Jean-Jacques Halans ‹› Afterhours

With Wired finally arriving on the iPad this week, and the first Australian newspaper app (The Australian) published right on time for the iPad release down under, I thought I’d do a quick overview of old world media apps I’ve been playing with.

Time Inc: is close to the original magazine, but optimized for iPad reading, with additional video and picture content. I love the full screen pictorials. A single, simple navigation system of an horizontal page scrubber with section navigation. In-app purchases (finally), but still waiting for a subscription service.

NYT Editor’s Choice: Good readability, extra photos and a bit of video, though it’s a “lite” version of what will be the real thing.

Wall Street Journal: great scan-ability, good readability, extra video and images, left to right navigation inside category, top to bottom between categories, click the article box to get the full article, section navigation. But before you can read the latest edition, you need to wait for it to download in full. When you register, you get some great subscription offers through email, like up to 60% off the regular subscription price.

The Australian: at a right price for a monthly subscription. Left to right navigation between sections, but the top navigation with drop downs is too “webby”. The biggest drawback is that the text on the section pages and article indexes is too small, both for reading and scan-ability. And the article pages are single column, which makes the text flow to wide (in landscape) to read comfortably. The text should really be in narrower columns, like in the paper edition (and NYT and WSJ apps). Feels like a rushed job, lots of room for improvement.

Financial Times: Doesn’t load the whole edition at once (“Live Edition”), only when you navigate to a section. Tab at the top to get a section scrubber (which is customizable – nice), a news + quote search box, and the option to download the full edition for offline reading, which is a nice difference to the other newspapers (most of them require you to wait for a download before you can start reading). Left to right navigates between sections, up and down navigates inside a section, tab to get into article, left to right to switch between articles. Great scan-ability and readability. Section front pages are often more than a single screen long, which means you get more preview text per article (though, yes you have to scroll down to scan a section). You get three free full articles within 30 days (else limited to first paragraph).

Popular Science: it all looks cool, but in the end the navigation is a bit un-intuitive. Swiping left to right, two finger swipes left to right, two finger swipe up, tab left and right… too steep a learning curve. In-app purchase.

Wired: best magazine so far. Great content, close to the original, but with a lot of extra media: video, voice, music (two minutes to full tracks), 3D interactive elements. Though I wish some of the pictures could be enlarged to full screen. It does result in a large download (500+MB), not helped by the included “premium” video ads. Great navigation aids (an index, horizontal scrubber, and a zoomed out overview of the magazine), remembers where you are in individual articles. Switching between portrait and landscape mode reshuffles the content brilliantly. And it’s cheaper than the imported, paper version (though in the US it’s the same price). (this guy doesn’t like it)

Zinio (also available as a desktop app): offers many popular magazines (National Geographic, Cosmo, Rolling Stone,… Mags from US, UK, NZ, AU, France,…). Magazines are partially optimized for the iPad. As in many articles the text is too small, you can often (but not for every article) switch to a text-only version of the article, which also allows you to enlarge the font. The pictures do look good, often you can zoom in by pinching for more details. There are some photo navigation features and low resolution video. You navigate through a page overview or a textual table of contents. The app is a bit buggy, but holds plenty of potential. Individual magazines as well as subscriptions are reasonably priced, but payment is through the browser (not through iTunes) with an account at Zinio, which actually gave me a nasty server error page. And when it does work, it asks for your credit card details over clear text HTTP! Please don’t!

GQ: cheap individual editions (US$2.99, for new, US$1.99 for back issues), but lots of adverts. In horizontal mode you see the magazine similarly as the paper edition (too small to read, but pinch to zoom in). Turn it into portrait, and you browse the articles through a full screen picture page, and tab it to get into the article, which is pretty nice. The article itself is split into a top photo section which can be minimized, and the article. Navigation through a horizontal scrubber or a popup index. In-app purchase.

APC: feels like a PDF magazine. Forces user to rotate for some articles. Only a page scrubber for navigation, though section front pages allow you to jump right into an article. Some articles have a slideshow but without captions. Lots of adverts and classifieds (I guess the same ones as in the printed edition).

One of the biggest drawbacks of media apps on the iPad is the fact that they all behave differently, with different user interactions. I guess this will be temporary until a common interaction language is agreed upon. We do start to see some common navigation elements, like the horizontal page scrubber. But for now, mostly no rules, a wild wild west, which is both interesting and frustrating.

PS: I’d also like a night time reading option, with white on black/grey text (like the option in Stanza and Borders), because the iPad is a wee bit too bright in a dimmed room.

It’s been over a week of spending time with the iPad, so here’s the obligatory one-week review.

Carrying it around killed my manbag/murse, I think. I didn’t notice it before. I do sometimes carry my SLR and lenses in it too so that might have contributed too. But it does fit really nicely, without any bulk, into any reasonable sized bag, though it’s weight at about 700g is considerable. But it is a joy to use, like the iPhone is. It is not however, just a big iPod Touch, it feels totally different, more capable. Quoting someone on Twitter:

“Saying the iPad is just a bigger iPod Touch, is like saying a swimming pool is just a big bathtub.”

I get through at least two days of usage, with 30+% battery charge left. So I charge every other day, though I have to wipe it clean every day… Not that I am dirty, fingerprints are just more noticeable on the big screen compared to the iPhone.

I love iBooks as an ePub book reader (mainly O’Reilly ePub books), as a bookstore, I can’t find anything I want. For me iBooks works. I don’t get eye strain or anything. It’s a lot more comfortable than reading on a regular desktop screen. And the size of the screen makes a lot more sense than my Kindle 2. GoodReader for PDFs is pretty good, though not very intuitive. It contains a lot of functionality which isn’t apparent at first.

Though would it be enough to get an iPad just to read ebooks, in stead of a Kindle DX? You do get more functionality with the iPad for about the same price, for sure. Mail is great (though it is at times slow to sync). Safari is great, just to be able to surf a bit from the couch, reading at arms length, while glancing at whatever’s on the TV. Maps is great, though buggy, as it kind of locked up on me twice, where I couldn’t zoom in anymore.

There isn’t any great Twitter app yet. I’ve tried Twittelator, TweetDeck and Twitterriffic and they all lack something. One of them I can’t even seem to click any links in tweets (or did I miss something – Edit: yeah missed that you have to turn Tweetdeck into portrait to get to click links). So I hope my favorite iPhone Twitter app, Tweetie (now owned by Twitter themselves), gets ported to the iPad soon.

The newspaper apps are not yet there I think, with much room for improvement. Magazines are experimenting and all the different interactions don’t make it any easier to read e-magazines (double swipe up here, tab there, double tab right side,…). I am interested in getting a subscription on a newspaper and some magazines (Wired, where are you?), if the price is right, not too much adverts and it offers something more than the dead tree version does. Time magazine for example, requires you to download a separate app every week, in stead of downloading a new edition inside the existing app, which is just plain silly. With this model, you can’t get subscriptions either. It is priced at US$5 which I believe is the same as the printed US version, but you do get extra video and additional pictures, but then again you can find those online at their site too. (Edit: To be fair, I just noticed on their app description that in-app purchases and subscriptions will be made available in coming months)

Lots of apps are just gimmicky. The Elements app is pretty cool (and heavy at 1.7GB), but I don’t really need a periodic table. The iWork apps are cool, but each have there own limitations (Keynote not supporting notes for example). Sketchbook Pro is a pretty cool art app, especially for the price. Scrabble (using additional iPhones/Touches) is pretty cool. And so on… But I haven’t found THE killer app yet, the one app that would make you buy an iPad just to be able to use that app. But then again it is early days. And I can’t really say there is a killer app for the iPhone either. It’s just the combination of different apps, and the ease of use.

The iPod app is a bit limited, or at least it feels that way, missing Coverflow, no iTunes LP/Extra support, and some other things I thought were different or missing.

File management is the biggest drawback. You can’t just mount it as an external disk, drop files onto it, and use those in any app. The iPad doesn’t have a system explorer app to browse its disk. So file management all happens through iTunes, and only for apps that support it. You can however use apps like AirSharing and GoodReader to wirelessly (over WiFi) transfer files, and then open these files (PDFs, Word docs, Excel docs,…) into the iWork apps (for example), in which case they get copied to those apps folder and imported into the app, where you end up with a duplicate file. Having said that, it hasn’t impacted me that much just yet, so it’s biggest drawback isn’t a biggy at all (for me).

On a side note, the optional VGA cable only works for Keynote and video (or any app that supports video out). You can’t just demo everything on the iPad through the VGA cable as you would on a laptop (Steve must have had a special build of the iPad OS), which is a bit disappointing.

It’s a lot easier to criticize the things that are wrong, as they often jump out, than it is to emphasize what is right. Because when things just work, you don’t notice that, as it should. And I believe that is the case with the iPad too. Despite these niggles, I still love it, and I’m sure it will grow on me further (though we’re still in our honeymoon period, and my wife is already a little bit jealous :).

PS: In case you’re wondering, I still wrote this post on my desktop pc, though WordPress has a decent iPad app.

When you read the blogosphere, with the introduction of iPhone OS 4 and it’s new T&C (which blocks cross compiled iPhone apps), it looks like we’re in for a next stage in the war between Apple and Adobe’s Flash. No doubt the particular clause in question is against Adobe. But why?

I went to the Adobe Refresh Roadshow event in February, where they showed off Flash CS5 and its capability to create iPhone apps. It was all very rudimentary. You couldn’t actually create an app that feels like a real iPhone app as there were no UI elements available, no common iPhone interaction,… unless you created those yourself.And as they said, it was all very early days.

What struck me immediately was the fact they did not mention XCode at all. The demo was given on OSX, so XCode could have been installed, and it could have used it to compile the iPhone app. But Adobe Creative Suite sells both on Mac and Windows, and I’m pretty sure they want to sell it on both platforms. It would be the nr 1 reason to upgrade.

So after the event, I asked one of the presenters over Twitter if there was a need for XCode and if it would also work on Windows:

I leave it to you to draw your conclusions on what Adobe is doing (or how it is doing it). I think this could be easily solved if Adobe takes out the iPhone compilation out of it’s main product, and sell it as an extension for the Mac version, which then would require XCode and would compile a Flash created XCode project, like Titanium creates and compiles an XCode project.

Shouldn’t Apple and Adobe get together and talk this out over a coffee (too)?

I love gadgets! I’m a techno consumerist, and maybe even a little bit of an Apple whore (although I don’t unconditionally bend over for Steve!). There, I said it, it’s out of the way!

My love for gadgets started when I got to work on the web (I think) back in 1997. I started to make some real money, so I could afford some things once in a while. Working in this environment exposes you to servers and routers and stuff, and you start to get intrigued about how things work (or don’t work). Still, laptops were pretty expensive back then, and underpowered. My first laptop was some Compaq, a 14″ one with a detachable cd-rom wedge, which made it pretty cool actually. Slim and light. I liked it alot. But my first true gadget, was the Compaq iPaq 3630 pocket pc in 2000. It was the first pocketable device, that looked nice, felt nice and had stuff going for it. It had these jackets you could slide it into that would extend its functionality (like extended battery, compact flash card readers…). Now I wish I was blogging back then, so I’d remember what it was like. I did find this review. But back then, I still felt it was pretty limited in use, not really a joy to use. Since then I had a bunch of gadgets, most of which I don’t remember really (I bought a PSP years ago to browse wirelessly, not necessarily for games), that’s how much impact they had on my life (none).

My first foray into Apple territory was a beige G3 Power Macintosh minitower desktop with a 21″ Apple CRT display, at work, I guess around 98-99. I didn’t like OS9 much, but I was using it to do some manuals in FrameMaker, and video editing, next to the development I did on Windows NT4/2000. Around 99 or 2000, we bought our first Apple for home use, a Bondi blue iMac G3. I played around with some Director development (remember Lingo?), but mainly used it for surfing the web and webdesign. I believe I sold it again and went back to a Windows pc at home. In 2005 I bought my first 30 GB white iPod, which I loved. A couple of years later, we bought a (second hand) white “lampshade” iMac which came with OSX which was so much nicer to use (than OS9 and Windows I thought). We loved it! It still felt underpowered though, if I remember correctly. But then we had to sell it again when moving to Australia. In early 2007 I bought my first Apple Macbook Pro (to replace a dead Acer laptop), followed by a first gen iPod touch, and a couple of months later the first gen, jailbroken iPhone from eBay. Followed up by an iPhone 3G and then last year a 3GS. I upgraded to the new unibody MBP last year. I’ve got a LCD cinema display, an Apple TV, an Airport Extreme and Time Capsule. Sooo, will I buy an this new Apple device? You guess…

That was a bit of background history. The fact that I remember these Apple devices, and not much of any of the other gadgets in between (oh, a Mio GPS, and forgot about the Sony Clie PEG-UX50), means that they had some impact in my life, they gelled into life and I loved using them. They do their job and get out of the way. And I’m a (web)developer, I love to get my hands dirty trying things out, see how it works, how to develop something that works on particular platform.

I jumped on the netbook bandwagon. I was intrigued by the its form factor, it’s kinda like a baby laptop.  It’s cheap enough to carry around (and loose it, have it stolen,… in stead of my workhorse MBP), small enough to fit in my “manbag”/gadgetbag, and it “kinda” offers the full PC experience. This when travelling, going to meetups/conferences. Yes, an iPhone does fit this profile too: It’s great to tweet, keep track of your email, search Google, GPS your way around town, grab a picture,… And I love it! It has some crazy cool apps, great games. It contains my most recent music (I’ve got a 160GB classic iPod that contains everything), it links to my Flickr account to show of my latest pictures on the go, I check the weather, the TV timetable, use Shazam when I hear music I like, has my contacts, keep a noise diary in Evernote, get the next Sydney ferry, keep track of my weight, check my bank account, play Wurdle, find nearby ATMs, remote desktop into my work pc at team meetings,… All in my pants’ pocket (yes, I am still talking about the iPhone here).

But the iPhone really isn’t comfortable to read lots of email, blogposts, nor ebooks for that matter (neither is a BlackBerry, or an Android phone). Sure the Stanza an Kindle apps allow you to do read ebooks, and some PDF apps allow you to read PDFs. But you really don’t want to read like that for an hour or more. Neither is it particularly practical to watch long (movie length) videos. It’s great for three minute YouTube videos, and three in a row at that. It’s inherent to that particular formfactor. And then there is the battery life while actively using the iPhone. I don’t bitch about it, because, again the formfactor limits the size of the battery they can use. Previous phones didn’t allow this functionality anyway so that’s why batteries would last for days. Or when they did offer the functionality, you still would hardly ever use it because the user experience would be so appalling (Nokia N95 anyone?).

That’s why I thought a netbook is a great idea. So I’d have something to easily browse the web, read emails and ebooks (pdf or some ebook format), while watching TV at night in the sofa, in bed in the morning without disturbing my partner, or at a conference, or while travelling. My 15″ MacBook Pro is really too big to read in bed, gets too hot, makes too much noise when it is so hot… (though it does have a backlit keyboard) . I got me a 7″ eeePC. It was crap. The screen and keyboard too small to do anything. It was rather a toy for toddlers.

I upgraded to a 10″ Aspire One. It feels more like a normal laptop. It is pretty nice actually. It is a WinXP, with 160GB harddisk, 2GB memory. It’s 10″ but it’s resolution is 1024×600, which isn’t that practical for browsing either as the height of the viewport is pretty low. I mostly end up going full screen in Firefox. Reading ebooks, or particularly PDFs, isn’t practical either on this resolution. It’s just too narrow. Sure I can rotate a pdf, and hold the netbook like a book, but it still doesn’t feel right. The keyboard is decent but cramped. The touchpad is a bit too small too.

And yes, I can multitask, if I want to, but I use Gmail in Firefox, and a Firefox extension for Twitter. When I really want to dig into Twitter, I’d open up TweetDeck, and sure whenever I click a link Firefox pops to the front. I can multitask, to run Spybot or CrapCleaner in the background while browsing in Firefox. I can multitask, as ZoneAlarm keeps me safe, while Windows Update does its thing. I’ve got TopStyle installed for when I ever need to fix some html or css on the go. I can open and edit Word documents. But that’s not what I use my netbook for. I mainly use it to browse the net (as in “net”book right?), on the sofa, in bed in the morning,… Sure I can watch videos in Flash, and then the ventilator starts to blow to keep it all cool… As it does whenever browsing media sites with Flash ads on each side. That’s why you’d install a FlashBlock extension in Firefox.

I’ve taken my netbook to some conferences, sometimes to take notes, or browse any examples given by the presenter, or check email in between sessions. But then again battery life is only about 2,5 hours. I guess by now, netbooks come with 6 cell batteries for the same price which would double that time. And I kinda hate it when people are tapping away on their laptop at conferences as it’s really distracting (so I tend to not tap away either, and an iPhone is a lot quieter to type on, but too small to do so continuesly). So, what was a netbook good for again?

Last year I bought a Kindle when they introduced their international version. This is an ebook reader. No more, no less. I though the price was right, the overall size was right. I buy a lot of “dead-tree” books, but in itself they are too heavy/impractical to log around (on holiday, to work, across continents,…). And often ebooks are cheaper (but not always that much!). The screen really reads a lot better than a laptop screen. The 6″ screensize is the minimum size you’d need to comfortably read an ebook on the sofa. It holds a charge for almost two weeks. It’s got a 3G connection, but only to connect to the Amazon mothership to buy books, and update your virtual bookmark (the location in any book you stopped reading at). When I get back to my iPhone, the Kindle book would update to the last read page. Pretty nice. You can add other books in non-Kindle-drm’d ebook formats easily  over USB, as display PDFs. But you can’t zoom into PDFs, and the 6″ screen is too small. You can rotate them, but the the viewport is too narrow again (like on the netbook). I guess the Kindle DX with it’s 10″ fixes these issues, but at $490 it becomes too expensive for a single use device I think (and a lot less an impulse buy).

I was also interested in getting a Time magazine subscription (as well as some other titles), maybe even some newspaper. But on the international Kindle, Amazon limits subscription by not including pictures (which would be in grey anyway), which makes a lot of articles, and the subscription in general, a lot less attractive. They should, and could, update subscriptions through their desktop app. But the Kindle doesn’t get hot, doesn’t make any noise. It feels good in your hand. And I like it (maybe because it kinda feels Apple-y?). But it only does books. No internet browsing, no email, no socializing. This year more ebook readers are being introduced which offer some more functionality (without custom apps or APIs to build on), but often at an inflated price point. One of the selling points of the Kindle, its “free” lifetime, “Whispernet” 3G connection turns out to be also one of its Achilles heels. Since a couple of weeks, Amazon offers a Kindle API for developers, to develop active content on the Kindle. But how “active” can it be if you can only use 100KB per month of Whispernet on offer (as developer you can buy more data though)?

Anyway, I think I’m going to end this one right here. That’s a pretty long post making the case for the Apple iPad without actually mentioning it, no? I guess the hype was too much this time round for Apple to easily disappoint people. But I feel most of the complaints people vent are full of bull****. Yes it doesn’t do the dishes, nor a good cup of coffee. I for one can’t wait to get my hands on one!

PS: While writing this on my MBP, I started up my Aspire One. It had been a couple of months. I had to restart twice as there were Windows updates twice (in stead of bundling them all into one update), and there was a Flash update. Sigh.

So finally, after almost a year since I registered as an iPhone developer over at Apple, I build myself a couple of iPhone apps. Here’s how.

I have a couple of Objective C books laying around, which I opened once in a while, but closing them again pretty quickly… so I never got around developing anything. For now, I couldn’t justify any time spend on learning yet again another language. It is after all just a hobby project (the iPhone development that is). As a webdeveloper I could develop cool iPhone web apps (with jQTouch), but still that wouldn’t give me the same satisfaction as a native app. Then there are a couple of frameworks like PhoneGap and NimbleKit which allow you to develop iPhone apps with HTML, CSS and JavaScript. But you’re still confronted with XCode, working in a new environment.

Then I found Appcelerator and their Titanium Mobile. Their Titanium product allows for cross platform development for desktop apps, and their Titanium Mobile allows for, well, cross platform mobile applications, using JavaScript and HTML. And Titanium Mobile is itself written in Titanium. Still in beta, I thought I’d give it a try. Was I in for a surprise! Titanium Mobile creates native iPhone and Android apps, which means you get to use native UI elements, the GPS, the accelerator,… to get some apps up and running pretty quickly. For example, I took the http://nextsydneyferry.com code and converted into a simple iPhone app (in the simulator) in less than 30 minutes! Before I was able to get it onto my iPhone though, I had to set up “provisioning”, generating certificates and all. Something you need to do for XCode development too. Once that was set up, you click a button and it gets transferred through iTunes to your iPhone, and you got yourself a native app. Without opening XCode, in my preferred webdevelopment environment!

Some gotchas:

• If you want to develop iPhone apps, you still need the iPhone SDK which is Mac only. No way around that. But you already have a Mac, right?
• You’re building native apps, and there’s different support between iPhone and Android. For one some features are missing in the other. So you’ll need to cater for that, and fork code between iPhone and Android.
• You still need to follow Apple’s design guidelines (although I’ve seen some horrible apps out there that don’t follow any design guideline). You’re not building an iPhone app for Android, or an Android app on iPhone.
• Don’t expect to go building 30fps 3D apps or something, you’re better of doing that in Objective C

Having said that, for simple text-based, web-connected applications, Titanium Mobile is perfect:

• There’s the basic API documentation of the JavaScript framework.
• They have a Kitchen Sink app and source that shows you all there is available in the framework, so it’s just a matter of copy/pasting.
• There’s a great forum for support and discussions.
• There are a couple of screencasts to get you started.
• Both iPhone and Android apps (and soon Blackberry) with a little bit of effort. I hope they would also add Palm’s WebOS.
• It’s Open Source (on GitHub).

Oh right, something about the iPhone apps I developed… A NextSydneyFerry app, which is just a port of the web application into Titanium Mobile. I might add some more features like saving the data locally, so you don’t need a web connection (only for updates). And a Twitter visualization tool called TweetFrame, which cycles through tweets based on a search query you define, like “a digital picture frame, but for tweets”. The funny thing is that, through Facebook I got a request to have something like TweetFrame, but as a website widget (don’t know why, but there were already widgets like that). Well, since it’s just some JavaScript, I did the reverse and created a widget based off of the iPhone app… You can see it in action on the homepage, below the Flickr feed.

For now I mainly focused on iPhone. I don’t care that much for Android at the moment, though with a little extra effort I could get them to work on Android too. One of the other platforms Appcelerator is looking at is Blackberry (though could )

It’s golden times for web developers, a Renaissance, where HTML(5) and JavaScript open great possibilities. I think we’re only seeing the tip of the iceberg, there’s so much happening now, it’s an exciting time.

So, if you’ve been keeping off developing for iPhone, try out Titanium Mobile!

Technology Review has a special report on 10 emerging technologies for 2008. One is Offline Web Applications, which I’m not going to talk about, it’s kind of obvious (Air, Gears, etc). Others are very “out there” (“Connectomics”, “NanoRadio”, “Probabilistic Chips” anyone…?). Another one though is pretty real: “Reality Mining“.

So what are they talking about? MIT Media Lab:

Reality Mining defines the collection of machine-sensed environmental data pertaining to human social behaviour. Reality Mining measures information access and use in different contexts, recognizes social patterns in daily user activity, infers relationships, identifies socially significant locations, and models organizational rhythms.

It is emerging in a sense that it is only now that recent advances in mobile technology put the tools in people’s hands to actually aggregate large, realistic datasets of measurable information. In the last 6 to 12 months new mobile phone handsets are being combined with Wifi and GPS. The boundary between mobile phone (a phone to make, you know, phone calls and send text messages) and smart phone (a mobile phone with additional business related applications like email, office documents, multimedia) is blurring fast, and mobile data is getting faster and more affordable. But Reality Mining as an academic experiment at MIT has been happening for more than 5 years already (using Bluetooth) and they have collected over 350,000 hours (~40 years) of continuous data on human behaviour (100 subjects at MIT – Sensing complex social systems – pdf).

Only recently several other Reality Mining experiments came to light, like Cityware’s Digital Footprint in the UK and bluetoothtracking.org in the Netherlands. The goal of Cityware is “to develop theory, principles, tools and techniques for the design, implementation and evaluation of city-scale pervasive systems as integral facets of the urban landscape.” But in both projects participants are actually unaware that they are participating, in fact they are covertly being tracked without their consent in a technology experiment using Bluetooth scanners installed at secret locations in offices, campuses, streets and pubs to pinpoint people’s whereabouts. And they have been doing so for 3 years.

More than 1,000 scanners across the world at any time detect passing Bluetooth signals and send the data to Cityware’s central database. Those with access to the database admit they do not know precisely how many scanners have been created, but there are known to be scanners in San Diego, Hong Kong, Australia, Singapore, Toronto and Berlin.

Although anonymous, most Bluetooth devices are given a personal name (Tom’s Blackberry), and the Bluetooth scanners can even pick up full names, email addresses, and address books from poorly configured devices.

Closer to our hearts (as it were), Yahoo! is experimenting with its MyBlogLog service:

MyBlogLog allows users to bind their Bluetooth address to their MyBlogLog account and discover others nearby and find out if they have any shared interests. Meetspace [meat-space?] keeps track of time spent with others so they have a running log of people to meet and things to talk about.”

MyBlogLog uses a mobile Java applet to tie your Bluetooth device to your MyBlogLog account, then polls for new activity every two minutes. There are plenty of other services out there doing the same (Google Dodgeball).

But back to today’s future… and the iPhone. The iPhone for example offers assisted GPS which means you don’t even need a GPS signal for location aware services, cell-tower triangulation can be used, as well as Wifi AP triangulation (which by the way also works nicely on the iPod touch), as long as there are known access points around (known to Skyhook that is). And we happily use those services together with our social network apps. There are already countless social, location-aware apps available on the Apple App store like Exposure and Twinkle, and if our favourite social app doesn’t have a iPhone native app, we’ll happily connect to Brightkite or other Yahoo! Fire Eagle enable service and tell everyone (or only friends and family) where we are and what we do, and who we do it with…

Where previously thousands of Bluetooth enabled device where being scanned and tracked (unknowingly and unwillingly) by ten scanners spread around Bath, UK, now, at the same locations around Bath, or for that matter around the country, hundreds of thousands of users would be broadcasting their doings and location, and do so voluntarily. Though we might not know what is happening with that information. While we try to retain control of (and monetize) our Attention data on the web, will we be able to retain control (and monetize) our Lifestream data?

The mobile phone as a social artefact becomes more and more a personal black box, recording our every move (into the cloud), for later playback. Where we currently see governments worldwide implement retention policies for email, we might see, in a not so distant future, a retention policy on our lifestream. I do hope I’m wrong.

Have a look at this short video interview (4 min) on Reality Mining, with Alex (Sandy) Pentland, director of the Human Dynamics Group at MIT.

BTW, I love my iPhone, and I love location aware applications, but I always have Bluetooth disabled on my phone.

Wired’s Vanity Validator widget for iGoogle, found on the Julia Allison Wired article:

How famous are you online? Inspired by Chris Anderson’s best-selling book, The Long Tail, this gadget uses Google’s PageRank™ technology to give you a number based on how many good websites mention the name you enter.

Try for yourself:

What’s your score? (mine was 50 at this time, not quite famous or fabulous)

The iPhone 3G costs an arm and a leg…

The AP writes “Quirk in Belgian law drives iPhones near $1,000“. The article compares it to the AT&T locked in price of $299, which isn’t fair though. They should compare it to the unlocked price of about $550. Still a big difference, and 21% VAT doesn’t help either. The thing is, in Belgium it is not allowed to sell one service or device only linked to another service or device. Both services or devices need to be available separately. But the difference with other European countries, which offer similar consumer protection, is then that they can sell a device (at $1) linked to a service while also offering the device and service separately at full price. The full price of an unlocked 16GB iPhone in Australia would also be about $900 AUD.

Winter has arrived in Sydney. Well, that’s all still a bit relative though.
But it’s going to be an exiting month. We have an Adobe AIR camp (a day of AIR immersion), the Google Developer Day I’m looking forward to, and the opening of the large Apple store, plus a probable release of the iPhone 2 (ends up to be July 11). At the Apple dev conference in San Fran next week for sure, but possibly maybe also officially in Australia. Still, the question remains if we will be able to get our hands on one this month, or will we need to wait for another couple of months? And the releases of Opera 9.50 (June 11) and Firefox 3 on June 17.