrint allows the generation of mobile applications for Windows Mobile and S60, as well as widgets that run inside the Yahoo! Go environment. Yahoo! has provided us an overview here.

The quest for “write once, run anywhere” continues. (more…)

Just got a letter, from a source that will remain nameless… It was addressed to “Ben BLAUNITEDKINGDOMOPF”. Sounds like someone needs to rethink exactly what parts of the address field get auto-completion…

SSH is undoubtedly a useful tool and the iPhone and iPod Touch are great portable ways of connecting to networks; put both together you can be a sysadmin on the move! So what are the options for this? The Apple AppStore has a few SSH clients, I decided to take three – SSH, iSSH and TouchTerm – out for a spin. (more…)

I have just been playing around with Stylizer, a Windows CSS editor. Why, you may ask, is the CTO of a mobile software company messing around with CSS editors? A very good question. Someone was extolling the virtues of this program on the Business of Software forum, and how everyone should take a look at the first-run experience. I went to the website, which is simple, clean, and attractive, and downloaded the program, which instantly launches into the tutorial.

Stylizer’s tutorial is well implemented, and compelling. I am no expert on CSS, and not much more knowledgable about CSS than I was when I started the tutorial, but I know a bit more about how to use Stylizer, and I agree that it is easy to use. Right up to the point where it asked me to hold down my left mouse button and then click with the right while the left button was still down.

Now, not only did I have to read that twice to work out what I needed to do, I could not actually do it. I use an Apple Mighty Mouse, and it is simply not possible to press any two buttons simultaneously, unless you press very hard enough (i.e. hard enough to break it).

Up to this point, all the shortcuts had been with the keyboard, so I didn’t quite see why we were suddenly using the mouse, particularly in a click combination that is hardly standard. In the case of Stylizer, it is simple enough just to achieve the desired action (insert a new rule) using the Insert key, but I am left asking myself why someone found it necessary to come up wth a completely non-standard action to implement a common action. In the same thought, I realise that Apple disabled simultaneous button clicks on the Mighty Mouse precisely to prevent people coming up with complex, non-standard UIs. More power to them.

Airsource woke up this morning to Nokia’s announcement to make Symbian an Open Source platform, and with it all the concrete platforms like S60, UIQ, and so forth. While Motorola, Sony Ericsson, and NTT DoCoMo are all mentioned in the press release, it seems to me that they had little choice but to jump on board. From an Airsource perspective, S60 pretty much meant Nokia – and now Nokia will mean S60. At the very least, that might make our sales presentations easier.

This announcement is good news in two ways for Airsource’s business. Firstly, from a commercial perspective, it removes some of the cloud of doubt about what Android means for the market. Android did not exactly threaten the future of S60, the established leader in the convergent devices market , but it did cast some doubt on the subject. How would an open source competitor affect the market? Businesses, of course, hate doubt, and while S60 was ahead of Android on pretty much everything apart from source access, the playing field there has now been made more level. Obviously a $1500 charge (annual) for source access is not free, but it is vastly cheaper than the old fee to become a Symbian Platinum Partner.

Secondly, from a technical perspective, access to the underlying platform code helps the developer produce more stable products, faster. Some areas of code are always technically more complex and more poorly documented than others, such as MTMs. Access to source code will significantly ease development on the really cool stuff.

We at Airsource look forward to seeing more developments.

The Cambridge CAMRA Beer Festival has arrived in town again.

An annual event in Cambridge, the Beer Festival features hundreds of brews from all over the UK and Europe. The key message is that the best beer is “Real Ale”; not stuffed with preservatives and artificially carbonated but the genuine, hand-crafted article. (more…)

I stayed at the Yotel in Heathrow Terminal 4 the other day. I had an 11am flight to the US, and decided that instead of a 6am start from Cambridge, it made much more sense to stay literally 50m away from the British Airways checkin desk. This made me an accidental, but much appreciated, beneficiary of the T5 shambles – BA are keeping a lot of their long-haul flights in T4 until the new terminal has properly bedded down. (more…)

I’ve just been taking a look at Device Atlas, which in its own words is the “world’s most comprehensive database of mobile device information”. I had high hopes, but unfortunately it appears to be rehash of the kind of information which is readily available, without anything more useful. I appreciate that this database is not designed for my sole delectation, but I surely can’t be alone in wanting to get a list of devices running S60 FP1 which have a camera? Not only does the Device Atlas apparently not allow any sort of search, it doesn’t tell me what operating system a phone runs, what JSRs it has, or allow any kind of user commenting (e.g. “HTTPS is broken on this device”).

My favourite part of the site is in the FAQ, where it says “Can I have a job? Yes, we’re hiring world class staff for the DeviceAtlas project. Call us.” Errr, call who? There’s no phone number. Click on “Contact” on the nav bar at the bottom of the screen. Still no phone number. I presume you’re supposed to call dotMobi (one more click away) rather than Device Atlas, but that’s far from clear. Also in the FAQ, we read that “We intend this to be the single largest, most comprehensive, and accurate device database on the planet”. A worthy goal – but Device Atlas has a long way to go to reach it.