Dev.mobi newsletter April 2008
Yay! It's the never-quite-regular-enough dev.mobi newsletter!
This time...
1. We want your mugshot2. Knowing your mobile clients
3. Dev.mobi on the road
4. Save time with Daniel's hot tips
5. New blogger alert
6. We now deliver...
7. Upcoming "mobile location" season
1. Forum upgrade - we want your mugshot
...but we will settle for a cutesy cartoon character, if cutesy cartoon characters are your thing. Plenty of you have already uploaded a cutesy cartoon character for your profile image. You know who you are, and I won't name names here...
http://dev.mobi/forum
But anyway, yes, we finally have an update to our dev.mobi forums. Now it's much easier to air your problems in a public place and keep track of the advice that you receive. We've tidied up the layout a bit, and we now display your user stats: when you joined, how many times you've posted, and whether you are online or not. We also display your mugshot and I must say, so far, we're a fairly ugly bunch.
Well I'm sure it's just the lighting... but what better time than now to update your profile image so that we can put a face to all those crazy ideas...?
2. DeviceAtlas - knowing your mobile clients
So in February we launched DeviceAtlas (our **AWESOME** mobile device capabilities database). This month we've followed up with several articles outlining just how to make the most of DeviceAtlas in your applications. We describe how you can do device recognition, and also how to do image adaptation to send the right-sized image to the right-sized screen (useful, eh?).
http://dev.mobi/article/deviceatlas-api-php-part-i
http://dev.mobi/article/image-adaptation-with-deviceatlas
After only two months, DeviceAtlas is officially "the biggest thing since WURFL", and already being used in some very high volume sites. We've just added in device data from those nice folks over at Argogroup. And v1.2, which is just around the corner, will contain even more device data from our partners, Volantis and Zandan.
And we actually listen to your feedback ;-) and already we are adding some new device properties: platform/OS information and usable screen size seem to be hotly requested. We'll see what we can do!
See the DeviceAtlas FAQ or help page for more info:
http://deviceatlas.com/faq
http://deviceatlas.com/help
Oh, and James keeps saying he's going to write an article about a few secret DeviceAtlas features. Watch out for that one...
3. Dev.mobi on the road
The dev.mobi folks were out and about last month. We sponsored two separate developer events.
The first was the "Mobile Jam Session", in Las Vegas right before CTIA, and attended by James Pearce, our CTO and thought-leader (so it says here -:Ed). James was on the panel and talked about various mobile bits and pieces whilst simultaneously Twittering it all.
The second event was the HOOOOGE "Over The Air" developer event in London. Ronan, Andrea, and Jo all attended this event and delivered masterclasses on SVG and DeviceAtlas. A very successful event, by all accounts.
A bunch of sweaty developers locked in a room for 48 hours, and not a can of deodorant in sight? Well, that's how real work gets done. And Ronan continues to wrestle with an intractable mystery of the universe: Why aren't more people using SVG? Come on people, make Ronan happy. Use SVG - it really works!
http://dev.mobi/article/svg-mobile
4. Save time with Daniel's hot tips
Our new man Daniel Hunt has been busy too. He's written a great article on keeping up with the fast paced world of mobile. Through the wonderful modern world of email and RSS. Ahem. But seriously, if you like to make the most of your time on dev.mobi then this is worth a read. He walks readers through how our RSS feeds work, and describes how you can get email notifications of all new content.
http://dev.mobi/blog/10-things-about-devmobi
5. New blogger alert
This month also saw the arrival of a new blogger to our team - none other than Ron Mandel, formerly of Openwave fame, and now with Adobe. Now Ron is an *old school* mobilist if ever there was one, and you should listen to him.
Ron knows what's what in mobile and he'll tell us about it too. His angle is 'What can you do today?' (which sounds a bit familiar -:Ed) and he'll be exploring existing and nascent technologies from his dev.mobi podium.
http://dev.mobi/blog/welcome-my-soap-box
6. We now deliver...
...search results to Meteor users! Some great news from our find.mobi team. Find.mobi, our mobile search engine, has been deployed with network operator Meteor here in Ireland.
This is a big deal for us, so if you are with Meteor, go ahead and see if you can find something special. You might not find love with find.mobi - not even the mighty mobile web can do that ;-) - but for everything else, if you can't find it here, it's not to be found.
Well anyway, that's what the guys here are telling me. You can judge for youself. (Even if you're not on Meteor you can still use find.mobi off-deck. Point your mobile browser at http://find.mobi )
7. Upcoming "mobile location" season
Just a quick note. James keeps banging on about how the world of mobile location is hot. Keeps urging us to do a season of articles on it.
FireEagle? OpenCellId? Google Maps? Cool stuff coming from the GSMA? We'll try to cram it all in somehow. If you're working in this particularly exciting corner of the mobile world, give us a call with the inside skinny.
Watch out for some cool developments in this area.
Well that wraps it up for this month. One last tip: seismic changes to the entire dev.mobi site are afoot, but we'll keep this story for another day...
As usual, you can email us any time or leave comments on the forums at http://dev.mobi/forum
Love ya,
Ruadhan, James, Ronan, Andrea, and the rest of us at dotMobi.
--------
(You have received this email because you have opted in at dev.mobi. If you do not wish to receive further emails like this, simply uncheck the "Receive dev.mobi newsletters" and "Receive dotMobi newsletters" in your user profile on the site)
Sign in or register to reply.