Utah Open Source Planet

I’m way excited about the Utah Mobile Developers user group that is forming. Their first activity is on the schedule for Wednesday, October 29 and will discuss both iPhone and Android development. Here’s the agenda and RVSP:

6:00pm Doors open, pizza, networking
6:30 Opening, recognize sponsors, review agenda, review door prizes
6:40 Presentation 1 - iPhone Development
7:40 Presentation 2 - Android (Google Phone) Development
8:40 Door prizes
9:00 Meeting over
Afterward - trip to someplace local for pie, drinks, fries, whatever

Please rsvp by sending an email to glen@glenlewis.com.

I’ve already added it to the Utah Tech Events Calendar. If you’re a nerdy Utahn who loves mobile phones you should come. This is going to be an area of explosive growth and opportunity.

For those who didn’t know, I’m working on a tech business that’s very mobile-phone related, so I’m very excited to see this group forming in Utah.

Android is looking pretty sweet.

Android Pacman looks good as well.

I can only say, “wow” to this. Heh, is all that even possible? Check out how the guy navigates the web.

Seeing what Android can do really makes me appreciate even more how incredible Linux is. The functionality in this next video is absolutely beautiful:

I know a few people that read the Fozzolog own Palm-based smartphones like the Treo-line from Palm. I own a Treo 700p and had a 650p prior to that. I've been keeping an eye on the Centro because it just looks sweet and addresses most of the complaints my wife has brought up about the Treo when I tell her it's so much nicer in one regard or another than her Blackberry Pearl.

This is going to be a review about a piece of software I recently installed on my Treo and have become quite enamored with. But, before I get to that, let me just say I'm worried about my future as a PalmOS user. If Google does things right with the Android mobile phone platform, I will ditch Palm in milliseconds. For a couple years now, Palm has been saying a future version of PalmOS would be running on top of Linux and would provide backward compatibility with legacy PalmOS applications. The advantage would be a new, modern platform for smart phones based on one of the most actively developed operating systems in history. The result: HUGE VOLUMES of software choices for users and that is really what drives a successful hardware device. But, Palm announced earlier this year that plans to release a new PalmOS on top of Linux have been... uhm... substantially delayed... so quit asking about it.

So, if Google does things right with Android, they'll achieve the same thing for their hardware partners and I'll be one of the first in line for a highly-functional mobile device that will let me do as much or more than I can currently do with my Treo.

Quick News

So, that brings me to something new I've been doing with my Treo: Reading RSS feeds with Quick News.

Now, I don't like paying for software. I generally look for open source software for my Treo before I even bother looking for commercial options. In this case, I paid for a couple applications from Hobbyist Software, including Butler -- an application that, among other things, nags you when you don't immediately answer an alert or alarm. One of the other Hobbyist applications I installed is called Initiate and it's a replacement for the default application launcher. Initiate supports plugins and one of those plugins is for Quick News.

I previously downloaded a free trial of Quick News and played with it. I liked it more than any other RSS feed aggregator for Palm that I had played with, but didn't really spend the time to explore it completely. When I disovered the Initiate plugin, I spent more time and ended up throwing $14.95 at Standalone Software so I could own it for good.

So, what is cool about Quick News? It's an awesome RSS feed reader. It comes with a boatload of RSS feeds already, many of which I disabled right off the bat because, for example, I'm not a Mac user and I don't really care to read what CBS thinks is newsworthy. But, they still had a few good geek news feeds.

Adding a feed is easy if you know the URL to the XML syndication resource (e.g. the RSS file). This is pretty straightforward when you're adding one site at a time, but can be annoying when you want to populate your Quick News feed list with a lot of sites. It would be easier if there was some way to set up Quick News as a helper application for Blazer so that any time you selected a link for an RSS feed, you could have the option of adding it to your Quick News feed list.

The best feature of Quick News is the auto-update options. I set my feeds up to automatically update every six hours, over the air. You can also update at HotSync, but that requires a conduit -- presumably a Windows application -- on the desktop computer you sync with.

Another excellent feature of Quick News is that it offers the option of downloading images from feeds as well, thereby providing a rich viewing experience. All the downloaded feeds can be stored on your removable SD card so you don't have to worry about filling up your onboard memory with feed content. The amount of feed content cached on the SD card is configurable as well.

Below are some pictures of Quick News in action. These were taken with my digital camera and my screen protector makes them look a little hazy. Sorry.

This first image is the "collapsed" view of all the articles in a feed. In this case, the Utah Open Source Planet.

Next is one of the articles from the feed expanded for reading.

Thirdly, a view of the list of all the feeds currently set up. You can quickly configure which feeds will update over the air, at HotSync, etc.

Some people didn’t want to believe me, but it appears I was right about the gPhone launching on November 5th. I was not completely right about it being their Social Networking platform. Of course the platform launch of OpenSocial was launched early. It appears the November 5th launch so anticipated by all the blogosphere was, in fact, the gPhone and their new platform, Android.

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I’ve blogged about this before - for some reason (not that I would have an influence), it still hasn’t stuck. We are officially in Web 3.0. Why do I say this?

I define 1.0, 2.0, 3.0, and any major computer change as a change in platforms. Back in the day we saw major platform changes from Unix, Apple II, to the IBM PC and Microsoft Windows. All these were major platform shifts, accepted by the general population. People are stuck in trying to define 1.0, 2.0, 3.0, etc. as marketing terms surrounding the general consumer, when in fact they aren’t. A 1.0, 2.0, 3.0 release is usually a major architecture change instantiated by the developers, and branded by a marketing or business staff.

So let’s look at Web 2.0. Web 2.0 started making a name for itself at the launch of Gmail, YouTube, Flickr and maybe even sites such as del.icio.us, and Digg. What was special about these sites? They all utilized AJAX, a relatively new platform which allowed developers to create desktop “clients” on top of the previous, 1.0 web platform. Around this same time came Adobe’s Flex, another similar platform which accomplished the same purpose. Add to that Google’s Gears and Adobe’s Air, (and maybe even the soon-to-come Mozilla products), developers now had the capability to provide media-rich, client-side platforms that have the ability to communicate with the web all through a single web browser or web communications platform. This was a major change from the previous web architecture of only being able to shift from page to page to get what you wanted your applications to do on the web.

Over the last year or two, as some of the Web 2.0 applications have released social capabilities - sites such as Classmates (not a platform), LinkedIn, Hi5, MySpace, and Facebook. Users have embraced many of these sites, and have begun to utilize these sites as their own “personal internet”, allowing them to view what their friends are doing, keep track of relationships, business contacts, and use the internet at a much more personalized level. Some of those have released APIs to the platform controlling the social capabilities within their own architectures. These APIs, such as OpenSocial and the Facebook Platform bring an entirely new level to these social websites, giving access to hundreds of millions of individual internet users. Now, through an entirely open methodology, developers, like never before have access to an entirely new internet, inaccessible before, that brings completely new customers, a much more personalized audience, and a completely new method of application development. Social API, my friends, is Web 3.0.

What will Web 4.0 be? I predict the cell phone market - perhaps through phones such as the iPhone and just announced Android architecture. There are more than a billion cell phones out there, at an even more personalized level than even the social networks can provide!

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