26/08/2008 by nicola.

I have started to think about this area a bit more recently, which is very inconvenient when my brain should be thinking deep and meaningful python and java thoughts but…

Via experientia.com an excellent article from Adam Greenfield which analyses differences between location and context, with resulting interaction design based on this understanding of environment, the devices used within it and the interactions between a human, devices and the environment itself.

He refers back to his previous post defining

“a mobile device’s capabilities and available interface modalities at any given moment are largely if not entirely determined by the other networked objects around it…..the device is of almost no importance in and of itself, that its importance to the person using it lies in the fact that it’s a convenient aperture to the open services available in the environment, locally as well as globally.”

I believe this is related to the extended mind concept too. I recently read the Andy Clark and David Chalmers extended mind essay which looks at the extension of cognitive processes into the environment and how the mind could exist in an external environment. The Guardian has also recently asked if an iPod is part of the mind.

I don’t think it is but then at the moment I have a very limited understanding of how the mind works. I read the extended mind essay as the mind literally extended into the environment, not into a device as such. There are comparisons between an advanced GPS enabled mobile device such as a smartphone and a notebook with information written in which can be accessed, but is it the connectivity / interaction / relationship between the device and the environment which is actually where the processes are ‘ignited’; i.e when you listen to the radio and a song comes on which invokes a good / bad memory, it is not the physical radio which is connected to your mind, it is just the enabler ?

So if you have a smartphone which can access information whilst you are mobile, wandering around an environment such as a city, with the variety of connections that will soon be available through GPS, Wifi, possibly SMS, I think it would be the combination of - how you are feeling whilst you are freely wandering around, any sounds, sights, smells or something you can touch etc that might be affecting your memory and then with a possible connection to a specific activity/interaction such as RFID / NFC sending information on an exhibition / museum to your phone through a networked tag in the environment, which could all be part of an extended mind, not just the device which could be in your hand, on your wrist, around your neck, on your clothing ?

Maybe…

Forgot to mention, Digital Encounters is another good read around this topic.

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19/08/2008 by nicola.

Do you use nothing but the phone and SMS? They’re my top 2 uses, maybe camera and clock+ringtone for my preferred alarm noise of choice too. Confession anyway - I hastily flung together a list of my top 10 mobile apps for learning, which upon thinking about, some are just related to personal organisation whilst I’m working in learning technology and would probably be using if I wasn’t, as well. So below is my list with proper explanations and some other ideas too.

See Ignatia’s great learning list and also Clark Quinn’s Top 10 mobile from earlier this year. If you have never visited Jane’s amazing site of top tools for learning technology, its worth a look - it has saved me - I don’t know how many hours - but a lot !

So, this is the challenge, if you work or interested and blogging about mobile technology and haven’t already done this - out your apps, if you don’t want to blog them, you can contribute them anonymously via C4LPT tools..

My top 10
Utterz - voice blogging on the go with publishing options on the spot.

Screenshot - taking still screenshots from a s60 phone, using one of the phone cameras - I use it to show shots for experimenting and for showing how to do things. There are others available for windows mobile devices and others

Find.mobi - brilliant mobile search. Provides web and mobile web-friendly page searches (Mobile web friendly pages = less time to download and display properly on your mobile device). To find flight status, select Travel from the tag cloud below the search box, then select Flight Status - you will then see various options - if you are a frequent traveller or organising conferences / events, this is such a useful mobile tool.

Other mobile search tools incl Yahoo Go, Google mobile, Kooaba also have a brilliant visual search/image recognition tool

Mobile flickr - upload photos quickly

Nokia Maps used this in Switzerland last week, it told me I was in Germany and France before I knew I was and scarily quickly finding you via GPS. I use it all the time. I think some phones are now coming bundled with Europe maps or similar / Google Mobile maps is good too (I like both equally at the moment). UPDATE - just saw a post today that can now purchase and use Lonely Planet guides from Guides-Extras menu directly within Nokia maps app.

Fring - Skype,AIM,GoogleTalk,MSN,SIP - see contacts all in one place and who is online, with options to chat/call/send files. Skype now appearing on more phones, you can Skype chat out okish from Fring, haven’t tried Skype calling (for VOIP anything charges, check operator package). I used this quite a bit when Surrey email crashed and I was more mobile for a few days, it was great. However, Twitter / Jaiku would still also be as useful and as quick !

Nokia mobile Web Server & extensions - starting to play with but finding useful, can blog, upload, IM, chat and manage a mobile site from the phone (have to pay data fees for transfer, according to your operator package).

Adobe mobile pdf reader - mostly using for work files and articles I’ve bookmarked on del.icio.us which can be read on the go.

Mobiseer - mobile bookmarking, tagging, sharing pages. Don’t find it easy to bookmark pages whilst on mobile though. Currently using this whilst mobile delicious - which found out last week, is being developed . I can currently use delicious via my webkit browser when using an N82, can edit, share, delete bookmarks but can’t bookmark pages. Can’t wait for mobile delicious - oh and a mashup with find.mobi so you could get delicious for mobile friendly pages would be awesome.

OperaMini browser - free download and works on loads of phones/devices - I also use it as a backup for any browsers I have on an older phone which for whatever reason may format pages strangely (hasn’t happened with webkit but earlier browsers on older phones). I think Opera are likely to be the first to bring out a voice-friendly browser too - they appear to be leading the way with voice at the moment. Another cool browser in beta at the moment is Skyfire.

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29/07/2008 by nicola.

Been thinking about this a lot over the last week, whilst starting Kiwanja volunteering and looking at FrontlineSMS, also all the mobsessed stuff I’ve been looking at. So the focus of this post is about ways of looking at SMS that may be used by anyone regardless of where they are and what kind of devices, connectivity they have.

Don’t know if the whole learning technology world has been having these conversations for several years and I’ve just not noticed but - thought I’d write a post about what options I think could work, not work and some of the why. This is not going to be a short and to the point post so I’d escape now if you’re short of time.

How does SMS work?

*Once you press send on your phone, an SMS message flies off to an SMS center which sends it onto its intended recipient. If the recipient is unavailable it will be temporarily stored in the center and re-sent later. On its journey it may have to go through gateways which allow different SMS centers to talk to each other. The storage capability means unlike the web, you don’t have to be connected in order to receive it, which in bandwidth-challenged environments is a communication / conversation enabler. So if you are in a rural area as soon as you come back in range, you can pick it up, without having to connect to anything, it will connect to you.

Sending SMS using a modem

or using your phone/blackberry as a modem, an SMS message follows the same journey off to another phone, except that you can send lots of messages in one go or one message to lots of people (although you will not be able to send lots of messages per minute with a phone acting as a modem).

What can you send with an SMS apart from text?

You can send binary (data disguised as groups of 0s and 1s) files with an SMS (e.g. settings for your phone sent by the operator or manufacturer), multimedia with an MMS message (some limitations currently if trying to do bulk MMS) EMS enhanced messages e.g. messages with pictures, ringtones etc or audio messages e.g you could record your voice and send a message that way. MMS, EMS and audio messages may not be compatible with older phones and MMS will have increased costs per message than a regular SMS text message.

What can you do with SMS messages and where can you send them?

A very good matrix has been compiled by Katrin Verclas at Mobile Active. You can send SMS messages to email inboxes, send SMS messages to talk to web databases using SQL and HTTP queries such as POST**. You can also use SMS with a script of some kind to allow an SMS message to display as a microblog post on a web page, e.g. DIY options on a microblogging thread. There are tools appearing that will allow you to post to more than one microblog.

Now there is a new concept with a web server sitting on your mobile phone, as previously posted.
Mobile Ministry Magazine have recently experimented to see if they could replace a community reaching website with the Nokia mobile web server.

With the webserver on your phone, it has a messaging inbox where you can access all the SMS messages on your phone and you can also send them. It was great seeing all my text messages on a web page though - because it means they are sitting there in html which means I can hopefully do some web magic with them if I can get my hands on the source code ! Not available on older phone models and relies on web connectivity to view on the web.

What can you do with SMS messages in learning that doesn’t involve a technical explanation?

Ok you can have one paragraph off. Note: by technical explanation I didn’t necessarily mean a good one

SMS quizzes - send out questions to groups of people, they send their answers back via SMS
SMS hints, tips, lists revision - sending out key terms via SMS
SMS language exchange - use of SMS messages in the language being learnt, as a conversation. A social-linguistics experiment in Norway has been documented.
SMS collaborative or personal writing - of documents, books etc Also reading - stories like Twittories concept or similar, with SMS ‘updates’ fed through from time to time.

There are many others - John Traxler is an expert in this area and has written loads of papers and articles about using SMS in an innovative way with older phone models. In a recent article he mentioned MobilED project too which uses SMS to help create a mobile wiki - where you can search by sending an SMS message and the server will send back audio results which you can listen to on your phone.

Using SMS for games is possible too, if you can have a text-only conversation, you can easily turn it into something which has a mission or goal.

Can you use SMS to organise your learning?

Txttools provide plugins that work with virtual learning environments. If you are organising your learning in a more personal way, RSS to SMS applications have been around for a few years, one of the more recent and ridiculously named but also looks easy to use is Pingie With things like MobileWebServer and SMS inboxes, I guess its possible to create a mobile widget that could show these (similar to a Pageflakes flake).

So these are just some thoughts about where/when/how SMS could be used within mobile learning. If it fits? Depends partly what you are hoping to achieve, but if you have limited resources, you want to join a larger community of learning now and you don’t have access to a pc, then why not?

*based on the tutorial I’ve been following of late
**POST is a command used to send some information to a web database via a webserver.

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22/07/2008 by nicola.

I have recently decided to spend a few hours a week volunteering with Kiwanja.net and Frontline SMS:

“FrontlineSMS is free software that turns a laptop and a mobile phone into a central communications hub. Once installed, the program enables users to send and receive text messages with large groups of people through mobile phones. What you communicate is up to you, making FrontlineSMS useful in many different ways.”

More info about the mobility project and plans for Frontline SMS

I am fairly new to this side of online volunteering, having only done website design / reports / publication work before so I do not have contacts with a lot of NGOs, although will be progressing this over next week or so. I wondered if you also may know of any who might be interested and/or you would like to join in too, please could you let me know via

n.avery@surrey.ac.uk

Thanks !

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21/07/2008 by nicola.

Saw yesterday that Sony Ericsson C905 due out this year will support DLNA. I think Nokia N95 8GB which came out earlier this year also supports it.

Digital Living Network Alliance began in 2003 and now has over 250 companies involved so that technology products can talk to each other. The implications for phones are that they can connect and discover other technological devices using wifi and because of the alliance, more devices will be more interoperable with other devices. You can already do some of this with bluetooth, infrared - I don’t know if anyone else has ever tried printing from a phone using bluetooth, I found the printer in an office, but getting the document sent to it was another matter.

It is aimed at streamlining a home entertainment network but I don’t see why it can’t go further than that - I wonder if you can set up small DLNA networks in education or institutions?

Mobile connectivity to other devices and the increase in gigabytes of memory cards means that you could take larger amounts of rich media content around with you and present or watch them as you need by connecting through wifi.

Why bother when you can put everything on a memory stick?

Suppose you arrive for a session you are presenting but as a result of a conversation with someone on the way or at the event, you suddenly have an idea about changing some of the media in your presentation, if you had a DLNA enabled network, you could quickly connect to the web and download whatever it was you wanted. Or you were having a conversation with somebody and wanted to show them something - you could connect to whatever device and/or the web and quickly demo it.

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20/07/2008 by nicola.

Its GSM / GPRS / EDGE modem (approx £170 - ouch !) so that I can send and receive SMS, MMS, email and connect to the internet using a SIM card with the modem on my laptop. I am using a great SMS tutorial on Developerhome website - this page explains the basics of sending, receiving SMS and pcs including the AT+ codes to use e.g. AT+CMGS for sending a message.

Hopefully this short video will explain further.

transcript.

I haven’t yet found a way of using SMS to connect to the internet in order to see if can use HTTP and FTP to send an SMS message as a text file to my web server, but without the modem, I don’t think there is another option. There may be a way using Python but in order to find that out, I need to know more Python than I currently do. You can use mobile phones, blackberries etc as modems but you have more limited options such as unlikely to be able to send MMS and concatenated SMS (i.e. when you type a long text message and it gets sent as 2 or 3 text messages).

Text editor
I have found a python editor which is now installed on my phone. It is an application which has the kinds of features that I would like to create in a mobile text editing application, as per the pictures below. As far as I am aware you can’t type html code - its been written for people who wish to develop Python on the fly. In order to make the application work, install by downloading PythonS60 (am using 3rd edition on my phone) and the shell first, then download the python editor .

These three screenshots below show parts of the application. The first shows some of the editing options available on the application - common editing options that you would find in a text editing or coding application for a pc too.

The second screenshot shows options for tabs - with Python, tabs are important - when you are e.g. writing a list of statements / commands you want a pc or phone to perform and you want to write a sublist (e.g. if….else… type ones) it works in Python by using tabs and if you don’t use the right number of them, it will produce an error message. I guess it depends how complex the programming is, I’ve only had to use two tabs to indent so far.

The final screenshot shows how you can use the menu to insert your code into an SMS and send it in a variety of ways.

So, if you can insert text as a file in SMS, then surely there must be some way to send it via FTP once it has gone through to a pc…..I hope.
I haven’t had much of a chance to look at Android SDK yet but I saw they have a sample notepad application too which is cool. Maybe there will be an answer there.

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10/07/2008 by nicola.

Summary:

Thoughts from ALT Mobile Learning event in London yesterday - higher and further education colleges to come together and look at some of the mobile learning projects done in the last year or so.

From talking to colleagues there, some other options for using mobile phones beyond learning - e.g. social networking, an institution using bluetooth so when students first come on campus, they can use bluetooth to scan who else is around, networking. Re privacy - some people might hate the idea of turning on their bluetooth and lots of people finding them. So far, it seems to have been positive. Another university using bluetooth to find information as part of campus tours - could always use RFID - small cheap tags - can tag objects - stick them on - can link phone to tag and pull down information onto the phone.

Some institutions in remote areas, looking at SMS - even in areas with mobile broadband, amount of time during day when can actually connect….can’t really connect with either laptop or phone for long periods of time because bandwidth not sufficient or ‘drops’; so looking at SMS

Session - language learning pilot - with mostly Nokia N95s - mobile quizzes, mms, cameraphones, iPOD audiobooks, personal tours, mobile interactive learning objects - created mostly with Flashlite and used Adobe Device Central emulators to test them. Note about emulators - they do not always display on computer as you expect to see, so essential to test with real phones - sometimes you can put together a page of html and it doesn’t display in emulator but does on a real phone.

Found navigation was biggest issue, looked at softkeys and used option menu on bottom left hand side of screen already used - so used it for the mobile learning too - more intuitive, frees up screen space because don’t have to put other navigation such as buttons/arrows that need to be clicked. Interesting !

They tried different options with mobile quizzes, mostly required to click on things on the screen - navigate around ’screen’ itself using trackwheel or similar, maybe hotkeys etc Unsure about whether drag and drop available or not on phones at moment, so mostly have to click ‘things’ rather than move ‘things’. Some examples from IgnatiaWebs, Niace and mLearnopedia. No branching in quizzes so have to go back to beginning of quiz each time, if get things wrong.

Evaluation of pilot - majority of students found it useful, students happy to use their own phones too. Students could have 1 or 2 hour journeys to travel into London, so could use the time for this which then frees up their time later, although some students enjoyed using whilst sprawled on sofa / bed. With some of the interactivity with the activities and quizzes, students wanted less of it, preferred more passive activity. Maybe sitting on a tube in London, can sit there in passive ‘fog-like’ state, maybe just ‘absorb’ stuff.

Carl Smith from Learning Technologies Research Institute presented, showed demo of Skyfire (in beta) mobile browser which can play Flash 9 (don’t know of any other phone browsers that do this). Can download Flashlite - which is different - available for some but not all smartphones. Showed mixed reality - putting content into your local context.

Is Flashlite going to stay or go - see previous post, some talk yesterday from couple of people about this, will probably be around for a while but Adobe looking at mobile options with AIR.

Pattern recognition - for visualisation - taking pictures with your cameraphones from which patterns can be analysed e.g. pixels, computer algorithms - also using to identify criminals using facial recognition- Showed Microsoft Photosynth video from TED talk, you can also see demo. Showed Nokia demo of someone in Stanford looking at building - pointing with phone and clicking - then receiving back a picture of cathedral with wireframe of original building on top. Also voice recognition, style, tone, emphasis, stress etc etc - don’t know of analysis but should be possible to collect from public voiceblogs etc

Afternoon sessions - more FE focused. Rebecca from MoleNet presented - a mobile learning project funded from Learning & Skills Council/Network - FE colleges and schools could either bid individually or as consortiums - for funding - used mostly to buy mobile devices. MoleNet provided device training, learning design support and evaluation. Three main strands to their research - impact on teaching & learning, impact on teachers / learners / institutions, impact on retention, achievement and progression. They are producing a big evaluation report for LSC in September but some early figures seem to indicate 75 % felt that using a mobile device had improved their learning, 87% would like to use in the future.

John from Joseph Priestley College presented, opportunity to use pdas and play with during the sessions - looked at activites, also developed with Flashlite - e.g. driving, health and safety, ECDL etc Some were similar to some page turning activities can find in eLearning completed on pc Some nice interactive elements - clicking on items on screen to create e’g road signs with instant feedback whether correct or not. Students reported that enjoyed very much an apparently two classes missed their smoking breaks because so engaged! Have found ways of increasing attendance e.g. SMS reminders to attend classes.

Other examples - construction, mechanics - often had to record portfolios by either writing by hand or pc - could use cameraphones to record pictures, video of what they had done, their ideas about them etc which they preferred. Some using ultraportable pcs to record their work, seemed to work ok in that noisier environment, allowed for more space too.

So overall - lots of opportunities there, issues for connecting people in remote areas, is it going to be mobile web, SMS etc Issues around the mobile device - what are you doing with it, how would you like to use it, what is it like in the environment you are moving around with. Maybe options for students creating content using phones (not just recording pictures, video) could bring in whole new dimension too.

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05/07/2008 by nicola.

Well, mproject is just not a word and I think mobsessed is a better reflection of what I’m doing and my state of mind… Actually wondering whether to rename my blog when I finally get round to changing it. I have a revised delicious feed now. I am finding delicious so helpful for doing this, even though I’m using it in a very chaotic way at the moment, its great to be able to both connect with others doing work in related areas and to look at tags and see connections that you might not have seen without, thus informing thinking in much more interesting ways.

I think I will be putting some kind of brakes on though (only slightly). I feel that I’ve reached a kind of milestone this week with all things mobsessed, bit of a strange one but its - programming is not feeling quite so alien now - I’m still a long way from achieving an application, but some of the basic concepts are making more sense and even though I’m not really creating my own code as such, just mostly still learning from examples, I am mostly able to correct errors and understand better why I made them.

I was hoping to at least to have been able to have done a Hello World with Android this week but had problems downloading the SDK and Eclipse, with a programming language you are editing - you need to reference in your editing environment (e.g. IDLE for Python or Eclipse for Android/Java) where the SDK is and I kept downloading Android and somehow misplacing them so I think I probably have about 4 Android SDKs on the loose somewhere in this laptop but one of them is now referenced from Eclipse !

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02/07/2008 by nicola.

This year, its changing and its going to get more fun ! If it gets easier to develop mobile apps, there’s millions of more possibilities for mobile learning too. There is an interesting article from European Communications this week summarising past, current mobile development activity and possibilities about how it could become easier.

1. Why isn’t it easy now?

In the preface of Designing the Mobile User Experience, Barbara Ballard starts off with “hundreds of devices, dozens of browsers, hundreds of implementation environments” and expands further about the variety of technology, messaging, connectivity options. I was at a DevMobi event last week and they mentioned that there are now over 3000 unique device profiles in the Device Atlas including a refrigerator The Device Atlas is a relatively new (and amazing) output from DevMobi which has complete lists of device characteristics / specifications for mobile phones, blackberries etc across the planet.

In a post last week, George Siemens mentioned that innovation in this space has been lacking. A recent post from C. Enrique Ortiz who has many years of experience in the mobile computing space, clarifies this further by showing the differences between local and browser based application development. So - mobile application development to date has not been easily achieved, not just due to all the different devices, but the different components within the handsets as well.

2a) What innovation has there been? I’ve had some cool apps on my phone over the years (mosquito repeller that worked in Bodrum, being one of the better ones!)
I guess this also needs - b) What has been the context for mobile innovation to date ?
I am not in a position to answer this fully, but in short mobile developers have not had the time or resources to develop for multiple devices in multiple countries and have had licensing restrictions on the development. Some highly innovative mobile application development has been carried out by developers, often for their own personal use on their device of choice at the time. These have been released within communities - such as xda as well as manufacturer communities and forums - software development kits have been around for several years. Some communities and sites have been specific such as S60. Lots of apps are available as freeware but are scattered around the web.

3a) Why are applications not all in a central place for downloading like a Sourceforge and b) how do you know what is good or not?
Context and purpose of development as above (as well as specific commercial development by manufacturers and operators alike). Two more sets of developer communities have appeared for developing apps for iPhone and Android. Device Atlas is also a start and there are initiatives afoot to create more central ‘repositories’ of accessible applications that can be downloaded and modified. For example, the Android Developer Challenge recently released some screenshots of the 50
re b) As with any opensource - how do you decide - look at resources, check the ‘readme’ documentation, check online reviews and ask internal and external colleagues.

4. Ok, so Android is opensource - developers can build apps, what else ?
Ajit Jaokar’s ‘Android crossing the chasm’ post, his ‘eleven architectures of the mobile web 2.0′ post and not ‘comparing ecosystems with operating systems’ post explain that Android with its development of an open stack releases the potential for others to not just be application developers, but also device manufacturers because they can now afford to develop them (hmmm Nikia phones anyone ).Google as a web giant with extensive web application development and web communities can explore where it is appropriate to bring these into the mobile space. Andreas Constantinou on the Vision Mobile blog, describes Android as being similar to a browser on steroids

If you are interested in further details, I highly recommend both Ajit’s blog and book, as a non-industry specialist, I find it both readable and insightful.

5. What about other ‘open’ mobile foundations ?
The two most well-known are Limo and recently Symbian foundations which will both provide opportunities for royalty-free software development and in the case of Symbian foundation, backwards compatibility to current device versions such as S60 3rd editions and others.

6. I still don’t really get where the mobile web fits into all of this or why its important?
We know that we have been able to create content via the web, reuse, modify and distribute it via the web. We also know that with web2 apps and rise of web-based social networks, we can collaborate with others to produce and update content regularly, depending on how/when/why/where users have connected with the content. With the development of the mobile web, you can also create and publish content using the web and it might be possible to avoid the development problems highlighted above - such as device interoperability and higher cost, (and speed to market?). With mobile phones currently outnumbering computers in terms of personal or group ownership, there may be chances that some people’s first or early experiences of the web at all, could be via a mobile phone or similar device.

The device, context and purpose are also highly significant here - you are using a mobile device because you are on the move, you want to find relevant things quickly, connect quickly, not spend too much time browsing and fiddling around with the keypad or touchscreen, connect with other people quickly, maybe collaborate on work-related projects as well. Wifi, bluetooth, RFID, NFC and GPS provide a range of possibilities for getting real time location-relevant information.

Mobile marketing thoughts suggest that because of this relevance of data based on where you are and what you are doing, that mobile advertising may be more successful. Admobs live data concurs with this.

Matt Lewis suggested that using a browser to develop and deploy applications opens up possibilities for non-development specialists to have a go too (mobile widgets being a good current example of this). Gábor Török provides an overview of the different environments compared to a browser. He agrees to an extent but suggests that the proliferation of mobile browser versions and their current limits in terms of interaction / rich functionality may make it more complex.

7. So how can we develop mobile web content that is going to work, be enjoyable and useful ?

My journey into mobile web is documented on this site and its ongoing. One of the best resources available is the devmobi community website. Devmobi are part of Dotmobi whose investors (incl Google, Microsoft, Nokia, Sony Ericsson etc etc) have put money into the company to help ’standardise’ the mobile web and provide resources for anyone who wants to create a mobile web presence. Rudy Da Waele’s M-Trends is another good resource for mobile web development ideas. For mLearning specific ideas, mLearnopedia.com is a fantastic starting place.

If you are interested in mLearning but not sure how much technical understanding you need in order to develop content, the rise of the mobile web and the opening up of development opportunities will lead to you being able to access something on the ‘front end’ so that you can develop without needing to code or worry about how to make it work on devices. Barbara Ballard’s choice of book title is useful - it is not designing mobile applications, but designing the mobile user experience. They are mobile - moving around, what do they need or want? As with any other learning experience that you wish to create - who are your users, context, purpose etc . Device considerations come in a lot further along the process (although knowing about them / gaining an understanding of some of their characteristics can help and may make the process more cost-effective etc)

I will post back about this over the next few months as my ‘mproject’ continues, I would love to hear from you in the meantime.

For now, its back to Python

I am going to Open Tech Day this Saturday so have just attempted to download Android SDK and the Eclipse development environment (woohoo, it has pictures… well at least until I have to start typing !)

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24/06/2008 by nicola.

Today’s announcements about Nokia buying remaining shares in Symbian and the creation of an open Symbian foundation, reported in various places, including Pocket Lint and TechCrunch It will include Symbian, S60, UIQ, MOAP(S).

According to the whitepaper released by the new foundation, it will have backwards compatibility to Symbian OS 9 and S60 3rd edition and will support environments including Symbian C++, POSIX C (whatever that is), C++, Python and Web. It also claims that it will provide integration for other environments including Java, FlashLite and Microsoft Silverlight.

Be interesting to see what happens over next year alongside Android development from the Open Handset Alliance. So what does this mean? Ajit’s post last year, about open source and open standards explains some of the issues including licensing and interoperability.

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