The Gungle » Client Applications

Worldwide Facebook Mobile Usage Up 300% In Last 12 Months

Ben Green — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 00:09:45 +0000

INSIDE FACEBOOK — Today at the Nokia World conference in Stuttgart, Facebook’s Director of Mobile, Henri Moissinac, announced that Facebook’s worldwide mobile audience just crossed 65 million active users. To put that in perspective, that’s nearly 25% of all of Facebook’s total worldwide reach – and four times as many people using Facebook Mobile than this time last year…

via Worldwide Facebook Mobile Usage Up 300% In Last 12 Months | socialmediaBiz.com.

Can imagine that’s causing some angst for carriers.

New Android Market

Ben Green — Fri, 04 Sep 2009 04:29:47 +0000

iPhone AR: Augmented ID from TAT

Ben Green — Sun, 26 Jul 2009 13:53:15 +0000

In the future, people will point phones at you to check your interwebs while you speak.

Notable about the video, and others, is the emphasis on the corporeal identity – face recognition, real-time video of people – seems to continue the anchorage of online identities to literal pictorial and video evidence. Facebook is a good example of this.

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Elsewhere in AR TwittARound “shows live tweets around your location on the horizon“. I found his summary of technologies used illuminating:

The whole application is developed in Webkit (UIWebView / Safari Mobile). A native Cocoa wrapper delegates location, compass and accelerometer to Javascript in the UIWebView. The 3D scene is based on Safari Mobiles brilliant 3D CSS transforms. The Ajax part is done with jQuery. After writing some native iPhone apps this Webkit approach seems to be ideal for rapid development of applications independent of the iPhone UI.

This setup is related to the non-availability of public APIs for live video on the iPhone, meaning developers can’t publish via the app store:

But here is the rub: we are currently unable to publish these apps on the app store because the iPhone SDK lacks public APIs for manipulating live video.

In early July, a number of developers and academics write the above in their Open Letter to Apple: Let us Augment Reality with the iPhone!. It will be interesting to see what Apple’s plans are in this space.

Vodafone App Store

Ben Green — Wed, 13 May 2009 12:01:59 +0000

Vodafone have announced the launch on their app store by year end in Britain, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Italy, the Netherlands, Portugal, and Spain.

They’ll concentrate on apps for Symbian devices initally
People will be able to buy apps and have them charged on their phone bill
It’s a 70/30 revenue split between the developer and Vodafone

Vodafone claims that geotargetting will be their advantage over handset and software vendor offerings – their ownership of the network provides the location of the person which the app should be able to use. I don’t really see how that’s heaps different than location enabled iPhone apps that use teh GPS.

From BusinessWeek: Vodafone Announces App Store

The Nokia App Store is Coming

Ben Green — Tue, 12 May 2009 22:56:33 +0000

And it’s called Ovi.

The future of mobile – it ain’t all that flash

Ben Green — Thu, 30 Oct 2008 10:37:18 +0000

If you come to this event expecting to hear anything about mobile Flash I don’t think we have very much about it. Not that it’s not a technology that’s in play, but it’s just not something – it’s not open. It doesn’t allow development of services very easily. It’s not in deployment by individuals or by users.

Daniel Applequist (Senior Technology Strategist at Vodafone Group & key W3C MWBP guy) talks to Tim O’Brien of O’Reilly about a mobile 2.0 conference he’s holding on November 3.

The mobile web is where it’s at:

Time and again I’ve heard from start-ups, that have started off trying to write a Java app, or something like that, that they abandoned that and when they went to mobile web they found that they immediately had way more customers.

Gmail mobile client gets offline support

Ben Green — Thu, 23 Oct 2008 22:31:19 +0000

A 2.0 release that includes offline support for J2ME and Blackberry.

Includes email account switching between Gmail and Google Apps accounts.

Introducing Gmail for mobile 2.0

Mobacut- instant webclips to phone

Ben Green — Tue, 21 Oct 2008 11:55:07 +0000

Via @jaketracey

Kindle vs iPhone

Ben Green — Sun, 05 Oct 2008 21:14:40 +0000

Forbes reports that e-reader Stanza for the iPhone has been downloaded 395,000 times, and is still serving 5,000 a day. The Kindle is expected to sell 378,000 this year.

The Alley Insider lists a number of reasons why the content and the iPhone hardware will limit the threat to the Kindle, like battery life, screen size, and the availability of books.

But the iPhone could still steal a whole lot of people’s reading time that the Kindle would like to have, like reading newspapers, blogs, and other ‘short forms’, which comprise most of my reading habits nowadays. Then the kindle is relegated to new books only. Not nothing, but less than what Amazon imagined surely.

Demo of Clutter from Maemo 5

Ben Green — Wed, 24 Sep 2008 23:40:06 +0000

“One of the most significant additions in Maemo 5 is the Clutter library, which facilitates rapid development of rich graphical user interfaces. Support for Clutter on top of OpenGL ES 2.0 will enable developers to completely redefine the Maemo user experience. Clutter provides a scene-graph system and frame-based animation engine for displaying and manipulating graphical elements. It can be used to implement rich visual effects and sophisticated interactive user interfaces that stretch beyond the boundaries of conventional widget toolkits.”

Clutter Demo

“The extreme versatility of Clutter makes it highly conducive to innovative user interface design, but also creates some challenges. There are no constraints to ensure basic consistency between Clutter-based user interfaces. Nokia will have to provide some clearly-defined guidelines so that third-party developers will be able to make Clutter user interfaces that don’t detract from the visual cohesion of the platform.”

src Nokia will bring bling and finger-friendliness to Maemo 5