PavingWays

There are some great mobile related events coming up in the next months that might interest you. Have a look:

• bada Developer Day, June 18, 2010 in London, UK
• BizSparkCamp, A Technical day focused on Windows Phone 7, June 22, 2010 in London, UK
• MLOVE, June 23-25, 2010 in Berlin, Germany
• DevDay for iPhone, June 25, 2010 in London, UK
• MobileBeat 2010, July 12-13, 2010 in San Francisco, CA, USA
• Handheld Librarian Online Conference III, July 28-29, 2010 - ONLINE CONFERENCE
• London Mobile Payments Networking Evening, August 02, 2010 in London, UK
• Nokia N8 Launch event for developers, August 03, 2010 in London, UK
• Consumer Content Conference, August 17, 2010 in Cologne, Germany
• App Days, August 17, 2010 in Cologne, Germany
• dconstruct, Sept. 3, 2010 in Brighton, UK
• MobileTech Conference 2010, Sept. 6-8, 2010 in Mainz, Germany
• Global App Show, Sept. 7-9, 2010 in Las Vegas, NV, USA
• Over the Air, Sept. 10-11, 2010 in London, UK
• APPNATION, Sept. 12-13, 2010 in San Francisco, CA, USA
• Nokia World 2010, Sept. 14-15, 2010 in London, UK
• Mobile 2.0, Sept. 20-21, 2010 in Silicon Valley, CA, USA
• IIR’s Mobile Broadband World 2010, Sept. 27-29, 2010 in London, UK
• IIR’s Mobile Payments Services conference, Sept. 27-29, 2010 in Barcelona, Spain
• iPhone/iPad DevCon, Sept. 27-30, 2010 in San Diego, CA, USA
• Blackberry Developer Conference, Sept. 27-30, 2010 in San Francisco, CA, USA
• Mobilize, Sept. 30, 2010 in San Francisco, USA
• Mobile Web & Apps World Forum, Oct. 5, 2010 in San Francisco, CA, USA
• Connected Home Global Summit 2010, Oct. 5-6, 2010 in London, UK
• Next Generation Mobile Devices 2010, Oct. 7-8, 2010 in London, UK
• 4G World 2010, Oct. 18-21, 2010 in Chicago, USA
• ITSF 2010 - Time & Sync in Telecoms, Nov. 2-4, 2010 in Dublin, Ireland
• Open Mobile Summit, Nov. 8-10, 2010 in San Francisco, CA, USA
• IIR’s Mobile 2.0, Nov. 22-24, 2010 in Berlin, Germany
• Femtocell Americas 2010, Dec. 13-14, 2010 in Miami, FL, USA

Are you aware of some other events? Please let us know!

Our June meetup for HTML5/CSS hackers was a hot one! We had around 30 degrees around here, and were sweating like crazy. Drinking hot tea apparently is a good helper (thanks Björn).

Again, less people attended than anticipated (learning there again). Luckily there were also two new attendees, thanks for coming Jens and Christoph!

The restaurant we picked was rather noisy, in part because they had all their windows open, which again also was rather unproductive air-condition wise…so maybe a restaurant is not a good place to do a tech meetup after all. That also did not help listening to Dennis from Hamburg, who joined us to present a project over Teamviewer/speakerphone.

The project was pretty interesting though: Dennis is using a Kaazing server for his Facebook-based Tic-Tac-Toe game. The game logic runs inside a JSP web application on the server and is using the Kaazing component for messaging with the clients. Clients connect either via a WebSocket connection (here’s the HTML5 part) or a fallback mechanism using Flash. The only thing to do for the developer is to include the Kaazing iframe component into the HTML of the game. Kaazing itself is a Java-based and enterprise-oriented product. WebSocket capabilities with fallback mechanisms and simple integration into web applications are underlining this.
Thanks Dennis for the demo! Unfortunately there is no version of this online, it’s all only working on a local machine. By the way Kaazing apparently runs on the AppEngine.

We also covered some other topics, SASS was one of it. Opinions about using it diverted and some attendees were reluctant to it because it is ruby-based (workarounds are there) and because it forces you to learn another non-standard CSS language - valid points I think.

Jens was kind enough hinting us towards the WebTech Conference in Mainz, taking place October 11th to 13th. Christian Heilmann is one of the speakers, so this surely becomes an interesting conference.

Finally we have been looking at some interesting HTML5-related links that I have been collecting lately. Here’s the list:

• http://happymagicfuntime.com/blog/html5_for_drunks (fun read)
• http://remysharp.com/2009/07/06/rimshot-with-html5/ (audio bookmarklets)
• http://html5shiv.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/html5.js (IE hack to enable HTML5 tags)
• http://html5.validator.nu (using Mozilla’s HTML5 parsing Engine)
  • about:config -> html5.enable in FF 3.6+ (3x faster parsing)
  • details here
  • test page here
• http://media.chikuyonok.ru/ambilight/ (HTML5 video with Ambilight effect)
• http://www.html5laboratory.com/drag-and-drop.php (good intro)

Thanks to all attendees and until next time.

Update: now that Steve Jobs’ keynote is over we can confirm that our hopes from below have not been fulfilled (again) and the new iPhone 4 will not feature a dashboard or home screen widgets. This rumor has actually been around for quite a while - we’ll not stop hoping though and we all should not forget that there are tons of other great devices out there that are well worth looking into developing for (see below)!

What else is new with the iPhone 4? Not much actually, except yet another screen size AND resolution we have to keep in mind when developing apps: 960 x 640 at 326 dpi.

Original: Apple has supposedly started to pull applications from the app store that implement Dashboards or interactive home screens (see here (same here, here too, at first).

These apps enable their users to put several Widgets on one screen, same as in Apple’s own Dashboard Application for Mac OSX. With these the lack of multitasking can be overcome, at least to some extend, and users get an interactive overview for different applications. MyFrame from Groundhog Software or DashPad from PXL Creations are examples for these. .

Ever since we saw the first iPhone and its non-interactive idle screen / home screen we thought it would be great to have really interactive widgets on there. Wouldn’t it be nice to see the actual weather forecast for the next 8 hours in the icon itself without having to open the actual application?

Meanwhile the Nokia N97, N900 and Android phones have this feature and I would assume Apple needs to improve in this direction as well.

So, you realize this is a question mark up there in the header, right? We just speculate, but it might well be possible that the iPhone 4G, already featuring multitasking, might also feature an interactive home screen or at least some kind of dashboard for widgets. It would be a logical step and Apple would probably do this in their own manner and most probably do it right (from a user and Apple’s perspective at least).

Still, the big question, at least for us as web technology fanatics would be if such a dashboard would be filled with web-based widgets (just like Nokia) or native applications (as in the case of Android). It’s hard to foresee, because Apple tends to go both ways from time to time, Mac OSX Dashboard widgets rely on web technology. However iPhone Applications are strictly native by design.

Let’s wait and see, within the next 3-5 hours we will probably know more.

Jesse and I took part in Germany’s GTUG Chrome Extension Battle back in March. GTUG stands for “Google Technology User Group” and the Extension Battle was a hacker competition to create some kind of Extension for the Google Chrome browser. This is rather simple to get started with and very similar to creating web-based widgets.

We had been playing around with gameQuery and some CSS3 hacks back then, so we decided to use what we had and created a Space-Invaders clone as a Chrome Extension. The outcome is called “CSS3 in Space” and it can be downloaded in the Chrome extension repository. Too bad I never found the time to finalize the multiplayer part :( But the game works pretty well as it is - especially given the few days we used to hack this together.

In the battle, we won 2nd place in Germany and scored Ogio Neoprene Laptop Sleeves…that’ nothing compared to 1st place and Nexus Ones but better than nothing, right? Currently we are at 1443 total and around 400 weekly installs, which is not too bad. This includes a “Top Picks” placement during the first few days which was part of the winning prize, so it will go down. It is actually strange how the “weekly installs” are calculated - the Extension is available for 10 weeks now so you should really see 144 installs per week.

Still, if we manage to stay at around 100 installs per week, we will be at 5k users in a year - that’s not bad and it makes me conclude that Chrome extensions, along with other browser Extensions such as the ones for Firefox or Opera can be considered a good channel for web-based apps and widgets. Monetization is tougher than in app stores, but that’s a whole other story.

Last Friday we attended the Mobile Unconference in Rotterdam. The topics at this event were mostly game related and over 90% of the attendees were Dutch. We really liked the unconventional style. There were some presentations, some discussion slots and a lot of space to get in touch with people.

The first presentation was held by Scoreloop. They have an SDK which allows game developers to build a community around their iPhone or Android game. Developers can integrate features like leaderboards, achievements or social networks. Apple’s Game Center does not give them an headache yet.

The second presentation was about Microsoft’s Windows Phone 7. The UI of the WP7 phone looked nice. Microsoft wants to make it easy for developer to develop apps (of course). On June 2, Microsoft will be organizing a free developer event called “Windows Phone Developer Hub” in Utrecht, The Netherlands.

PavingWays’ Rocco was presenting a concept about a new cross-platform e-reader for mangas and comics. The reader allows interactivity as well as community features amongst some more cool things. More about that soon right here on our blog. The session was intended to be a feedback channel for us and we did indeed receive a lot of feedback and food for thought from the attendees. Thanks to all and thanks to Arjan from MobileGamesBlog.com for mentioning it on his blog, too! Read the rest of this entry »

Tomorrow we will attend the Mobile Unconference in Rotterdam. We are really looking forward to the one day event. Some of the topics: Windows Phone 7 & Marketplace and mobile gaming communities - interesting stuff for us. We try to keep you updated through our blog or via Twitter (@pavingways).

There are also some other mobile related events coming up in the next weeks/months that might interest you:

• “Move Your App To The Next Level” Developer Conference, May 27, 2010 in San Francisco, USA
• Mobile Geeks of London VIII, May 28, 2010 in London, UK
• Windows Phone 7 Developer Hub, June 2, 2010 in Utrecht, The Netherlands
• Samsung bada Developer Day, June 3, 2010 in Amsterdam, The Netherlands
• dconstruct, September 3, 2010 in Brighton, UK
• Over the Air, September 10-11, 2010 in London, UK
• Nokia World 2010, September 14-15, 2010 in London, UK
• Mobile 2.0, September 20-21, 2010 in Silicon Valley, USA
• IIR’s Mobile Payments Services conference, September 27-29, 2010 in Barcelona, Spain
• Blackberry Developer Conference, September 27-30, 2010 in San Francisco, USA
• Mobilize, September 30, 2010 in San Francisco, USA
• Mobile Web & Apps World Forum, October 5, 2010 in San Francisco, USA
• 4G World 2010, October 18-21, 2010 in Chicago, USA

Are you aware of some other events? Please let us know!

It has been a few days ago, but I still wanted to provide a little recap of our last HTML5/CSS3 meetup.
We were set up for eight people this time but only had a turnout of five. It was still a nice evening at Frollein in Sachsenhausen. Additional to great food there was some HTML5 with Modernizr presented by Jesse and a lot of Node.js. Modernizr is a tool you can use as a fallback mechanism for new HTML5 pages. You include the JavaScript file in your HTML5 page and it detects the browser’s compatibility for all sorts of new features. The tool adds classes for each supported HTML5 attribute to the document’s body so you can take care of these document parts with special CSS classes. Modernizr also creates a special JavaScript object to do things like: if (Modernizr.geolocation){ …do geolocation stuff … } - kinda neat. It would be great to have this as a jQuery plugin or even better within the jQuery.support feature.

Both Andreas and myself had prepared a WebSocket demo. My demo did not work, Andreas’ did, at least halfway… There was incoming data from Twitter’s brand new streaming API to Node.js. The WebSocket connection to Chrome did not really want to work completely that evening, but we could see #fail-tagged tweets streaming in on the console :) I can not really recall the context, but there were also talking about Strophe, a JavaScript XMPP library framework well worth looking into.

I don’t have access to Andreas’ presentation (see below), but I also created one, so here’s another introduction to Node.js:

We were thinking of getting a small HTML5/CSS3 project going within the meetup group, so everybody has something to work on until the next meetup - I still think this is a good idea, now if I could just come up with something useful…The next meetup will be around the end of May, stay tuned!

UPDATE: Andreas provided Links to his slides and the project itself, it’s called tweamer and it is available on GitHub. Here are the slides:

If you want to attend the HTML5/CSS3 Meetup in Frankfurt in May, please sign up here: http://bit.ly/aVEmCm

We wish all our readers an enjoyable and a wonderful Easter time!

Once in a while you come across a new technology and are just blown away by it. You feel that something like this should have been around much earlier and that it is (gonna be) a significant milestone, not just in your own live as a developer but in general.

The last time this happened to me was when I dug a bit deeper into a project called node.js or just “node” as the binary is called. In case you have not heard about this don’t worry. However, if you are a developer, especially if you are working with JavaScript, then you should be concerned and maybe check your news sources, because it is a couple of months old already and it is drawing a lot of attention lately! If you’re not a developer this might get a bit techy from here, but maybe you get something out of it after all…

Ok so what is node.js? It’s actually not too easy to explain, but basically node.js is an:

• open-source
• low-level
• evented
• non-blocking
• event loop based
• SSJS runtime environment

It is written in C and JavaScript, it contains the V8 JavaScript engine, a CommonJS module system and it helps you to implement highly concurrent web servers by handling I/O very efficiently, namely in a non-blocking way. Support for TCP, DNS and HTTP is included and many HTTP features are supported that are important for Comet-style web applications - things like hanging requests.
Read the rest of this entry »

Today our first iPhone game called “Baby Roulette” was published on the Apple App Store. The whole submission process was really fast. We submitted our app to Apple on Sunday afternoon, it went into review on Monday noon and today (Wednesday) morning it was published on the iTunes Application Store.

The game is very very simple, so maybe that’s one of the factors for a speedy release…

Why did we build an app like this?

Baby Roulette is a really simple and fun game for kids (mostly) to learn animal sounds. Our main intention for building this game is to get a simple and nice looking game quickly in as many App Stores as possible starting with Apple. Our next targets will be the Ovi Store , Android Market and Vodafone 360, which is still running the “Vodafone 360 App Star Competition“.

We mainly want to gain insights about different application stores regarding users, downloads, major downloading countries, devices and of course we want to practically go through the whole process of building an application/game and releasing and actually selling it on different app stores. This will help us to enlighten our clients and of course we are also blogging about it. So here are some first facts…

Read the rest of this entry »

We have been planning to organize a local meetup group around the topics of HTML5 and CSS3 for a few months. These topics are necessary to get into for any serious developer in the area of web development. Also mobile developers need to know what’s up with it, especially if they are planning to develop for the iPhone, Android phones or basically any other web-based platform. On top of this talking about experiences and learning from each other is a good way to get into any topic.

Some people were contacted and this past Tuesday the first HTML5 and CSS3 meetup in Frankfurt took place. We managed to gather a small bunch and met at the Lokalbahnhof, a pretty nice restaurant / bar in Sachsenhausen. It turned out to become a very fun evening with good food and a couple of drinks.

HTML5 action was based around an introductory presentation that I was showing:

I was also showing a canvas demo intended to be used for the iPhone - after all we ended up replacing this part of the application with an old-school CSS sprite background animation for performance reasons, which was a learning on its own. Another Demo shown was a GameQuery-based shooter game that uses CSS3 animations to blow up enemy ships - amazing to look at and play - thanks for that Jesse!

There were various discussions about the two technologies. The concept of just sitting together without a real agenda, talking about a wide topic seems to work - I could learn some new things and I am sure the other attendees did too. Thanks to everyone who was there, it was a great evening!

We are now planning to do this monthly (roughly), so we are looking forward to April! If you want to come make sure you are filling out the Doodle poll so we can pick the best date!

Some more interesting news announced at the Mobile Word Congress:

• Google’s new strategy “Mobile First”
  Google’s new strategy: “Mobile First”  The company now focuses more on smartphones than on desktops. That means giving mobile top priority and launching new products first on mobile platforms before creating PC versions.

  (Source: brighthand.com)

• 60,000 Android phone a day
  Google’s Android launched a year ago and is now available on 26 different devices in 48 countries. 60.000 Android devices running this operating systems are now being sold on a daily basis … meaning about 5.4 million handsets per quarter, or 21 million per year. Apple sold 8.7 million iPhones last quarter and 25 million in 2009. Seems like Android is gaining ground, hopefully internal fragmentation will be taken care of (if that’s possible).

  (Source: mobilegamesblog.com)

  Read the rest of this entry »

At MWC a number of the world’s leading telco companies including Vodafone, Orange, Samsung, Sony Ericsson, LG, Deutsche Telecom, SK Telecom, Verizon, AT&T or China Mobile have announced the formation of an international alliance called “Wholesale Applications Community” (WAC) - to battle Apple.

They are aiming to build an open platform for mobile apps to all mobile phone users and want to solve the massive fragmentation problem.

They try to develop a common standard for applications within the next 12 months. The WAC is supposed to be a platform NOT an app store.

Of course, the app market is still a lucrative business and growing. Analysts at Gardner predict that the number of app downloads will rise to 4.5 billion (from 2.5 billion last year), yielding almost $30bn.

So far so good. But what does that mean, especially for us developers? Is this the right approach in the “write once, run anywhere” direction?

The good thing is that the group intends to use existing open standards (JIL, BONDI, W3C) and that will make it a lot easier for developers creating apps across multiple platforms. Besides developers then have only one single gateway to access a vast potential and international customer base. It also saves a lot of time and resources. And the new alliance has access to more than three billion customers.

Well, does this sound too perfect to you? There are still a lot of questions and even doubts, right? Read the rest of this entry »

Instead of a lengthy blog post here is just a wrap-up of quite interesting news announced at the Mobile Word Congress today:

• Symbian joins Open Screen Project
  The Symbian Foundation is joining the Open Screen Project, an industry-wide initiative led by Adobe to enable the Adobe Flash Platform across a broad range of devices. This means that Symbian will be integrating Flash 10.1 in future releases of the platform.

  (Sources: allaboutsymbian.com, eon.businesswire.com)

• Ericsson launches eStore
  Today, Ericsson unveiled an application store product for mobile operators allowing them to set up their own application store. The eStore is available in 25 markets worldwide, reaching more than 1 billion subscribers throughout more than 100 operator networks. It already has 30,000 free and paid apps and games. The eStore is backed by Opera who provides the client framework for widgets and applications across multiple channels and devices.

  (Sources: mobilegamesblog.com, finchannel.com)

  Read the rest of this entry »

At Mobile World Congress 2010, Adobe announced today that it will bring Adobe Air to mobile devices, starting with Android and Blackberry phones.

At the moment you can build desktop web applications with AIR that run outside the browser on multiple operating systems, but soon it will be possible to create Android and Blackberry apps as well. These mobile apps will be able to store data locally on the phone, access other data on the phone such as photos, and be distributed as regular apps in the Android and Blackberry app stores. Not only that, but the same apps created with Flash developer tools will be exportable as iPhone apps (”Packager for iPhones“). The big picture is that developer can create applications once with Adobe’s developer tools and then output them as AIR apps for Android and Blackberry phones, native iPhone apps, or Flash apps on the Web. Read the rest of this entry »

Some interesting stats about smart phone sales…

Worldwide sales of smart phones grew 30 percent in the fourth quarter of 2009 to 53 million phones, according to researcher Strategy Analytics.

Nokia led market volumes, ahead of Research in Motion (RIM) and Apple, and shipped 20.8 million smart phones during the fourth quarter – up 38% from one year ago.

Read the rest of this entry »

Last year in October I wrote in a blog post about smart phone applications coming to cars. Today I read an article about Deutsche Telekom and tyre maker Continental joining this market as well.

They plan to put apps into all vehicles via an Android-based on-board computer. The prototype called AutoLinQ will be demonstrated at this year’s Cebit show. Inspired by the iPhone drivers can search for apps, download music, pick up news, check emails and answer them by using voice recording technology. The promise is: all without taking hands off the wheel or eyes off the road!

Deutsche Telekom said in a statement that the core functions of AutoLinQ include an online address book linked to the navigation system. Drivers can type in journey destinations on the computer at home or work before getting in the car, or via their mobile phone when out and about. As the vehicle is connected to Deutsche Telekom’s mobile network, drivers can call up information that tells them where the car is parked, or check whether the sunroof is open and close it remotely using their phone.

Read the rest of this entry »

After mobile phones and cars we now will be able to access our mobile apps on TV - This really is exciting news:

At CES 2010 in Las Vegas Samsung announced the upcoming availability of of free and paid apps in Samsung’s Apps store, including apps for Televisions, Blu-Ray Players, Home Theater and Mobile Phones. The download service for TVs will be available in July 2010.

I found two interesting videos from Samsung’s press conferences:

Read the rest of this entry »

Bitstream, the company behind the popular BOLT mobile browser, has announced that version 1.7 of its browser will have the ability to run Web applications - known as widgets.

BOLT already supports Ajax, Javascript and other web-based languages. But the widgets will be installed directly into the BOLT browser and thus will load and execute faster. The BOLT widgets are written in standard W3C code. Users can access their widgets from within the browser via a new widget menu.

“As many of the recent mobile and wireless trade shows have demonstrated, mobile applications are part of the mainstream mobile experience,” said Sampo Kaasila, vice president of research and development at Bitstream. “However, the vast majority of phones in use today are ‘feature phones’ not smartphones. Unfortunately for the users of these billions of feature phones, it isn’t easy to find, install and run mobile applications. By adding Web apps to BOLT, Bitstream is not only improving the usability of our mobile browser, we are also making it possible for literally billions of people to partake in the mobile apps revolution.” Read the rest of this entry »

We just wanted to take the opportunity of the beginning new year to wish all our readers all the best for this year and the new decade!

We are in the process of changing our website design and content. The new page will contain more information about what we have been doing lately and what we will be doing soon - all in the area of games, mobile widgets and app stores.

Because of this there was not much happening here during the last few weeks, except maybe useless filler posts like this one. But it’s gonna be better soon, so please stay tuned!