As part of WOMWorld Nokia, my friend and mobile technology aficionado Roland Tanglao offered to lend me a Samsung Focus with Microsoft's mobile operating system on it for a weekend. I took it around Vancouver, installed apps, took photos, tracked a walk on Commercial St., and, breaking with tradition, actually made a phone call.
iPhone
Followers of @justagwailo, my automated ephemera Twitter account, know that I'm a frequent user of a service called Brightkite. Brightkite is a social web application that lets people check into physical locations with the intention of socially interacting online. With Twitter integration (you can have checkins, notes, and photos automatically post to Twitter with customizable text), it's an "where I'm at" application which also shows you who has checked in nearby. You can get SMS notification of nearby Brightkite users, and even set privacy settings so that only friends see your exact location and others see a more general city or municipality as your current location. The Brightkite iPhone app makes checkins easy, giving you the option to search for something if it isn't in the "pick a place" listing, using the built-in GPS to find out what's nearby.
On the heels of the successful Brightkite meetups in Berlin and Austin and the BayArea, the team at Brightkite wrote some helpful hints on organizing a Brightkite meetups, spurring me into action to organize one for the Vancouver area.
(I should note that I'm in no way affiliated with Brightkite. I'm just a frequent user.)
In a couple of weeks, Vancouver will host the Geoweb 2009 Conference, though I won't be attending. I would like to invite those who use Brightkite in the Lower Mainland, as well as people who are interested location-based online social interaction tools to join me at The Irish Heather at 7:00 PM on the 28th of July. (That date conveniently happens to be my birthday.) I'd be interested in doing a short introduction to Brightkite, and talk about the future of location-based online social interaction (one word: games).
I see Brightkite as an interesting way to explore a city and expand people's social network. I can also see roadblocks to the effectiveness Brightkite and its ilk, and would like those interested in discussing mapping, social activity online, and collaboratively mapping the world to join me in a week and a half to see where things are going.
Did I mention I'll have Brightkite t-shirts and stickers to give away? RSVP at the Yahoo! Upcoming event listing (understanding that the address is 212 Carrall, not 217 as listed there).
If we are to believe in timestamps, on October 7th, 2006, I took over maintainership of the Mobile theme for the Drupal CMS. At the time there was no iPhone, and stripped down graphics-free versions of websites made it easier for people with small screens on their phones to get to the information quickly. Now, relatively larger screens coupled with effectively unlimited data plans make websites more consumable by tiny devices. My maintainership of the theme continues unabated, as today I (finally) released official 1.0 versions for Drupal 5 and Drupal 6, and dropped official support for the 4.7 version. m.justagwailo.com serves as the Mobile theme's demonstration site. Thanks to Bèr Kessels for originally writing the theme and webschuur.com for its original sponsorship.
A note about version numbers: when the new system for CVS tagging came out way back when, somehow it occurred to me that "DRUPAL-6-4" was the correct version number to assign to a developmental release. What that meant in practices was the version number for the theme ended up as "4.x". Looking at the usage statistics, at this writing, the overwhelming majority of sites that have deployed the Mobile theme use that developmental release. It is my hope that they all move to the 1.x branch, either developmental or official, as that's where all development will happen from now on.
As with any software, there are feature requests and bug reports, and I encourage anybody using the theme to give me feedback there. The theme is not to be confused with the Mobile Theme module, which cleverly detects whether a browser is a mobile device and serves up a "mobile" theme for that device. I have the combination of the Mobile Theme module and one of two iPhone-friendly themes at PDXphiles, my Portland-lovers blog.
We've bought the tickets, so it's official: Karen and I will be going to Portland for the last week of February, then take a very short side-trip to Seattle on the way back. We're taking the Greyhound bus down from Vancouver, B.C., so we'll get a lot of Interstate 5 goodness. Since we didn't know exactly how we were getting back from Seattle, we decided that at least on the way from PDX to Seatown that we'd take the Amtrak train. A little more expensive, and the Amtrak guy in Vancouver wanted to see our passports. We managed to convince the ticket agent that we didn't know we needed them to buy tickets and that we had just made the decision (both true), so we'll finally be able to do as Djun did in 2005.
We very tentatively decided to neither of us bring our laptops, the idea being that we'll find enough computing power with friends and cafes to check our email as much as we need to and that's it. I'll bring my iPhone, which I'm assured by the fine folks at Fido will cost me an arm and a leg to use the data plan while roaming in the United States. As part of our trip budget, I have an amount of total usage in mind. Again, friends and wifi in the wilds of PDX will get us jacked in when we need to.
To update my thoughts on the PDX Bus iPhone application, the developer today had approved a 2.0 release of the app, which embeds Google Maps inside the application. It also adds a flashing screen to make it easier for TriMet bus drivers to see you. I didn't believe that TriMet actually recommending this, but the transportation agency itself has an explanatory video, including asking for what are called in Vancouver "request stops", i.e. getting dropped off anywhere along the route, not just at designated stops.
Not quite correct, I'm currently on a bus boarded at the ferry terminal the time this screenshot was taken.
Synchronizing your calendar between devices is still a mess. My personal calendar is on one account, my work calendar is shared with my personal account, and my girlfriend shares her calender with me as well. Initially I tried NuevaSync's Microsoft Exchange server to have over-the-air synchronization, and that worked well, allowing me to create events and have them appear, right away, on the Google Calendar account without intervention from iCal. The downside of NuevaSync was that every calendar event appeared as if it were on one calendar, so I couldn't tell which was work, which was her event (imagine everybody's surprise if I were to show up to an appointment she had with a heath care professional!), and which was a personal life event.
Google had CalDAV integration in beta, and recently launched it as an official service. That worked to keep iCal on my Mac synchronized well, but I could not add events from my iPhone. Having to move events over after a sync is not a habit I'm willing to form.
Spanning Sync is the least worst option, an endorsement that probably won't appear on their site. Through Spanning Sync, I get all my events in neat calendars but still have to manually synchronize the iPhone with the computer. It's something I have to do periodically anyway, so no loss there. The holy grail, of course, is direct, instant iPhone-to-Google Calendar synchronization.
Boris schooled me to Spanning Sync's referral program, which means that when anybody clicks through his image link, he gets a cool $5 sent to his PayPal account. Anybody clicking through that image also gets a cool $5 off the product. So in the spirit of trying to get something for free in an honest way, I encourage those frustrated with the state of calendar synchronization to click the image at the very top here to get me a fin, the term for a 5-dollar bill I learned from watching The Simpsons.
