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On the heels of the iPhone SDK announcement, growing interest in Google’s Android and a whole host of other recent developments, Dan Appelquist of Mobile Monday London and Ian Forrester of BBC Backstage have been organizing a new hybrid conference/hackday for the mobile set here in London.
Like Mobile Camp London, this event will be entirely free to attendees. We’ve got a great venue over at Imperial College London, and room for 400+ participants. For those of you who wanted to come to Mobile Camp, but couldn’t because it cut into your weekend, feel free to drop in to day one on Friday the 4th - Over the Air after all, is work related :)
Dale Lane walked away with our final prize for the Hack Challenge: an OpenMoko Neo 1973 handset. How did he achieve such a feat? Oddly enough, by developing a series of plugins for Windows Mobile that allow him to search Google, create TinyURLs and post to Del.icio.us:
The aim was to find some more small ways to improve usability in Pocket Internet Explorer - the web browser on Windows Mobile. Anything that we can do to cut out a step, or save the user having to input something, all helps with the overall experience.
Search with Google: Search for the currently selected text in the mobile Google search engine. Saves the user having to copy the text, manually enter “http://www.google.co.uk/m/” in the address bar, paste the text into the search box and hit submit.
The biggest problem with the new Google plugin was in trying to get the currently selected text from the Pocket Internet Explorer. I’ve written up my efforts to do this in a blog post here
Turn into tinyurl: Get the tinyurl link for the current webpage, copying it into the clipboard. Saves the user having to copy the current URL from the address bar, manually enter “http://tinyurl.com/” into the address bar, paste the URL into the box, hit submit, select the tinyurl result and copy it.
Post to del.icio.us: Opens a form to post the current webpage to the del.icio.us bookmarking service, prefilling the page’s name and URL. Saves the user having to copy the current URL from the address bar, manually enter “http://del.icio.us/post”, login, paste the URL into the box, hit submit, wait for the next form, manually type in a title, hit submit.
In addition to the Orange Code Camp happening November 6th and 7th and the Future of Mobile occurring the following week here in London, October and November will be busy months for mobile events. Just a quick scan of Barcamp.org’s homepage reveals several mobile camps happening around the globe:
If anybody is going to any of the above and blogging, please let me know, it would be great if we could start sharing what’s presented at each of these grassroots events so that everybody gets to learn more.
Sam Machin walked away from Mobile Camp London with a shiny new Nokia N95 thanks to his weekend effort - creating an app that pushes notes he writes on his phone, out to his Tumblr blog:
I use tumblr for noting down ideas / urls etc when at conferencing events and some one says check out this site… The app was designed so that I could note it down quickly on my phone and then when I`m sat at my PC later I can look at my tumblr feed and find all the links & notes I made during the event. Despite tumblr having a very simple API nobody seems to have made any kind of app for S60. I didn`t find too many problems during the weekend apart from not having enough time to implement a persistent store of the username & password on the phone although this will be done asap!
Currently the app only supports 3 of the tumblr post types (Note, Quote & Link) but I want to add support for photos via the camera and possibly saved in the gallery too, I don`t think theres much use for the chat or video links from a mobile at this time.
Once I`ve got the user details storage and the camera bits sorted I`ll post it as a free download on my site www.geektech.co.uk. It uses the
PyS60 runtime so I`ll probably build 2 versions of the install file one for people with python and one standalone that bundles the runtime.
Simon Maddox - our first place winner in the Hack Challenge, and soon to be proud owner of an iPhone, created an amazing way to find television content and then get it streamed to your phone:
My hack:
TV Shows is an easy way to watch TV shows (such as Heroes, Prison Break etc.) on your mobile. Show details are pulled from TV.com and displayed on the mobile. When you choose a show / season / episode, the system will go off to a video sharing website and pull the content to the server. Once the video has been encoded into a mobile streaming format, the user is sent a text message telling them their show is ready to watch. The TV show is then streamed to the handset (3G recommended).
As part of Mobile Camp London 2007, we offered a little design/hack challenge to create a mobile mashup in a weekend. Five teams took the challenge to heart and built some interesting apps, ranging from a way to pull tv-shows from the web to using Tumblr and an N95 to take notes. We taped the presentation for your viewing pleasure:
