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This site is no longer maintained.
My current weblog.
Saturday, March 30, 2002Question: If you have a weblog and a Pocket PC, would you pay for a program like MOB? If so, how much would you pay?
I had taken a bit of a hiatus from the Mobile Offline Blogger project, but now am back on it with a vengeance. Designing the interface has been a serious challenge.
My development work in the past has centered around server applications and specialized command-line tools being used by highly technical people. My design philosophy has always been to make these applications as configurable and flexible as practical. Interface considerations are important but secondary.
With the Pocket PC as the target environment, the interface must come first. The screen is simply not big enough for large number of interface elements. A single screen for configuration options can display no more than a half-dozen items, a text-editing screen has room for just a couple of buttons.
Suddenly I find myself removing features because of their UI requirements.
Anyhow...
The interface is nailed down at this point, and most of the interface glue has been in place since the begining. Today I have been working on proper wrappers for handling XML-RPC payloads, they should be feature-complete by Monday. HTTP transport routines were written for a previous test project, they just need to be integrated. Local storage is up next.
With a little luck, Beta 1 should be available within a week. Category routing for Radio probably won't make the first release.
Follow-up: Palm vs. Smartphone
In reference to my Palm vs. Smartphone post, Frank McPherson points out that the Palm OS's competition in the phone arena is not just Microsoft (and vice-versa). The Symbian and J2ME environments are being used on phones from Nokia, Sony-Ericsson, and Motorola. Nokia alone shipped 140 million phones last year.
I've been ignoring this aspect, but not without reason. My impression of the technology has been that it's "killer app" is downloadable programs, especially games, which the carriers will likely charge for (as they've begun doing with ringtones). Color me underwhelmed.
These technologies will dominate the industry, however. I would hardly be going out on a limb by predicting that all Nokia phones will be of the Symbian and/or J2ME variety within two years. It is the natural evolution of the cellular phone industry.
I'll dig in a little more, attempt to figure out if Symbian and J2ME are actually poised to deliver features that would put them in direct competition for consumers wanting PDA-like functionality on a phone (be it a PDA Phone or a "Smart" Phone). I suspect not, but I wouldn't mind being proven wrong.
