A segunda edição do evento da comunidade PocketPT.net para os Profissionais de tecnologias móveis e relacionadas, dá continuidade ao sucesso obtido pela primeira edição.
Este ano, de modo a oferecer um conjunto de conteúdos mais alargado, as duas tracks foram divididas em dois dias, sendo o primeiro dia reservado a programadores e o segundo a profissionais de TI.
Consegue-se assim uma maior riqueza e abrangência de conteúdos e intervenientes.
Mais um evento sobre Windows Mobile promovido pela comunidade PocketPT.NET. A julgar pelos a que já assisti irá valer bem a pena. Inscrições abertas. Mais informações no site oficial.
In the last day of Shift’08 Conference I attended to a session about a project of investigation that I really liked. The speakers (authors of the project) weren’t good speakers and had difficulties to “sell the product”, but the project itself and their idea really pleased me. What is it?
TODAY is a piece of generative design for mobile phones.
It’s an application that visualizes personal mobile communication. It sits on the periphery of the machine, monitoring our connectivity through the number and type of calls we receive, subtly displaying them back to us, in the form of a generative graphic. Here, the visual result is a figurative and seemingly abstract picture – the story of your day. Some days will be really colorful and wired, others quieter and more reflective, either way the resulting visuals will always be personal, unrepeatable and unique.
They have a set of rules used in the creation of the elements of each drawing. Bellow you can have a taste of the main rules.
When I talked about this project to some people they were like “And what’s the use of it? Seems silly…” As far as I am concerned: NONE!!! But it is art! It is not meant to have an use. It is pretty and meaningful. Your day recorded in an image. Brilliant concept. That’s it. No “features”. This project gets funds from the Portuguese Ministry of Culture!
This software is free and it is available for download. The only drawback is that it targets only Symbian… When someone in the audience asked the authors about porting to other platforms they told that iPhone or Android would be great, but in the iPhone would be difficult to get information about your communications, so Android would be a nice option.
I was really sad that they didn’t even mentioned Windows Mobile, which I consider to be a great platform for development that is growing everyday. I haven’t ever tried something like this, but my feeling is that it wouldn’t be that difficult to get information regarding calls log and SMS’ log on a Windows Mobile powered phone.
Try this software if you can, really. Unfortunatly I won’t be able to… TODAY, Mobile Application.
I’ve previously written that I was using Wordpress PDA Plugin in order to give mobile users a nice user experience. Today during lunch time I’ve upgraded the plugin which now has a iPhone/iPod version. (I must give a word of appreciation to the new “one click upgrade” feature in Wordpress)
It has animations in page transitions and all. Pretty cool. It still have some bugs (at least when testing it in Firefox with a fake User Agent), but it is usable. Maybe one of my readers will give me feedback from his iPhone experience navigating in this website. 
About a week ago I read on Channel 10 that Live Mesh was available to everyone on the U.S. Sarah Perez even gave me a tip: I could try it too! I just had to change my Windows Regional Settings, to tell Live Mesh servers that I was from the U.S. Shame on me, lying in order to access Live Mesh. 
I wrote about Live Mesh some time ago. Now that I am using it I can say that is just as I was expecting. You can register your devices (just Windows-based computers, for now) in Live Mesh in order to sync files between devices and remotely control devices. The screenshot bellow shows the devices list page. It includes your registered devices, a special device called “Live Desktop” and an Add Device button.
That “special device” Live Desktop to which you can connect is a simple interface where you can access your shared folders, download stored files, create folders, upload files, etc. AJAX allows a kind of user experience that resembles to a real Windows desktop, so the name “Live Desktop” is appropriate. Since you can share files/folders with other people, in order to keep track on your Mesh you have access to a “News” panel where you can stay up to date with changes that have been made.
The client software that you download from Live Mesh and install in your computers has an interface that is identical to the panel that is available on Live Desktop. This application notifies you when any change happens, and takes charge of all the syncing-related tasks. Bellow you can see a “Programs” folder on my desktop. Folders that you have in Live Mesh are fully integrated with Windows Explorer, so you can browse them as any regular folder. You can even share a regular folder in Live Mesh just by right-clicking it and choose the context-menu option “Add folder to your Live Mesh…”.
I must confess that I haven’t used the folder sync functionalities. I just tried one time after I installed Live Mesh, but one great functionality that I have been using is Remote Desktop. Using Internet Explorer you can remotely control any of your Windows devices from anywhere in the world where you have an internet connections, without any particular software, just an ActiveX control that acts as an Internet Explorer plugin.
Remote Desktop works pretty well. I can even browse in the web, check e-mail, install software, etc, in the remote device using this functionality. You can only connect to a device that isn’t currently in use and has the Live Mesh application installed, so if you are like me, and what to control your home computer from work, don’t forget to leave if locked or logged off. I have been having some issues with connectivity. When I loose my connection to the web, I get a retry connection button from Live Mesh, but it almost never works… Another issue is related with copy/paste files between your local machine and your remote device. It is way too slow… And copying text from the local clipboard to the device doesn’t always work. Well… It is just a Tech Preview, not a final version.
The mobile version of Live Mesh has became available this week, it allows you to check the news on your Mesh and download files. It is available at the address https://m.mesh.com. A Mac version of Live Mesh is on development.
So far Live Mesh is a mashup and rebranding of several “old” Microsoft products like Folder Share for file sync, the Remote Desktop connections via web browser of Windows Server 2003, and since we have 5Gb of storage that can be used not only for sync but also for sharing with other people, has a little bit of Windows Live SkyDrive. But the kind of integration that Live Mesh brings is pretty great as an user experience improvement.
I’ll be expecting news from Live Mesh team.
Weave is an experimental prototype from Mozilla Labs that integrates online services with Firefox.
“As the Web continues to evolve and more of our lives move online, we believe that Web browsers like Firefox can and should do more to broker rich experiences while increasing user control over their data and personal information.”
in Mozilla Labs » Weave
Seems nice. But I’m pretty sure that I would not store all my passwords on the cloud in a service like this. But to store bookmarks, history, cookies (excluding the authentication ones) and tabs is pretty useful. I tried this service today, and it was toooo slow. I’ll way for a more efficient version of this experimental software.
I would prefer a browser independent solution, but that is too much to ask. Nevertheless it may be nice in the future. Meanwhile I’ll keep using Windows Live Favorites. If I used Internet Explorer as my main browser, it would be perfect, but it will have to do.
