Recently in moleskine to mobile Category

The lovely folk at Environments for Humans are hosting the 2nd Annual Responsive Web Design (online) Summit April 16-18, 2013.

The great thing about the E4H online summits is that one can attend and participate in the summit from anywhere were you have a data connection - home, office, coffee shop, car, mountain, desert, the ISS, wherever.

Yes, there is a the traditional presenter presents with slides, but the best part - speaking from experience as a presenter and as an attendee - there is a real time chat that the attendees can use to ask questions, comment on the presentation, and otherwise interact with the group, which then gives the presenter an opportunity to interact back.

I love this style, as it makes the presentation into a more of a meet up or workshop conversation amongst peers around the ideas in the presentation rather than Lone Speaker on Podium speaking Truth to Audience.

I will be presenting at 9am (CT) on Wed April 17, 2013 on "Mobile Development on a Shoestring Connection".

Please come join me, a whole slew of great speakers and topics, and fellow designers & developers, whether you are currently working in Responsive Web Design or Mobile or are RWD/Mobile curious, for the RWD Summit next week. It will be good, stimulating, and great way to get up to date on a wide range of ideas in the RWD and mobile spaces.

Use '20JEN' when registering to get 20% off an individual or meeting room ticket!

Look forward to next week at the RWD Summit!

Jenifer Hanen - A Minimalist's Guide to the Mobile Web - BDConf, April 2012 from Breaking Development on Vimeo.

Thurs 08.30.12 - The nice folks at Breaking Development have published the video with slides from my presentation at BDConf April 2012 in Orlando.

If you say to yourself "I must know more about designing and developing for the mobile web and beyond the desktop", then get yourself on down to the Breaking Development Dallas coming up in a few weeks - September 24-26, 2012!

Yesterday, I had the privilege to guest once again on the Unleash the Phones weekly video-cast. This time myself and two other guests - Michael Faro Tusino and Everything N9 the masked mystery man, as well Clinton Jeff & Alvin Wong of Unleash the Phones spoke/conversed/debated about supposedly dead mobile platforms. We mostly spoke on Web OS, Meego, and Maemo 6/Harmattan and how the communities of the said platforms are keeping their hearts beating.

A few weeks ago, Clinton Jeff invited me and Ali Qudsi to guest on the Unleash the Phones weekly video for the Nokia 808 PureView edition of their weekly video-cast.

It was a great conversation with some really smart folks, thanks to Clinton Jeff, Alvin, Yash, and Bharad for the invite!

Sun 07.22.12 - Testing out my new itty bitty little tripod for camera phones on the moon. I bought it to see if I could get any decent astro-photos with the Nokia 808 PureView.

Thurs 07.19.12 - Yesterday my Nokia N950 dev testing phone decided to lose all charge after only 4 hours and I knew that it was time for a new battery. With some Twitter advice from Attila and Thomas, I was able to unscrew the back case batteries, open the back of the N950 from the speaker end and then verify which battery was in my device and at what mAh.

While the Nokia N950 specs as listed on the Maemo.org wiki state that the battery is the BL-4D 1320mAh, @achipa wrote that the Nokia 808 PureView's BV-4D battery would work as well, which I tested and it worked. As of today on Amazon.com, the BL-4D is for sale but is only 1200mAh and the PureView's BV-4D with 1400mAh is not yet available in the US or for sale on Amazon. When the BV-4D does come available I will get one for my N950 as the extra 200mAh will help in the battery lasting longer department.

Big Thanks to Attila and Thomas for their Twitter advice, esp. on how to do the Quick Charge (carry an extra battery and swap it out).

Video taken by Ms. Jen with her Nokia 808 PureView.

Now that my Nokia N9 has returned from the dead, I wanted to do a post about my favorite Nokia N9 / Harmattan apps that I use daily or very frequently:

Firefox - Oh Yes, the lovely folks at Mozilla have released a version of Firefox mobile for the N9. Love it! Thank you!

FM Radio - I was a sad little Jen panda to learn last summer that the Nokia N9 had an FM radio receiver on board but no native app, as I do like my Los Angeles area radio when I am walking at home. Luckily, mobile app developer Andrey Kushanov has solved the lack of radio app problem with the simply named FM Radio.

The first version of FM Radio I used had only one UI skin choice, a rather amusing vintage radio interface with a possibility of 6 station presets, but the recently updated version allows one to choice between the N9 black UI skin or the vintage radio UI skin and to have more than 6 radio stations preset. Thank you, Andrey K!

Cameraa, aka "Volume+ as Camera Button" - Brilliant app / hack. There is no camera button on the Nokia N9 and there are many times when pressing the screen to activate the camera shutter is downright awkward to unusable, thus Cameraa to the rescue! All the app does is turn the Volume Up button on the N9 into a physical camera button. Thanks, thp!

Sports Tracker - Speaking of walking, I continue to love Sports Tracker (my second longest app relationship at 4 years & counting), as it not only keeps track of fun data about my walk, but more importantly photo maps my walking path. Thanks!

What Nokia N9 apps do you really like right now or can't live without?

Wed 05.23.12 - Ever since MWC in February, I have been waiting patiently for the supposed end of April 2012 or sometime in May 2012 release of the Nokia 808 PureView.

While we wait for firm release dates in various countries, I give you the video above on how the Nokia Imaging team conceived of the Nokia 808 PureView and a link to the whitepaper (pdf) on the technology behind the camera.

Tues 04.17.12 - Yesterday I was quite wrapped up in the nerves of presenting, today I took notes during the Breaking Development Orlando sessions and I have added in the presentations slide embeds as the various speakers have shared them.

My two favorite BDConf presentations from Monday the 16th was Guy Podjarny's "Performance Implications of Mobile Design" and Stephen Hay's "Responsive Design Workflow":

Per my usual, my notes are a paraphrase of what is being said during the presentation and what is on the slides, anything is quotes is a quote from the speaker rather than a paraphrase. The notes plus presentation slides can be found after the jump.

Mon 04.16.12 - Here are the slides from my presentation on "A Minimalist's Guide to the Mobile Web" from Breaking Development Orlando.

Here is the official description of the talk for the BDConf website: "Designing and developing for mobile devices can be overwhelming in the sheer amount of factors to consider. Questions of where get started or how to retool for fast and lovely mobile sites can send one screaming for the supposed safety of Webkit before running and hiding under an iOS rock. But such fear and trembling is unnecessary and we can go forth in confidence with the minimalist's guide on data sipping as a legitimate lifestyle, serving responsive images, how to strip that code, and do I really need all this Javascript?"

A video the presentation will be available soon on the BDConf Vimeo channel.

If you are a mobile or web design and/or developer who really would love to attend a great one track, intimate conference on the mobile web, Breaking Development Dallas will held in September 2012.

All photos taken by Ms. Jen.

Sun 03.25.12 - Now that I am in possession of my Nokia N8, Nokia N9, and a Nokia Lumia 800, I will start a semi-regular photo comparison blog posts where I will take a photo of the same subject under the same conditions with each of the camera phones and post the photos here, with links to the original sizes over at my Flickr account for even greater comparison fun.

Today's photo subject was a macro mode photo of Ms. Belle le Cane taken in the late afternoon light of the 5pm hour with a moderately challenging mix of cloudy outdoor light and interior incandescent light. On each of the camera phones I used the settings of Macro mode, 4:3 aspect ration, and the flash turned off.

The only thing I did not 'normalize' was I kept all three at their maximum megapixels for the 4:3 ratio, thus the Nokia N9 and Lumia 800 are at 8mp and the Nokia N8 is at 12mp. But it is not the megapixels that matter here but how each camera phone dealt with the color & lighting, as well as the subject being less than 8 inches / 20 cm from the camera phone.

All three camera phones did a fine job at a close up subject and there is no distortion with Belle's nose and eyes clear in each photo. In terms of light & color, the Nokia N9 had the best response to the mixed light as photo, the Nokia N8 had the most accurate color albeit a bit dark, and the Lumia 800 had the most interesting color interpretation with a light red-ish wash over half of Belle's face when there was no red.

If you wish to inspect each photo further, go look at the original sizes:
Nokia N8 in the original 4000 x 3000 pixel size
Nokia N9 in the original 3248 x 2448 pixel size
Nokia Lumia 800 in the original 3248 x 2448 pixel size

Wherein I, @msjen, and Richard Sheridan, @sheridan01, have a good natured mobile photography showdown on the best photo app for your mobile over at Nokia Connects...

Should you or shouldn't you use a photo | editing app on your camera phone? Richard and I discuss | write about this over at The Nokia App Photo Editing Showdown at Nokia Connects.

Go read it, put in your two or ten cents in the comments.

On April 16, 2012, I will be speaking at the Breaking Development conference in Orlando, Florida on:

A Minimalist's Guide to the Mobile Web
Designing and developing for mobile devices can be overwhelming in the sheer amount of factors to consider. Questions of where get started or how to retool for fast and lovely mobile sites can send one screaming for the supposed safety of webkit before running and hiding under an iOS rock. But such fear and trembling is unnecessary and we can go forth in confidence with the minimalist's guide on data sipping as a legitimate lifestyle, serving responsive images, how to strip that code, and do I really need all this javascript?

Come join us for a mobile spring break in Orlando at BDconf! Register here with the following discount code, ORHAN12, will give you a $100 off the registration.

Video by Clinton Jeff at Mobile World Congress 2012, Barcelona Spain. After CJ and I filmed the segment of us, from 3:24 on, in the video, we decided that we need to start a CJ & Ms. Jen video-cast.

A new era in my professional life begins this month, as I have devolved my web design consultancy of the last 11.5 years and now take the leap into full-time mobile work.

Since the beginning of my web design career, due to my love of minimalism, my web sites worked on nascent mobile browsers, but my true love since late 2004 has been in all things mobile, particularly mobile software that enables users to create rather than just consume.

I have slowly but surely since 2006, been teaching myself and going to workshops and trainings in programming - Python, Qt/QML, among others - and now feel ready and confident in my skill level to take the leap into mobile software development - be that mobile web apps or native apps.

I do not presume to call myself an engineer, but instead a designer/developer hybrid whose strengths are in user experience & systems design, as well as coding/programming to a working application.

Mobile World Congress 2012 was an excellent conference for me to attend as I had an opportunity to talk to a wide variety of people in mobile development, be they a single developer, at an agency, or embedded in a large company creating mobile web sites/applications or mobile software development, and the feedback that I received on my plans and elevator pitch was positive.

Yes, I used the phrase 'elevator pitch'. I didn't know I had one until a business development fellow at Mobile Sunday asked me what I am doing, I told him, and he said, "Great elevator pitch! Good ideas!" That feedback was repeated several times over the course of MWC12.

The best part of MWC was the announcement of the Nokia PureView 808, not just for my camera phone addiction, but for my mobile creativity app plans as the PureView will be the perfect camera phone creation platform for my app, be it on Symbian or Windows Phone 8 (when it comes).

Wish me well and if you know of any angel investors who are funding imaging apps, let me know.

Photos taken in Barcelona by Ms. Jen with her Nokia N8.

Sat 02.25.12 - Here I am in Barcelona for Mobile World Congress (MWC) 2012.

As I wrote here, I decided to go to Barcelona for MWC this year rather than Austin for SXSW Interactive. Now that I am here, even though MWC doesn't start until Monday, I am so glad that I decided for MWC as Barcelona is fabulous and quite a bit cheaper than Austin.

I left LAX on Thursday the 23rd and arrived here at 7am yesterday morning. Even though I sort of slept on the plane, once I made it to my rented studio apartment I had a nap attack that lasted too long. In the afternoon, I wandered around my neighborhood and went grocery shopping.

In the evening, I met up with Dhruv Bhutani who is also in town covering MWC for Fone Arena, and we went to have drinks and tapas at Cerveseria Catalunya.

Barcelona is really lovely and I am glad that I am here.

This August, while speaking at the Mobile Javascript Summit, I came out in my presentation as Appnostic, stating that the mobile world is too young for us to get set in dogma on the subject of mobile web vs. mobile native apps but instead we need to be pioneering on all fronts of mobile development and creation. I don't care if one is creating/developing a mobile native app, a hybrid app, or a web app / site, what really matters is that the human who owns the mobile has a good to great user experience, accomplishment of tasks, and an element of delight. Let's create, design, and develop in a way that delights the mobile user and moves all of us forward.

Much of the web only for mobile rhetoric is not only limiting but a bit absurd when taken to the logical end. How many of the mobile web only folks would work only in their computer's browser for every activity, professionally or personally, for months on end? Why ask that of the mobile owner that every task and activity should be accomplished only in the browser?

Two recent articles have pinpointed that now is the time to pioneer mobile design:

Cennydd Bowles makes a clear and concise argument that we need to build and innovate for mobile be it web or native apps:

"No one has this problem about native desktop apps vs. web apps. The same people that decry native mobile apps use Coda, Photoshop, and OmniFocus. Native enthusiasts use FreeAgent, Google Docs, and Basecamp without a second thought. In the desktop world, we already know that whether a native or web app is better depends on what it's for."

Go read it.

In another recent article in the Guardian piece on Nokia's Design EVP, Marko Ahtisaari, makes a great point about giving the mobile user choice:

One of the glories of a mobile is that it is particularly personal and the user should have the choice to use their mobile as they so choose, not how we choose for them. Maybe you prefer to do things in your mobile's browser, but your next door neighbor loves loves loves native apps, dowloading them mostly but loves 'em anyways. Maybe you have only one ecosystem you will use and all of your devices use that one OS, but maybe your neighbor has a MacBook, an XBox, and an Android mobile and doesn't care if they are different OSes, in fact they prefer it that way.

The mobile world is still very young and let's not fight for a small slices of professional territory but instead let's create great human centered user experiences and happy mobile owners rather than getting set in our ways so early.

On the Saturday of Thanksgiving weekend, Lauren, Dave and I went to lunch and then to the Huntington Library and Gardens. As we were walking to the Sam Maloof exhibit, I was telling them why I will most likely not be attending SXSW Interactive this year, but will most likely be going to Mobile World Congress in Barcelona instead.

As I was saying this a tall man walking the other direction said, "MWC is a boondoggle. I used to work in wireless and I know. I went every year."

I said, "And so is SXSW now and I haven't been to MWC so it may just be a new adventure for me."

He laughed, shook his head and walked on.

Dictionary.com defines boondoggle as:

"boon·dog·gle [boon-dog-uhl, -daw-guhl] Show IPA noun, verb, -gled, -gling. noun
1. a product of simple manual skill, as a plaited leather cord for the neck or a knife sheath, made typically by a camper or a scout.
2. work of little or no value done merely to keep or look busy.
3. a project funded by the federal government out of political favoritism that is of no real value to the community or the nation."

Wikipedia defines the term as:

"A boondoggle is a project that is considered to waste time and money, yet is often continued due to extraneous policy motivations."

Both SXSW Interactive and MWC are huge conference/exposition/party for their respective industries that takeover the cities they are held in. The last three years of SXSW Interactive has been expensive, overly crowded, hard to find people, sessions ok, and impossible to swim through the crowds. Now veterans of MWC describe the same but with the added fun and excitement of Barcelona pickpockets and laptop thieves but with excellent food.

If it was just a matter of being burnt out by the last few overwhelming years at SXSW, I would most likely find myself in the same position as the last 3 years where I didn't register until the very last month before the conference when friends convince me to go and someone offers for me to be their roommate at the Hampton.

This year is different. This year my best friend, Erika, is due to deliver her baby on March 12th, and I have the choice between staying home and getting to meet the New Little One or spending 5 days overwhelmed in Austin, I am going to stay home and be apart of the Team Hope cheerleading team in and around the same time as SXSW.

I am still considering attending the developer days at MWC and making a small holiday of visiting Barcelona and northern Catalonia, but MWC is the last week of Feb / first week of March and babies do come early and they can arrive late.

Hmmm.... I am going to go to Barcelona, need to experience Catalon mobile boondoggle over Texas interactive boondoggle.

A few small tidbits bouncing around my brain from this week's Qt Dev Days 2011 SF:

* One of the things that made me quite happy is that the grand majority of the presenters were using Linux OS of one sort or another on their laptops and a minority had Macbook Pros or Airs. To the best of my knowledge, none of the presentations I saw were run off a Windows laptop. A silly detail, but it still makes me happy. I have a special part of my heart reserved for Linux and Ubuntu, as it was my first toddlings around Ubuntu Breezy Badger that really kicked me deep into wanting to learn to program rather than just script sculpt.

* I am still curious what the Nokia "Qt for the next billion" slogan really means. Mr. Mathers said that it will not be to S40 but to smartphones and that the strategy will be revealed next year. Will Microsoft relent and allow Qt to have a publish to Mango project tab?

* Per the usual with conferences, the best conversations were had at breaks, in the hallways, and at the parties. I am still chewing on and thinking about a few of the ideas and challenges that some smart folk inserted in my brain during these conversations.

* And for the mild humor tidbit... If there is Qt Quick and Qt, I wonder if Qt Slow only uses Terminal and Vi/Vim?

All photos taken by Ms. Jen with her Nokia N8.

Thurs 12.01.11 - As the Qt Dev Days 2011 wrap up and are over, I present to you a summary of the photos I took over the course of the three days of the training and conference.

I really enjoyed and learned a good deal over the course of the Qt Dev Days. One of the best parts is the high ratio of nice and smart folks I met and the conversations were good. I attend at least 3-4 conferences a year and this one rates up there with Mobilism for my fave conference of the last 2 or so years in terms of content and inspirational conversation with other attendees.

Big thanks to Qt, Nokia, Digia, Futurice and all the other sponsors for putting on a great conference.

Even bigger thanks to all the lovely folk I met, the good conversations on mobile & development that were had, and letting me take your photos. Y'all rock.

See everyone next year, if not sooner.

******
My Qt Dev Days conference notes:

Qt Dev Days 2011, Day 1: Training
Qt Dev Days 2011, Day 2: Conference Sessions
Qt Dev Days 2011, Day 3: The Last Day

Thurs 12.01.11 - Today was the third and final day of Qt Developer Days in San Francisco (Airport area), being the last day it was a bit more relaxed and the sessions where more give and take. I have really enjoyed this conference, not only for all of the new information learned but for the high caliber of people I have met. I will definitely go again next year.

I have one more post of the photos from the event to come but the photo essay will need to wait until the weekend.

My notes are mostly a transcription but sometimes a paraphrase of what the speaker said and what their slides said, if exact quote then I will put it in "". The use of () is my notes or asides or thoughts.

Wed 11.30.11 - Here are my notes from the Qt Developer Days 2011 Day 2, the Conference Sessions of which there was many good & meaty sessions on Qt, Qt Quick, and mobile. The big dinner and party was also this evening, but that will merit a separate photo essay post.

My notes are mostly a transcription but sometimes a paraphrase of what the speaker said and what their slides said, if exact quote then I will put it in "". The use of () is my notes or asides or thoughts.

Qt Dev Days 2011 - Training Day

Tues 11.29.11 - I am at the Qt Dev Days 2011 in San Francisco(-ish) for the next three days and per my usual, I will be taking notes during the sessions and posting them here.

Today was the Training Day where one could choose one of five training tracks and I chose the Qt Apps with Nokia track and I am glad I did as the Digia trainer, Tuukka Ahoniemi, was funny, thorough, and informative on Qt Quick/QML matters big picture and small details.

The day started with Nokia's Kenny Mathers talking about the best way to make money from mobile apps and the Nokia app store. He talked about 'Next Billion' a favorite unspecified key phrase of Nokia presenters of the last year and I had an opportunity to ask him to clarify. And he did.

The day ended with Gordon Thornton walking us through how one submits one's app to the Nokia Store and demystified the process.

Now to go off to the Welcome Reception.

My notes are mostly a transcription but sometimes a paraphrase of what the speaker said and what their slides said, if exact quote then I will put it in "". The use of () is my notes or asides or thoughts.

On Friday in the way of any good internet bunny trail, I found myself at the PySide website wondering what progress had been made with the Python port/binding for Qt since I last looked, downloaded, built and inspected to see if it was fit for my mobile application development purposes back in April/May (or more like was my skillset I ready for building the most recent stable version of PySide).

In the first 20 minutes of traipsing down Python and Qt based bunny trails on Friday afternoon, I found myself in raptures of happiness, as it appeared to my eyes and reading comprehension that Nokia had taken on the PySide project and was moving forward with it as a legitimate wing of Qt. I was so excited that I called a non-technology-working friend and gushed about it to her (sorry).

I tweeted asking if any of the PySide folk would be at Qt Developer Days 2011 in San Francisco next week. I was ecstatic about the prospects of using Python for the logic in my Qt Quick apps rather than C++ or Javascript.

The major reason that I love both Python and Qt Quick/QML is that the code is by and large minimal and declarative but gets the job done powerfully without excessive grammar, wordiness, and very little punctuation, which makes my minimalist loving self happy happy happy. The very idea of Python + Qt Quick sounded too deliciously good to be true.

And it appears that after some months of Nokia dedicating employees to making PySide a robust binding for Qt and Qt Quick, that Nokia is now un-dedicating said employees and will be decommissioning their involvement in PySide to an add-on for Qt.

My hopes were crushed in less than two hours. Up in happiness of the possible perfect pairing of my favorite programming/scripting language with my favorite mobile framework, only to fall down the rocks of despair and sadness that so much potential was so fast dissipated.

Matti Airas the Nokia python guru on the PySide project does write in this email that he does see a future for PySide and mobile as an add-on for Qt in the community separate from Nokia. Here's to hoping that he is right.

Further hopes go to Python catching on as a good option to the various C languages and Java for mobile app development. And here's to hoping that PySide folks will be at Qt Dev Days next week.

****
Update from Wed 11.23.11 - Just to clarify, this post is for NaBloPoMo and is my joke on / to myself about moderating my enthusiasms in a world where the funding of technology projects is driven by management stratagems & quarterly profits, as I get so excited upon finding out a technology has finally reached the point that it will be useful and then, in this case, less than an hour or two later after searching for more info I find out that the project has been discontinued.

Wed 11.16.11 - Today during Scruffy's late afternoon / early evening walk, I decided to take the Nokia N950 along to see how it would handle low light and just plain dark photo situations. In each of the photos above, I only turned off the flash, kept the camera on Automatic, and did not change any other settings. The Nokia N950 did a fine job in the low light situations where I could hold the device steady.

One of the great promises of HTML5 with CSS3 and Javascript is that eventually, after much wrangling & negotiation, one will be able to write apps that can work across many devices regardless of platform and ecosystem. In the meantime, while we are waiting for HTML5 to have access to the contacts or camera on the mobile you could be possibly carrying, we can use future friendly practices to develop and design flexible web sites and apps.

Until the future web accessible world arrives, from a pragmatic standpoint, many of us if we want to access contacts, or the camera, or a variety of other APIs and features on our mobile devices, we find ourselves delving into hybrid native-web mobile worlds or diving into native mobile apps be it through a SDK or PhoneGap or the like.

Thomas Perl in a post-Nokia World 2011 blog post, Comparing Mobile OS SDK availability by platform, builds an argument for a very salient point for folks who are currently developing for native mobile apps:

"Now, people can argue that one can set up dual-boot or virtual machines to support all OSes, but that's not the point. The point is that if the SDK is available on all Desktop platforms (note that this is not the same as SDK targetting all mobile platforms), developers can retain their choice of Desktop OS on which they develop on, and are not forced to use OS X or Windows for development of apps for the corresponding mobile platform (I also understand the reason why these companies only provide the SDK for their own Desktop platform, but that is not a good reason from a developer's point of view)."

I agree with Mr. Perl. I don't want to be told which desktop platform I must use so that I can develop for a certain mobile. I find working in virtual box to be tedious after a short span of time. I would like the system I develop for to respect me enough to let me to make the choice about what desktop/laptop OS I prefer to use.

Bravo to Android, Qt, and PhoneGap.

I have been compiling a list of links for how to use, design, and develop for the Nokia N9 / N950, yesterday was links to tips & tricks for the User, Designers and Developers. Today is all the great and very valuable blogs and podcasts that I have found to be a font of information on the Nokia N9/N950, Harmattan, creating N9 apps in Qt.

If you know of other good Nokia N9/N950 designer, developer, and Qt blogs out there, let us know in the comment section.

Nokia N9 & Qt Blogs, Forums and Podcasts:

Nokia N9 Developer Blog
http://www.developer.nokia.com/Community/Blogs/blog/n9-developer

This Week in Qt Podcast
http://www.ics.com/learning/podcasts/

Blogasdf
http://juhaturunen.com/blog/

Cutehacks
http://cutehacks.com/

Ed Page (Python, Harmattan & Qt...)
http://eopage.blogspot.com/

fiferboy's developing
http://fiferboy.blogspot.com/

flors
http://flors.wordpress.com/

KDE Pinheiro (Designer who works with Qt)
http://pinheiro-kde.blogspot.com/

Meego Handset Forum
http://forum.meego.com/

Meego Aggregator
https://meego.com/aggregator

My Meego
http://my-meego.com/

Nokia Developer News
http://www.developer.nokia.com/Community/Blogs/blog/nokia-developer-news

PySnippet (more Python & Qt!)
http://pysnippet.blogspot.com/

Qt Labs Blog
http://labs.qt.nokia.com/

Qt, Maemo and some other stuff
http://kunalmaemo.blogspot.com/

Qt / MeeGo Mobile Apps Development
http://qt-mobility.blogspot.com/

qtsource
http://qtsource.wordpress.com/

The MicroNokia Developer
http://micronokiadev.wordpress.com/

thp on Maemo
http://thpmaemo.blogspot.com/

I have been compiling a list of links for how to use, design, and develop for the Nokia N9 / N950. The first section tips and tricks is for anyone with a Nokia N9, the second section is links for Nokia N9/N950 designers and developers, and the third is Nokia N950 specific.

Tomorrow, I will publish a list of blogs and podcasts that I have found to be a font of information on the Nokia N9/N950, Harmattan, creating N9 apps in Qt.

If you have any tips and tricks links for the Nokia N9 or N950, be it for users or designers & developers, tell us about it the comments.

Nokia N9 and Nokia N950 general interest topics for everyone:

The Nokia N9 Swipe site:
http://swipe.nokia.com/

Nokia N9 UX Gestures - click on DEMOS (I found the gesture demos invaluable in the first hour of using the N950):
https://www.developer.nokia.com/swipe/ux/pages/getting_started.html

Nokia N9 MeeGo/Harmattan Swipe UI Tips and Tricks
http://blog.wapreview.com/15554/

Nokia N950 Close Apps:
http://my-meego.com/faq/showquestion.php?fldAuto=5&faq=1

Using Firefox Mobile on the Nokia N9 (I have been using a version of mobile FF from Sept on the Nokia N950 and it is great)
http://blog.wapreview.com/15780/

N9 Swipe undocumented feature; activate sane behavior (How to set the Swipe behavior to the gestures you want)
http://felipec.wordpress.com/2011/08/14/n9-swipe-undocumented-feature-activate-sane-behavior/

How to Take Screenshots on Nokia N9 with ScreenshotMee
http://thenokiablog.com/2011/10/13/how-to-take-screenshots-nokia-n9/

FM Radio App
http://my-meego.com/software/applications.php?name=FM_Radio&fldAuto=488&faq=2

Regardless of how I personally feel about the Nokia-Windows alliance, the above photo is SO FULL OF WIN that it makes my whole day happy.

On the left in the slightly rumpled-it-is-the-end-of-a-long-day suit, smiling away is Stephen Elop, the CEO of Nokia.

In the center with his thumb up is everyone's fave happy, enthusiastic blogger, Mr. Clinton Jeff.

Why Full of Win?

1) How many CEO's of Fortune 100 companies run around towards the middle or end of the yearly company conference party rather than be in the extra special VIP area?

2) How many CEO's would pose towards the end of said party with happy, excited overly caffeinated bloggers?

3) How many humans on the planet would say to said CEO, "Hi, will take a photo with us?!?!?!?" Clinton would. This is why we love CJ, he has got cajones.

4) Rewind 15 months ago to 4 years ago, would OPK have posed for this photo and actually looked HAPPY? No.

Mr. Elop has now risen in my estimation. Now if he would resurrect Harmattan/Meego...

;o)

Next Wednesday at 9am GMT, Nokia's CEO and various other humans will get on a stage at London's EXPO and make Big and Great Announcements concerning Nokia and its Future at the annual Nokia World. Big, Grand, CEO type announcements.

The kind of announcements that set the tone for the next year or two or more. Announcements that will either win the faithful and the masses back to Nokia or the kind that will fall of meh ears. Announcements that will either excite or horrify designers and developers who are so crucial to the success of the 'ecosystem'.

In the face of such high expectation, Al P and I, while sitting at Berlin cafe this morning, cooked up five probable or improbable but hopeful announcements that could come out of Nokia World next week:

1) Announcement of next Harmattan commercial release, preferably of the already existing Nokia N950 dev phone, as it is very desired.

2) Nokia N8 refresh with 12mp or higher, autofocus Carl Zeiss lens, Xenon flash, 2.2f stop, 4" screen, with green & red call buttons. We would prefer the OS be Belle, but due to current Windowsphilia conditions, most likely Mango.

3) High end phone with physical landscape qwerty keyboard with tilt screen. Too many danged slab touch only phones out on market with so little differentiation. This could also be combined with #1.

4) Meltemi gets announced and it is a stripped down core of Maemo that has S40's data sipping and battery longevity talents. Then all feature phones apps can be built on Qt.

5) A Metro (Windows 8) Tablet. 10", ARM dual core, ...[At this point Al and Jen disagree on screen resolution, price, etc.]

It should be interesting to see or hear about. Will any of Al and I's improbable predictions come true?

As a side note, Ms. Jen wants to know why the Nokia World Developer's track is only 1/4 of the event and is fairly weak in its offerings? Nokia, don't just send us to Microsoft, keep us on board with you and with contact & events from you.

Mobilism has announced a Call for Papers for their May 2012 conference in Amsterdam. I think this is very exciting.

As the xkcd comic above amusingly illustrates a problem that gets solved by an academic gets many years and much publicity generated out of one problem, and in business it is on to the next problem with nary a peep out of the problem solver.

Web design and development have evolved faster in the last 15 years than academia's ability or desire to keep up with it, in response the community has been largely self-educated with keen practitioners who have solved various problems rising up to write articles, blog posts, books and speak at conferences. In the last few years, a certain set of these practitioners have become the rockstars of the web publishing and speaking worlds.

Recently there has been a bit of a brouhaha about how conferences seem to have the same speakers, the prices are high, and charges of elitism have been leveled on the in crowd.

On one hand, as Andy does, one can argue that known speakers are needed for conferences to draw paying attendees so that the conference organizers can rent the venue, pay for all the attendant expenses, etc. On the other hand, known speakers and authors can state that they are feeding back into the community by getting the information on standards, new & best practices, as well as lighting an inspirational fire for other designers and developers.

Be that as it may, there are many other web and mobile designers and developers who by dint of introversion, fear of putting oneself out there, thinking the problem or solution is not good enough, busy-ness at work, family obligations, NDAs and other corporate contracts who are not being heard or even seen as they just move on to the next problem to be solved and keep quiet about the one they just solved. The rest of the community is much the poorer for their silence.

For this alone, the Mobilism Call for Papers is brilliant, as it will hopefully be the (structured) encouragement that many developers and designers who have solved really cool problems but never think to or have not yet published or spoken about them will come out of the woodwork and will submit their solutions as a paper for the 30 minute presentation slot.

Yes, you, don't be shy, share your ideas and solutions, go submit a paper to Mobilism 2012.

*****

Update: Wed 10.05.11 - Please read the comments below as Jeremy Keith asks a pertinent question about my language and link choices and I reply.

Also, Helen Keegan, FJ van Wingerde and I comment about this from an the academic v. practitioner point of view on Facebook.

Thur 09.29.11 - The long awaited Nokia N9 with much talked about Swipe UI and the Meego/Harmattan OS has now started to ship or will be in a store near you within the next two weeks. Well, in a shop near you if you live in Sweden, Finland, Pakistan, Kazakistan, or China, but if you live in the US, UK, Germany or many other places you are f*ck3d unto the very Ballmer. Yep, only MacroSquish for you if you live in Western Europe or the Western Hemisphere.

Order the Nokia N9 online, even if your local shop doesn't carry it, it is worth it. The Swipe UI is beautiful and very usable, the hardware delish, and Maemo's Harmattan with a touch of Meego goodness hiding behind all the UI swipe is a geek's delight. I have had the Nokia N950 developer phone for two weeks now and it causes mobile envy even in the most dedicated iAddict. If the Nokia N950 turns heads...

Hello lovely little Nokia N9, welcome. Go forth and prosper.

Three thoughts floating around my head this morning while eating breakfast and reading the weekly Seal Beach Sun:

1) For all of my gushing two days ago, after spending some time with the Nokia N950 the camera is very good but not great like the N8. The resolution, color, and clarity on the N8 is definitely superior but the N950 has a nice look to the photos that I do like.

2) At Mobile 2.0's end of conf cocktails, I had a conversation with Mike Rowehl of Mobile Monday SV and Churn labs about wanting to develop for the mobile web or native apps. Mike said that the stop up on developing for the mobile web for many devs was monetization. I made a joke that I was satisfied as long as I wasn't living in my car or had moved back home at 40-something. We both laughed, but I could see that monetization meant something else to him entirely.

The conversation keeps coming back to me when thinking about the mobile web: why right now devs prefer to create native apps and what in the heck does monetization really mean any way?

Does monetization mean that I can be self-supporting as an app developer and not have to be taking on clients (my definition)? Does it mean the dev can use the money to buy a house and hire a few employees? Does it mean turning the app(s) into a full blown business? A business that then gets sold to a larger business for a large sum and then you get to join the big cats in Los Gatos?

What thinkest thou?

3) Once again the Seal Beach Sun's Crime Log has produced a pick of the litter winner this morning:

"Monday, Sept 5, 2011 - Rossmoor - Suspicious Person or Circumstances - 10:55am - Kensington Road - The caller requested a patrol check for a man wearing a hoodie who was walking on the Gertrude side of the elementary school. The caller said there has been a recent increase in crimes, including a robbery involving men in dark hoodies. The caller that it was suspicious for someone to be wearing a hoodie at all in September."

Now before you get all upset about hooding profiling, please remember that this is September in Southern California, our hottest month of the year with temps in the 90s to 100s and higher. And the caller was right, anyone wearing a hoodie with the hood up in 90+ temps is cruising for a minor Darwin Award in the heat stroke category.

Photo of Tammy, Ryan, and Solomon taken by Ms. Jen this afternoon with a Nokia N950 camera phone.

Mon 09.12.11 - This morning DHL delivered a Nokia N950 developer mobile wonder-kin to my doorstep. The Nokia N950 is the nDrool device that I have been hoping for out of Nokia for the last few years: Great camera + physical keyboard with a tilt screen + maemo/meego linux based OS.

The Nokia N950 is the next few logical steps from the N900 and while still very geeky it is also consumer ready. It is a true shame that Nokia is choosing to only release this device to a few selected developers and not to general, worldwide release.

After playing with the the Swipe UI, the camera, browser, downloading apps, and getting myself acquainted with the various on-board dev tools today, I would feel very comfortable in giving the Nokia N950 to anyone I know who likes smartphones.

The thing that surprised me the most is how high quality the camera is on the N950 is even without the branded Carl Zeiss lens. I love the camera software UI and have been getting really nice photos all day long. I very much look forward to the N9 with Zeiss optics.

Meego/Maemo + the Swipe UI = A lovely lovely Mobile. I look forward to creating for the Nokia N950 and N9.

Dear Nokia, the Nokia N950 and N9 are ready for the worldwide mass market, don't miss out on selling lots of devices in your current love for all things MS. I have played with the Windows phone and was bored in less than 5 mins, I still have the N950 in my hands after nine hours of discovery play.

Big thanks to all the folks who have been working diligently on the Nokia N950 and N9. And mille grazie to the good folk(s) at Nokia Developer for sending me a Nokia N950.

This blog post is brought to you by the N950's web browser, sftp in the terminal, and me tiptapping away on the actual real live keyboard.

Photo of Belle taken with the N950 at less than 5 inches away from earlier today, sent to Flickr.

Go Create.

All photos taken from 08.25.11 to 09.04.11 by Ms. Jen with her Nokia N8.

In the last 12 days, I have driven to Sunnyvale for the Nokia Dev Party, spoken at the Mobile Javascript Summit online conference, fallen down a stair and wrenched my back, flown to San Francisco to attend Mobile 2.0, launched one web site and working on another launch, and spent a bit too much time icing & heating my back.

Note to self: do not fall down stair. Yes, that one stair did more damage than a whole flight.

I really enjoyed the two mobile conferences and the Nokia Dev Party. It is exciting and encouraging to talk to other folks who are designing & developing for, and passionate about mobile. While it was amazing to workshop at Mobile 2.0 with other mobile designers and developers in person, the Mobile Javascript Summit was also very encouraging not only learn but also to see & participate the interaction in the chat area.

Regardless if you are designing or developing for native apps or the mobile web or the one web, this moment in time is very exciting as we can and could and will be pioneering whole new worlds, even if it might be small, handheld ones.

Big thanks to all the fine folk that I have talked with, met for the first time, or been able to catch up with the last 12 days.

The client says that their ________ research shows that their ________ want an ________ for their _________ mobile device. The __________ demographic that the client is aiming for Loves/Hates (circle one or both) ________ brand, as well as ________ brand, and insists that the ________ works also for the _________ user base. ____________ bandwidth is / is not (circle one or both) a problem but the client insists that we must also take into account folks with _______ fingers if we are going to design for ________. The user base may or make not have great ________ and that will need to be taken into consideration. But regardless, the _______ says that other __________ shows that market penetration.....

This Tuesday, August 30th from 9am - 6pm (Central Time, read Texas Time), the Mobile JavaScript Summit will be coming to a browser near you. If you are a web designer/developer who is wondering how to get started with designing/developing for the mobile web and mobile apps or have already started but would love to know more about how to take the web technologies you work in and turn them to mobile, then this will be a great one-day online conference for you.

The great thing about the Environments for Humans' Summits is that the price is low and you attend the conference on your own computer. The software used to present the conference allows the attendees to not only have a video feed of the presenter, also the slides in the main window and the ability to ask questions in real time.

Here are the talks that will be given:

Josh Clark on The New Rules of Designing for Touch
Jonathan Stark on Mobile Apps and the Enterprise
Jenifer Hanen (me) on The Realities of Mobile Design
Simon Laurent and Daniel Pinter on From "It Works" to "Wow! This is Fast!"
Lunch break
David Kaneda on Sencha Touch
Stephen Gill on Phone Gap
Marc Grabanski on jQuery Mobile
Kevin Whinnery on Appcelerator Titanium
Tom Dale on SproutCore

I presented last year at the UX Summit and really enjoyed the online format, I definitely look forward to talking about one of my favorite subjects on Tuesday.

If you would like to join us, please use the following discount code, HANEN20, at The Mobile JavaScrip Summit.

"People who work creatively usually have something in common: they love the media they work with. Finding the medium that excites your imagination, that you love to play with and work in, is an important step to freeing your creative energies." - Sir Ken Robinson, The Element

My biggest surge creativity of the last 10 years was getting a camera phone and pushing the envelope of my long time photography practice with a 1 megapixel wonder. The past six plus years of having various camera phones with me everywhere I go has not just excited my imagination but freed me up to take photos of things or at angles or in lighting that I would not have with my SLR or DSLR cameras.

This summer after many years of coding web sites / apps and a few years of python mobile app attempts, I have fallen for Qt Quick / QML not just to create mobile apps that have been living in my head but as a new way to approach to javascript that has made programming in javascript fun again. The last few weeks have been very exciting because now I can program the camera and resultant photos on my phone. It is been compelling to take my hard won programming knowledge mash it up with my love for designing to create native mobile apps that I can use right then and there on my mobile.

What medium are you creating in right now that is exciting your imagination?

Sat 07.02.11 - This Wednesday, I installed the Meego 1.2 'MidSummer' Community release on to my Nokia N900's microSD memory card. My first act after booting up to the Meego side of the dual boot was to take photos to see how the N900's camera ran on Meego. The outdoor photos of neighbors Ryan and Tammy results were amusing as the light sensor didn't know what to do with strong sun v. shade, but the indoor photo of Belle turned out as nice as any photo taken on the Maemo 5 side of the Nokia N900.

The problem I encounted the last couple of days since Wednesday, is that due to the fact that Meego 1.2 wrote the photo files to the microSD MMC card that the OS itself is living on and I was unable to get the photos off as bluetooth on the Meego partition was not interested in talking to my MacBook and USB cable only saw the N900's Maemo 5 side of the partition, I couldn't get the photos off to show y'all.

At the urging of Jukka Eklund (@jukkaeklund) and Randall Arnold (@texrat) on Twitter, I posted a what is best practices question on the Meego Forum. The nice folks at the Meego forum suggested SCP to transfer my trapped photos to a server, this morning I ended up using SFTP on the N900 Meego's Terminal app to transfer the photos to my server and now to the world, or this blog post as the case may be.

Once I solve my Qt/deb/Meego issues that I talked about in my forum question, I will *hopefully* have a branched version of d-pointer's Quickflickr that will work on the N900's Meego side so I can send my photos directly to Flickr.

But not today, as I am helping my Mom move into her new summer beach apartment this afternoon.

Photo taken with Ms. Jen's Nokia N8.

Wed 06.29.11 - I have Meego 1.2 community release dual booting on my Nokia N900. Amusingly, the first thing I did was take photos. The photo, above, on the home screen is not my photo, but the Meego Community default.

The photos that I took with the Meego N900 were much more entertaining, as the camera plus the Meego dual boot completely overexposed the images in a lovely way. My only problem is that I can't get them off the device right now to show you, not by bluetooth, usb, or web upload. Photos stuck on a device are unhappy photos.

The first Meego developer review released a couple of months ago was unusable for me as it did not have working wifi nor did it recognize my sim chip, but this new one, the Meego 1.2 Midsummer community release, is usable with a few caveats. It is exciting to see mobile OS software in progress. The wifi is working and so is my T-Mobile sim chip, so I can go online and connect, but I am not able to use bluetooth, the microUSB cable, nor have I been able to upload any photos to upload to Flickr's mobile web site.

My next trick is to attempt to build a QML Flickr upload app with Meego components. Wish me well.

************

Here is how I did the dual boot install of Meego to my N900:

I followed these instructions at the Meego wiki for installing a dual boot on my Nokia N900 with the Meego 1.2 midsummer release on the MMC/MicroSD card:
wiki.meego.com/ARM/N900
wiki.meego.com/ARM/N900/Install/Dual_Boot
wiki.meego.com/ARM/N900/Install/MMC

I started by installing U-Boot from the Nokia Devel Extras repository to the Nokia N900 to do the boot to MMC on launch.

The BIG thing I did to make it all work was to first format the microSD card while it was in the Nokia N900 with the Maemo file manager, so that it was a clean microSD formatted the way that Maemo & Meego would like it best. Then, I used a card reader & the instructions for Mac OSX on my MacBook.

This spring has been travel crazy here at Black Phoebe and one of the ways that I have been able to keep within the parameters of my AT&T International data plan is to use Ovi Maps when I was in London and Amsterdam, as you can download the maps before you go and those maps also have all of the most current place information that one would want.

When I was in London, I switched off between using Google Maps on my Nokia N8 and using Ovi Maps. I noticed that Google Maps is quite the data hog using it online and Ovi Maps set to 'offline' was much easier on my data usage.

When I was in Amsterdam, I was surprised how thorough and good that Ovi Map's offline offering was. I was to meet up with friends for dinner, but trying to find them was a moving target as they did not know where they were going and I was about 10-15 minutes behind them. One friend texted me the name of restaurant that they had decided on and without going online, I was able to use Ovi Maps to get the address of the restaurant and the map of how to walk there. It was on the fly with no data usage.

At the beginning of May, Surya Nair, Ovi Maps community manager, invited me to attend a workshop this week in Berlin on Ovi Maps and a few other applications. I am looking forward to meeting the team behind Ovi Maps and to talk with them and other workshop participants about the mobile maps/location/etc.

Off I go to Berlin this evening, volcano willing.

Sun 05.15.11 - Mobilism 2011 was a great conference, not only were all the sessions quality, but all the folks I met were smart and thinking about as well as doing some cool things in the web and mobile web space. Big thanks to PPK, Krijn Hoetmer, and Stephen Hay for all of their vision & organizational abilities!

It was also great to be back in Amsterdam after 18 years away, even if for only 4 days, as the city has changed for the better and it was lovely to see a small slice of it. I will definitely come back.

Sat 05.14.11 - Here are a few of the photos taken during and after the sessions of Mobilism 2011, as well as on Saturday. Both Thursday and Friday, I had the opportunity go out for delicious dinners with other speakers and friends. On Thursday, we went to Kantjil & de Tijger, a dutch-indonesian fustion place on Spuistraat, and on Friday a super delicious Italian slow food restaurant, Pianeta Terra on Beulingstraat. After dinner on Friday, we went over to Cafe Hoppe (Anno 1670) for drinks and talk.

On Saturday, after all of Mobilism was over, I rented a bike from the hotel, took the ferry to the NDSM werf and met up with Martin & Abi Sutherland and their family for a late lunch at the fun & funky Cafe Noorderlicht and then a lovely bike ride up to Het Twiske, as well as a tour of the book cases. As a proud reader & book addict, I too, one day endeavor to have a two wall living room / book case showroom. Even more important, Abi gave me a few good book recommendations.

On Saturday evening, after a bike sprint back to Amsterdam and a walking sprint to the Ouid-Zuid, I met up with Brian LeRoux, Joni Rustulka, and her brother Jay. We had dinner at an Eritrean/Ethiopian restaurant that had the best tasting Ethiopian food I have ever eaten (not usually a fan) and a lot of laughs. All was well, until 2am, when the food decided it didn't like me. Oops.

All photos at Mobilism or afterwards taken by Ms. Jen with her Nokia N8.

Fri 05.13. 11 - Here are the slides from my Mobilism 2011 presentation this morning, I would also like to highlight the conclusion ideas and some of the links:

Moving Forward:
* Form a grassroots set of folk to work up the hybrid server/client side solution for mobile browser and feature detection as proposed in Brian Rieger's presentation.

*Work with browser makers for a more complete feature profile and to alert of user preferences on data, media, and current context.

*We are all here now, what are we willing to accomplish & organize?
The Mobile Web is young, let's keep the lines of communication open and work together.

The Three Presentations after mine that expand on CSS (Media Queries), Client side, Server side and Hybrid approaches:
Steve Hay's Presentation On Media Queries
Scott Jehl's Presentation on Mobile JQuery and how it is used on the new Boston Globe site (he will be posting this later after permission is gained)
Brian Rieger's Presentation on Muddling Through the Mobile Web

Resources:
Text W3C's Mobile Web Best Practices
W3C's Mobile Web Application Best Practices
Authoring Practices for the Mobile Web
USC's Best Practices in Mobile Detection
Quirksmode Mobile
Detect Mobile Browser
Modernizr
Simple javascript mobile OS detector
WURFL
Deploying WURFL
Tera-WURFL UA & Feature Explorer
The Switcher
Manifesto for Responsible Reformatting

Also, this presentation was geared as a guide on where to begin for web designers and developers to who are wanting to get started in Mobile. I would recommend starting with the resources to move forward.

Also here are a few links to:
James Pearce's Modernizr-server
W3C Media Queries
Rethinking the Mobile Web

Dear reader, As a way to both pay attention and have a good record of the proceedings, I like to type out transcriptions/paraphrases of conference sessions. Here is my final transcription/paraphrase for Scott Jehl, Bryan Rieger, Nicholai Onken, and Jared Spool at Mobilism 2011. - Ms. Jen

Jump to:
Scott Jehl - Getting Started with JQuery Mobile
Bryan Rieger - Muddling through the Mobile Web
Nicholai Onken - The Hitchhiker's Guide to Mobile Dev
Jared Spool - Mobile & US: In the Eye of the Perfect Storm

Fri 05.13.11 - Sorry, today's transcriptions are a bit sparser, as I presented between Mr. Souders & Mr. Hay.

********

Steve Souders
stevesouders.com

WPO - Web Performance Optimization
drives traffic
improves UX (session lengthens as it gets faster)
increases revenue
reduces costs

Mobile Performance test sites/tools
Blaze.io/mobile
pcafferf pcapperf.appspot.com

stevesouders.com/mobileperf

HTTP Archive for Mobile
mobile.httparchive.org

*************

Stephen Hay
Meta Layout: A Closer Look at Media Queries

Links: http://delicious.com/stephenhay/mobilismconf2011
Presentation: http://www.slideshare.net/stephenhay/mobilism2011

Dear reader, As a way to both pay attention and have a good record of the proceedings, I like to type out transcriptions/paraphrases of conference sessions. Here is my transcription/paraphrase for Brian Leroux's After HTML5 and the Mobile Browser Panel at Mobilism 2011. - Ms. Jen

Jump to:
Brian Leroux - After HTML5
Mobile Browser Panel

Dear reader, As a way to both pay attention and have a good record of the proceedings, I like to type out transcriptions/paraphrases of conference sessions. Here is my transcription/paraphrase for PPK's The future of the mobile web and Stephanie Rieger's Beyond the Mobile Web at Mobilism 2011. - Ms. Jen

Jump to:
PPK - The future of the mobile web
Stephanie Rieger - Beyond the Mobile Web

Luke W - Mobile First

Web products should be designed mobile first.

"We're just now starting to think about mobile first and desktop second for a lot of our products." - Kate from Facebook
"We really need to shift now to start thinking about building mobile first" Kevin at Adobe

Mobile First
1. Growth = opportunity
2. Constraints = focus
3. Capabilities = innovation

Web 05.11.11 - Photos in Amsterdam by Ms. Jen taken with her Nokia N8. I arrived in Amsterdam at 9:30am after not sleeping on the plane at all, so the first day before Mobilism was spent in a fun jet lag / sleep deprivation haze. After a small nap at the hotel, I took myself off to Brasserie Luden for lunch, then I walked down the canals through the western canal district of Amsterdam. Around 4pm, I found Brian Rieger and joined him, Stephen Hay, Stephanie Rieger, Lyza Gardener, and Peter-Paul Koch (PPK) at the cafe of Felix Meritis.

The evening was a fun speaker dinner boat cruise of the canals of Amsterdam as well as the Ij and Amstel rivers. It was lovely to see Amsterdam from the water and to be able to socialize leisurely with other mobile folk. The best part is we went by the big cruise ship docks to pick up Steve Souder and Andrea Trasatti half way through the cruise. While others went off after 11pm to get a drink and talk some more, the wall of NO SLEEP hit me hard and I went off to bed.

Great first day of Pre-Mobilism in Amsterdam.

Wed 04.27.11 - Many thoughts have crowded into my head today and then fled just as fast as the miasma of jetlag has descended on my brain.

A few of the fleeting thoughts that I either can recall right now or have repeated on my brain:

1) I really do want to get back to daily photo and/or text blogging. I want to reinstate the multiple year daily blogging that got disrupted in February. One of the things I thought about while in London, is how much I do love blogging and that this is my place. It is time to reclaim it. Please encourage me.

2) The complete disconnect in big big big companies between the executives and the teams that actually do the work astounds me. Last week in London, I heard a true account of one Big Company Making a Big Contract with another Big Tech Company of which it is due to be executed contractually by this June, yet the Big Company to do the work decided to lay off the workers to do the work a few months ago and then when the executives realized that without the workers that the work wouldn't get done and they would be in breach of contract, much LOLs followed. Ha ha ha. F*cking Executive Idiots. Ha ha ha.

3) So Nokia + MicroSquash deal got signed in the workers' blood this last week. Hope the 7,000 employees that are to be laid off aren't the workers who are to actually do the work to make the contract happen, like in tidbit #2 above. Wouldn't that be LOLs?

4) If a certain Mr. Elop is to wield the hatchet, hopefully he will lay off the multiple layers management between him and the teams that do the work. Wouldn't it be big time LOLs if he keeps all the management that have throttled innovation & execution the last five years and lays off the teams that actually do the work?

5) In between bouts of jetlag brain, I did a big spring clean of my house and found the Angry Bird furry slingshot toy that Adrian Parker won for me at CTIA. Adrian, I will mail it you tomorrow.

6) Glad to hear that folks are rescuing Delicious from a certain death by starvation, hope that some passionate social photographers with $$$ will rescue Flickr from Yahoo neglect.

Photo of Ms. Jen reflected in the seat back entertainment screen in hour ten of the plane ride between London and Los Angeles on Tues 04.26.11 with her Nokia N8.

While we were at CTIA two weeks ago, Tom Messett from WOM World had Franco the Shuttle Bus driver run over a Nokia Astound / C7. Not only did the Astound survive, but Tom continued to use it the rest of our time at CTIA. It only had a few dents in the back of the case, no broken glass, and no broken functionality.

Photos taken by Ms. Jen with a Nokia C7.

Thurs 03.24.11 - On our last day in Orlando, the nice folks of WOMWorld, aka Tom Messett & Adam Woodley, took us to the Boggey Creek airboat rides at Lake Tohopekaliga in Kissimmee, Florida. While completely different from anything to do with mobile, it was a great palate cleanser after the neon thumping wiz bang of the CTIA trade show. It was very nice to get out of the composed, planned Orlando and drive south to the edge of the start of the headwaters of the Everglades to take an airboat ride through a Florida lake.

As a birder and nature lover, it was wonderful to see a sandhill crane on her nest, to see many egrets, herons, various water fowl, alligators, a water moccasin snake, and best of all, a bald eagle soaring within 100 ft of us. The shallow lake waters with tall grass, lily pads & flowers, as well as miles of flat waters, green grass and blue sky, was a delightful tonic to a techno-weary soul.

I flew home in the evening and would like to give a big thank you to Nokia and WOMWorld for a good trip filled with lovely devices, great conversations, and good new friends. Thank you.

Photo comparison post between the Nokia Astound/C7, Nokia E7, and the Nokia N8 coming up next.

Photos taken by Ms. Jen with her Nokia N8 and a Nokia C7.

Wed 03.23.11 - Today started with a breakfast meeting between the Nokia E7 enterprise team leaders and the bloggers, while not as lively as a discussion as yesterday morning, the enterprise guru - Todd Thayer - gave some good background on the considerations of creating a good mobile device for the enterprise customer.

After the breakfast meeting we went back over to the Convention Center for more of the Trade Show and keynotes, as well as participating in an Angry Birds high score challenge. I spent most of my day wandering around taking photos with the Nokia N8, C7 and E7 for a future photo comparison blog post. To give you a wee sneak peak, the E7 is an amazing and marvelous device with a great qwerty keyboard, a delicious tilted screen, but a sub-standard camera. The Nokia C7/Astound beat the E7 on every photo and occasionally took as good as the N8 photos.

I also spent a good hour or two at the CTIA Nokia booth in conversation with various folk, including the bright and talented Darin Burris. We covered a wide variety of subjects from mobile development, user experience design, how one goes from an artist/musician to a designer/developer, the Nokia+MicroSquash alliance, to the wonders of maltese dogs, as well as attempting to get a red circle on the Nokia Near Field Communication (NFC) cup game to no avail.

The folks at the Nokia booth had four stations of demo/display phones plus two NFC readers at each station that would read a NFC chip embedded on the bottom of coffee cups. Once one got a cup, one could go around to the stations and put the cup on the reader to see if one won, if the circle turned bright red and stayed red then one would win a Nokia N8. It was fun, interactive, and a great way to get CTIA attendees involved.

The evening hours were spent at the CTIA Unplugged event at the Hard Rock cafe which included a Lady Antebellum concert. Unfortunately, I did not feel very festive due to yesterday's bad news and was not too peppy, but the company was good and I really had fun text with Erika on the Nokia E7's qwerty keyboard. Love that keyboard, love it.

The evening ended with a nightcap at the hotel bar with our group and a few SXSW friends that walked by.

Photos taken by Ms. Jen with her Nokia N8.

Tues 03.22.11 - The first full day of the Nokia CTIA adventure started with a breakfast meeting with the Nokia Astound / C7 team leaders and the CTIA Social Reporters (aka blogger type humans). We had a lively discussion about the Nokia Astound, its specifications, the aesthetics (I think it is lovely), and its market. I will write more on the Astound later, but it is truly a great smartphone in that not only is it full powered, lovely, elegant, takes good photos, and it will only be $79 with a contract on T-Mobile.

After the breakfast meeting, we, the blogger type humans, had an Ovi Maps Check In challenge before going over to the Orlando Convention Center for the CTIA Trade Show. The Convention Center was truly awe inspiring in size, scope, and over all hugeness. The Trade Show had so many bells, whistles, loud sounds, flashing lights, etc, that I thought I would need dark shades and ear plugs. The only downside was a some bad news from the home front. In the evening, we met up for dinner and had a lovely evening.

One of the things that I most admire about photography and the internet is that anyone can get involved with both.

Within 15 years of the invention of photography, cameras, darkrooms and nascent photographers had bloomed everywhere even in small towns in the 1850s. One of the very first places that a woman could own her own business legitimately in the Victorian era was a photography studio, and women did. For the last 150+ years, photography has grown beyond a specialty into a life, creative outlet, as well as snapshot hobby for billions of people worldwide.

The internet has been much the same in the last 18 years, the barrier to creative entry has been relatively low: access to a machine that can access the internet. Many millions -> billions have taught themselves the rudimentary coding skills necessary to maintain a website or blog online and are expressing themselves thereof.

One of the things that I have loved most about Nokia as a company and as a mobile culture is that they have brought mobile camera phones to millions -> billions worldwide, and regardless of my own personal feelings of the recent (mis)alliance between Steve + Stephen, Nokia has pioneered the mobile camera phone space and will most likely be on the forefront for a least a couple more years.

Beyond the great hardware that Nokia has created for camera phones in the last six years, I have been very excited about the development of Qt and the open source development platforms that Nokia has been rolling out since 2008. My greatest hope is that they will continue pursuing this space and my greatest fear, due to Mr. Ballmer's hate on for all things open, is that they will not.

As humans we are at our best when we are creative and when we share with love. We teach our toddlers and kindergartners to share. Creativity is best served openly, with the transmission of knowledge, mentoring, passion, and the art product freely without restrictions.

If you want to give your art and knowledge away, good. If you want to charge for it, good. If you want to share your source code so others can learn how to code as well, even better. If you want to copyright your material, good. If you want to copyleft it, good. Just create and encourage those around you to do so, be it art, music, photography, code, software, cooking, sewing, knitting, hair coloring, web site creation, writing, blogging, bulding, making, creating, etc. etc. etc.

Regardless, create and share creation.

To that end, my goal for the next six months is to finish my Qt mobile app for photographers, to blog here more often, to photowalk more often, and to get involved in an open source community where I can share my passion and learn from others.

And if at all possible, with all the other travel planned for this spring, I will try to get to EuroPython as I do love the Python community and after all that has gone on the last few bits, I think it is time I participate more fully in the community around my favorite programming language.

What about you?

Sometimes a thought will pop up in my head that is fully formed and completely contrary to current thoughts on a subject and contrary to the evidence at hand, but in the long run the thought will turn out to be completely true and will come to pass. Most of the times that this has happened to me, I am not the primary actor who could or could not make the contrary thought come to pass, usually it is forces that are larger than myself, outside of myself that are the primary actors and my actions are how I react to it or the situation.

I have never been comfortable about calling this knowing a premonition or ESP. I suppose if I was a futurist or an analyst, I would have a lucrative career with these knowings. But mine are much more whimsical, as they are usually about art, music, or people.

I am sure that there are a legion of psychology studies that have explained away or rationalized this type of behavior; but whatever the reason, it still happens.

Since my life has continued to be personally challenging, I have not had the time to blog about my thoughts on the Nokia + MicroSquash announcement but here are my favorite articles of the last eleven days:

* asymco on In memoriam: Microsoft's previous strategic mobile partners

* outsider on Microsoft Buys Nokia for $0B: "This is a coup, folks."

* C. Enrique Ortiz on Reaction to Nokia 2011 Strategy Announcement (and Microsoft relationship)

* Mobile Monday Silicon Valley's Mike Rowehl on Nokia and Microsoft: "So to all the other developers out there who are going to be hearing a ton of marketing down the line about the Microsoft/Nokia partnership and trying to make some sense of it, remember that this isn't a two party deal. This is really about Microsoft, Nokia, and us. And in business deals like in poker: if you look around the table and can't figure out who the sucker is, it's you."

* Roland Tanglao hits the whole matter on the head with point #2 in February 11, 2011 shall henceforth be known as #Nokia #Microsoft Co-Dependence Day :-) and further hits the nail on the head with a second blog post in Nokia execs believed it couldn't do 21st century mobile phone experience hence Nokmsft & the move to Windows Phone 7

* Jonathan Greene on Nokia the OEM: "Microsoft gets a new hero manufacturer to abuse. If Nokia enables Windows Phone sales he wins - on both sides of the equation. Nokia as a company and brand has some major issues to resolve.

The real issues facing Nokia are remain the same. They still need to attract developers and require some major assistance still in the US, the largest smartphone market. Microsoft has barely made a dent and it seems their sales are in the channel rather than end user. Windows Phone is a fresh start in a race that's been active for years. Android while more competitive for Nokia as an OEM would have been an easy option for developers to work with given the stratospheric growth and sales of Android products over the past two years. Windows Phone is certainly nice, but that's all it is. There are no standout applications yet even though the growth has been reasonable. Time will tell, but I'm not feeling this at all."

* Former Nokia designer, Adam Greenfield, who would not blog about Nokia upon departure has now blogged in Nokia: Culture will out: "I have to conclude that it's this inability to even perceive the clear makings of an unacceptably bad user experience, let alone address them as profound obstacles to success in the marketplace, that leads to situations like this.

Another, blunter way of putting it: there's nobody with any taste in the decision-making echelons at Nokia. And this is especially unfortunate and ironic, given that elegant, simple Finnish design has tutored generations in what taste means. My whole tenure in Espoo was soured by the nagging counterfactual, "What if Nokia had embraced and extended the finest traditions of its own national design culture, in its approach to the global mass market?"

Something tells me that Stephen Elop, whether or not he turns out to be a Trojan horse for Redmond, will be comprehensively unable to help in this department."

* Today, former Nokia Lifeblog creator & executive Christian Lindholm, came out in favor of the alliance from a long term design cycle perspective in The beauty of the Nokia Microsoft deal:"In UX circles we have for a long time talked about Context or Task Centric UIs. UX people agree that context or task centric experiences are the future, but no one has stepped up and launched one, until Microsoft Phone 7. The Microsoft Phone UI is called Metro, from the underground network that connects you seamlessly from one place to another and from the clear signage the real world is full of. It is a great name, and a powerful guide for designers. It the first UI that has taken bold moves towards the context UI. (one of my visions here from 2007). The Metro vision is from 2004 it seems a long time ago, but designing these UI's take a long time. A key reason is timing the paradigm shift. Microsoft simply had the guts to do it first. A huge bet. We do not know if it pays of, but one thing is certain it will be the catalyst to the next paradigm if it is not it. The most important sign is user reaction which generally is positive. Once that happens the rest will unlock.

Both Microsoft and Nokia knows that this is where things are going. Nokia is joining an industry transformation or even a disruption, started by Microsoft. It is a transformation, because we need to rethink how services work, how users are drawn into the services, and how branding is done and how customisation is done. How services are mashed up. Lost of challenging Service design rather than UI or UX design. Metro takes the UX business and turns it into a service business."

Lindholm makes the first compelling argument for the Nokia + MicroSquash (mis)alliance, but I am still afraid that MicroSquash's inerrant ability to crush and bankrupt partners as well as their deeply ingrained distaste/hate for all things open will be more detrimental to Nokia than the possibility that the two companies could *possibly* be on the vanguard of a whole new mobile UI / UX archetype.

Deep down inside, I am wary and more than a bit horrified at the Nokia + MicroSquash deal. It still smells slightly rotten to me.

Tweet from Oliver Reichenstein:

"Nokia has lost 30% of its share value since the PR disaster last week. Not everyone seems to share Elop's Microsoftimism."

My silence of the last three plus days has broken a three or so year daily blogging streak. While I do have a lot to say and have composed whole blog posts in my head, I have either not had the time nor energy to sit down and write, as my thoughts and emotions have continued to churn in such a way that would be unproductive to blog.

I am sorry, but I am still quite discombobulated by Friday morning's Nokia + MicroSquash announcement. It is not just an issue of a corporation/brand that I *actually* do like (Nokia) making an alliance with a corporation/brand that I have un-admired for over a decade (MicroSquash), but is also a professional issue.

In October, I went on two trips on my own dime, one to San Francisco and one to Austin, to check out and then receive training in Qt. I got really excited about developing for mobile using Qt and put a lot of time and energy into learning and working on my ideas the last five months.

Now I am reeling. I have no desire to code for MicroSquash mobile. None.

Here are a few Tweets that sum up my thoughts of the last few days:

Fri 02.11.11 - The devs over at Forum Nokia are not happy campers. http://tinyurl.com/6fot6rd Neither is Wall Street. NOK -14% How is this good strategy?

Sat 02.12.11 - This developer's comment basically sums up my thoughts yesterday: 5 months down the drain & I was angry. http://tinyurl.com/6j56mty #Qt

Sat 02.12.11 - "In business deals like in poker: if you look around the table & can't figure out who the sucker is, it's you." http://tinyurl.com/49ab3mt

Sun 02.13.11 - Stupid priority. #1 should be to make great phones & apps!! RT @TeroatNokia: It's official. Our No. 1 priority is to beat Android.

Sun 02.13.11 - I hate the whole competitive biz thing. Just focus & make great products #1, make people happy #2, stop watching the competition #3. #Nokia

Honestly folks, I have had 3 hours of sleep last night and today was sh*t on many levels for a number of reasons of which only some of it was professional and mobile related. So, please forgive me if I don't give a breakdown of the #Elopocalypse* right now, but I need some sleep before I can even remotely write with some perspective and clarity.

I would like to give a big thanks to four lovely friends who had kind words on Twitter today: @allaboutgeorge, @jussipekka, @docmobile, and @chivacongelado. You guys rock. Many blessings upon you.

* Possible coup?

The internets are on FIRE with rumors, rumors, and more rumors about what will happen on Friday Feb 11, 2011 at 10am GMT when Nokia's new CEO, Stephen Elop, gives what may be either the usual dull quarterly report to the investor style humans or a completely non-dull throw down and strategy session. Folks are certainly talking.

The Rumors start...

Engadget on Nokia CEO Stephen Elop rallies troops in brutally honest 'burning platform' memo?

All Things Digital on Nokia's Stephen Elop Didn't Start the Fire-But His "Burning Platform" Certainly Lights One

And then the real fire gets lit:

WSJ on Nokia, Microsoft Talk Cellphones

All Things Digital on Nokia Appears on Verge of Adopting Windows Phone, as MeeGo, Android Fade From Consideration

Google's Vic Gundotra weighs in: "#feb11 "Two turkeys do not make an Eagle"."

Engadget follows up with Google's Vic Gundotra on Nokia: 'Two turkeys do not make an Eagle' (updated)

Tomi Ahonen enters the fray swinging:

Mr. Ahonen on The Nokia CEO 'Burning Platform' memo at Engadget, doesn't ring true to my ears..

ReadWriteWeb summarizes Tomi in Former Nokia Exec Claims CEO's "Burning Platform" Memo a Hoax

Other prominent Mobile Bloggers come out with thoughts, opinion and a bit more gasoline to throw on the fire:

Ewan on That Nokia memo; How Nokia can still screw it up; and what I want to hear on Friday

Jay Montano on The Burning Platform Memo: Elop supposedly on transforming Nokia:

"Real or Not, I want MeeGo to have a frikkin chance to do what it has been planned to do. I don't want an either/or situation. I can't wait for most of the speculation to be resolved on Feb 11. Then wait and see what happens at MWC."

Ben Smith injects a bit of sanity in to the rumor brush fire with It doesn't matter if Nokia launches a Windows Phone...

The Rumors breed more Rumors, and a Wave of Humor breaks on Twitter:

@MattMiz: "Nokia stock up 14% on rumor that Elop plans new Antarctic HQ run by robot penguins running on LISP OS" ;)

Photo illustration #1: Meanwhile at Nokia HQ...

Photo illustration #2: Nuke from Orbit

@ChanseArrington: "Less than 36 hours until #elopocalypse = less than 36 hours left of binge drinking. #excited #scared #pumped #bringit"

Finally, Eric Zeman sums up my hopes on this matter in a most precise manner:
@phonescooper: "Dear @Nokia and @Microsoft: No. Just, no. Don't do it. DON'T. #dont"

Whatever the outcome of Friday's Capital Markets Strategy Report by Mr. Elop will be, this is the best press run up to an event that Nokia has held in years... almost Almighty Holy Jobs style press/marketing run up. A burning media platform, in word and deed. Good job, Mr. Elop!

Are you a web designer or developer who is mobile curious? Are you a web des/dev who wants to jump into mobile, but is not sure where to start?

Are you a seasoned mobile designer or developer who really would like to have your own practice sparked & challenged by a some great speakers on mobile web design & development, as well as mobile web user experience?

Do you just want a good excuse to go to Amsterdam in late Spring?

Come join us at Mobilism:

Mobilism is the first conference that focuses exclusively on web design and development for mobile devices. Mobilism will take place in Felix Meritis in Amsterdam on the 12th and 13th of May 2011. Follow us on Twitter for the latest Mobilism news. Or buy a ticket now!

Mobilism has a great line up of speakers from mobile web world and mobile user experience as well as web design & development. I am excited about participating in and making the mobile web better for all, to that end, I am really looking forward to Mobilism 2011.

Sat 02.05.11 - This week has been eventful from the server surprise on Tuesday to Grandma Grace's pre-91st birthday party today. The best part of the week was all the local fruit trees decided to be in full-bloom just in time for lunar New Year and St. Brigid's Day.

This evening as Scruffy and I went out for his last walk of the evening, I decided to try out the night mode on my Nokia N8 to see how photos of the blossoms would turn out in the dark with only a street light for illumination. The blossoms were lovely in the dark with the yellow of the street light shining down.

Photo of Scruffy taken last week at about 7cm from the N900's lens to his nose using the Bless N900 camera app. The nice bit is the soft bokeh around the outer corners.

From yesterday's Sunday LA Times Art & Books section, David Hockney's friends in art: the iPad and iPhone:

"What fascinates me is not just technology but the technology of picture-making," says Hockney. "I spend more time painting, of course, but I treat the iPad as a serious tool. The iPad is influencing the paintings now with its boldness and speed."

One discovery feeds the next. From photography he moved onto photo collages and experiments with office copy machines -- cameras of another kind. His fax art allowed him to send exhibition artworks over telephone lines much as he recently e-mailed an exhibition worth of iPhone and iPad drawings to an art gallery at Paris' Fondation Pierre Bergé-Yves Saint Laurent (where "David Hockney: Fleurs Fraîches" is on view until Jan. 30.) "Who would have thought the telephone could bring back drawing?" Hockney asks in the Paris show's catalog.

Hockney's iPhone art began in 2008. A rotating group of about 30 friends, curators, dealers and writers regularly receive his e-mailed artworks, and the artist even urged his friends first to get iPhones, then iPads to archive the continuing e-mails. According to Gonçalves de Lima, Hockney has already sent out nearly 400 e-mail drawings on his iPhone and 300 more on his iPad.

"I had to get an iPad so I could receive the drawings on the same platform he used to make them," observes Stephanie Barron, senior curator of modern art at Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Barron, who has already curated three major Hockney shows for the museum, printed out about 20 iPad drawings for her office walls and often uses them as screensavers.

One wonders what would have happened if Ray Johnson had an iPad in the 1960s Mail Art scene, or maybe that is what Hockney and others are creating now.

Last Tuesday, I wrote a blog post on my frustrations with setting up a Mac OS X and/or Ubuntu Linux Qt install that would also compile Qt's Symbian modules. I received quite a bit of feedback in comments, emails, Google Buzz and via Twitter.

Feedback saying everything from, "Duh, just use Windows!" to "Ugh, I hear you and I also really want a full working for Qt toolchain for Mac/Linux" to nice Nokia/Qt employee-type folk* who checked and double-checked facts for me.

Thank you to all of you for your comments, be they helpful or not, as it spurred on my overly persistent nature and I spent most of Saturday trying out several different options to see what would work to set up a full working Qt Mobility/Symbian/QML development toolchain on my MacBookPro.

1) Per Emmanuel's suggestion, I decided to install VirtualBox on my MacBook Pro rather than fiddling with my previous Bootcamp set up. The pros of VirtualBox is that you don't have to reboot to access the other OS, but merely tab in and out of VirtualBox as it is just another window on the desktop. Very Nice.

The sad thing is that neither of my Windows disks would activate on VirtualBox at all.

2) So, I called Windows' Customer Service to see if we could get a new activation code for me, and after two fruitless calls with nice customer service agents who listened to me talk about how my Dell was dead and I was using the really old Windows XP SP2 disk on a virtualization and could they just give me a code. Really, I swear that this copy of Windows is not being used on another machine, no, it isn't. No, PLEASE don't forward me to Sales, Ugh.

Like I said before, I am not interested in purchasing a whole new copy of Windows just to run Qt with Symbian compile & build, as I have other financial goals for the next few months. That $200+ could be better spent in Austin, TX, not to enriching Redmond, WA, - not when I have 2 perfectly good copies of Windows that no longer have working computers attached to them.

This is a dead end for now. But of course, there is a back-door here.

3) After Lucien Tumota of Forum Nokia, advised that I take the wiki info I had that Qt's remote compiler was not working with Ubuntu 10.10 with a grain of salt, he followed up with the nice folks who are on the remote compiler team and confirmed that it is working with Ubuntu 10.10 (aka Maverick Meerkat).

4) By late Saturday afternoon, I had 2 installs of Windows**, both un-activate-able, and 1 install of Maverick Meerkat on Virtual Box. The remote compiler is working on Ubuntu 10.10. But still no long term solution for developing a Qt or QML app for my Nokia N8 on my Mac.

After all of this fiddling, installing, being patient, learning the ins and outs of Virtual Box, enjoying myself thoroughly, I decided that rather than arguing farther up the food chain at Windows Customer Service to get a working activation code, that I would do the following until Nokia and Qt provide a full Qt Symbian dev toolchain for Mac or Linux:

I will develop my app in Qt on my Mac as if I was only developing for Maemo, then when it is time to test for Symbian, I will put the project files in my shared folder, open up Virtual Box, hope my 30 days of non-activation aren't over yet, and then build the Symbian app on the Windows Qt. When my 30 days are up, then I will delete that Windows VirtualBox, and start again.

A hack, yes. A bit overwrought, yes. And yes, it will be 2 hours down the drain to reinstall Windows & Qt to full working order, but hopefully, within 30 days, Nokia will have released a full working Qt for Mac & Linux.

A mobile dev girl can hope, can't she?

* Big Thanks to Lucien Tumota, Henrik Hartz, and Ville Vainio for all the help. Y'all rock.

** Once I got Windows installed on Virtual Box, I then installed Qt SDK from Forum Nokia and Qt for Symbian from qt.nokia.com, so that I could 'harvest' the Symbian folder and sis files for later use, of which the biggest goal is to make sure that my N8 is ready for dev testing.

I have been trying to develop a Qt mobile app for the Nokia N8 since October, except there is one not so small problem: There is no symbian module for Qt for Mac OS X or Linux. There is also the not so small problem that only half the Mobility API has been released, but that is another issue.

It is very hard to build a Symbian^3 mobile application for the Nokia N8, when the only platform that has the full Qt SDK to develop for Symbian is Windows.

Right now, I have only my MacBook Pro and an old Dell with Ubuntu Linux, I don't have a Windows machine nor to I have a version of Windows that will both activate on a Bootcamp partition and will run the full Qt SDK*.

I have installed and re-installed various versions of Qt from various download places to both my Mac and to my Ubuntu install and each time have run into many walls of frustration and still no Symbian module.

Nokia, why does this have to be so hard? I want to develop apps for Nokia Nseries phones, but at this point I have spent more hours trying to get the dev environment running than it would have taken to code an alpha version of the app.

Please release the full & equal Qt SDK for all three major computer platforms**.

Please do release a full Mac & Linux SDK with Symbian, as well as the rest of the Mobility API, soon - before Feb 15, 2011, so there is still at least six weeks to develop & test an app before the March 31st Calling All Innovators deadline.

Thank you.

* And the truth of the matter is that when I converted the Dell to Ubuntu in 2005, it was because I was completely and utterly over Windows in any shape or form. That was a bit more than five years ago. Every time I have to deal with Windows, my chest tightens and I feel my blood pressure raise. Nokia, I love you, but not at the expense of my health & well being.

** Calling the Mac SDK 'Beta' and leaving out major bits but having the docs in the SDK as well as the docs on Forum Nokia act like it is the full version equal to Windows is an evil little mind f*ck.

Mobile:

Tech Crunch on Guest post: Symbian OS - one of the most successful failures in tech history

Qt Developer Blogs on Experimental packages for Symbian development on Linux

Qt Mobile Development Online Training

O'Reilly on HTML5 Mobile Web Development

Sarah Parameter on Designing for iOS: Life Beyond Media Queries

asymco on What has Android done for Apple?

HTML5:

Think Vitamin on 23 Essential HTML 5 Resources

Chris Heilmann on A call for quality HTML5 demo markup

Delicious:

Tech Crunch on Why Sunsetting Delicious Matters

Jeremy Keith on Home-grown and Delicious

Misc:

Userfocus on 7 myths about paper prototyping

FeldThoughts on Just Make it Faster

Yesterday, Chanse Arrington asked on Twitter:

"What are some things I should be doing in 2011 to get more developers on board with Nokia in the US?"

Here are my suggestions as a designer | developer who has been working on an app or two for the Nokia ecosystem:

1) Take over the Forum Nokia twitter account and use it to update followers on what is new content on Forum Nokia and what is new in developer tools for Nokia. Right now the @forumnokia twitter account is just a mimic to the various Nokia marketing tweets that are going around, but it could be SO MUCH MORE.

The Forum Nokia website is a bit of a beast and many useful parts are updated frequently but there is not a full RSS feed for the whole site and the new content is difficult to find, so use Twitter as that RSS feed. Let us know what new articles have been added, let us know about additions to the wiki, use twitter to highlight the best and most useful of Forum Nokia today not just what the upper dudes at marketing think are important this week.

Also use this twitter account to announce webinars, cool mobile & dev conferences (even non-Nokia), contests, blog posts by mobile devs who are writing about Qt/dev tutorials and tips, and what the community is up to, feature apps, etc. And like @NokiaCareUS and @womworldnokia, have @forumnokia have a set of photos of the tweeters for the account & their names so that it personalizes the account.

Use Twitter to make us excited about Forum Nokia's content and thus excited about developing for Nokia devices.

2) Convince the Qt folk to make sure that the full Mac Qt with Symbian & Qt Mobility gets released extra super soon. Like it or not North American mobile app developers love their Macs, even if Nordic/Europeans are still PC/Windows committed. If you want to win over North America, get all of the Nokia dev tools fully working on Mac & Linux as well as Windows dev platforms. Steve Jobs has kindly convinced developers to dump their PCs for Macs over the last five plus years, so rather than fight it or be angry about it just give us all the tools we need to develop without hassle or dual boots or having to switch to another OS. Be developer OS agnostic, make great tools that work across the platforms so that developers can create great mobile apps.

3) Highlight the Qt Quick and other Nokia web runtime tools to web designers and developers on Twitter to show them how easy it is to transfer their current skill set of HTML/CSS/Javascript to developing apps for Nokia devices. There are quite a few great tools for web designers to start creating mobile apps, but they need to know where to start. Highlight videos, webinars, and online blog / Forum Nokia tutorials on how to create mobile web apps and mobile web sites from scratch.

Many of the current resources are native mobile app focused with the assumption that the developers have a full four year computer science bachelors background and are now Java or C++ engineers at large companies, when there are tons and tons of web designers and developers out there who could be reached but are currently being alienated by the current offerings.

Case in point, this last week's Forum Nokia webinar on Qt Quick, where the presenter just assumed that the audience were C++ programmers who had already created Qt desktop apps and were moving into mobile, rather than presenting the material as a great place for web designers & developers with javascript experience to get started with Qt Quick / QML and mobile app development.

I have more ideas, but a great Forum Nokia twitter account, fully powered Qt for Mac with Mobility and Symbian, and a real outreach to web designers & developers is where I would start.

Well, this was silly of me. Really silly of me to promise you all that I would go through each year of mobile photo blogging and then highlight the best of each year.

Yesterday, Friday, I went through each post from 2005 and picked out about 12-14 photos that were my favorite. This took over 2 hours. By the time I was done selecting, I didn't have time to make thumbnails and then write the post. Today, I also blanched about taking another couple hours to finish up 2005 and then do 2006, amongst all the other work and personal related things I had to do today.

Sorry to tease y'all with my over-ambition but this week is very busy and I don't think I will get to daily photo essay of each year.

Here is the list of URLs that I selected yesterday, feel free to go view them.

01.17.05 - http://www.blackphoebe.com/msjen/2005/01/looking-up.html
02.02.05 - http://www.blackphoebe.com/msjen/2005/02/nancy-laughing.html
03.12.05 - http://www.blackphoebe.com/msjen/2005/03/sxsw-day-2-lunc.html
04.09.05 - http://www.blackphoebe.com/msjen/2005/04/at-the-poppy-re.html
06.04.05 - http://www.blackphoebe.com/msjen/2005/06/sat-geek-party.html
06.13.05 - http://www.blackphoebe.com/msjen/2005/06/in-perfect-repo.html
07.01.05 - http://www.blackphoebe.com/msjen/2005/07/at-the-warped-t.html
07.10.05 - http://www.blackphoebe.com/msjen/2005/07/note-to-goat.html
09.10.05 - http://www.blackphoebe.com/msjen/2005/09/frankie.html
10.31.05 - http://www.blackphoebe.com/msjen/2005/10/happy-halloween.html
11.07.05 - http://www.blackphoebe.com/msjen/2005/11/image-46jpg-12.html
11.22.05 - http://www.blackphoebe.com/msjen/2005/11/image-48jpg-11.html
12.03.05 - http://www.blackphoebe.com/msjen/2005/12/image-49jpg-17.html
12.06.05 - http://www.blackphoebe.com/msjen/2005/12/image-49jpg-15.html
12.09.05 - http://www.blackphoebe.com/msjen/2005/12/image-50jpg-3.html
12.19.10 - http://www.blackphoebe.com/msjen/2005/12/scruffy-belle-t.html

All the photos above where taken, to the best of my knowledge, with my Nokia 7610.

The really interesting part about taking the time to go over all of my blog posts from 2005 was how hopeful I was that year. I would like to be that hopeful again.

My two favorite Nokia 7610 camera phone photos from 2004, click on them to go to the original post.

Thurs 12.09.10 - Today is the 6th anniversary of my having a camera phone in my hands and using the phone's camera and internet connectivity to send photos to this blog & Flickr as well as using Nokia's Lifeblog (r.i.p.) to mobile blog photos and text to this blog and others.

This six years has been the most consistently creative six years of my life, as taking photos daily with an internet connected camera that is always on you has honed my eye, sharpened my senses, made me *really* look & observe even in the most mundane moments, and has inspired many other areas of my life both my creative and other parts of my life.

Since SXSW 2003 when I heard Adam Greenfield & Joi Ito talk about how camera phone photography and mobile blogging was taking off in Japan, I yearned for my own camera phone. In July of 2004, Erika and I went to the "Sent" exhibition at The Standard that Xeni Jardin & SixSpace Gallery curated. My desire for a camera phone increased, as I hated that my computer's hard drive had become a cemetery for photos never posted to the web, I just wanted to shoot and send.

On Dec. 9th, 2004, when I picked up the Nokia 7610 and drove to AT&T to re-up my contract with a fancy new, shiny unlimited data plan and then started taking photos and moblogging them, a whole new world opened up to me. A world of mobile photography, mobile creativity, and community that I am very glad to have participated in the last six years.

I would like to thank (then) Nokia's Charlie Schick and (then) Creative Intelligence's Kristen Bennett for taking a chance on me for the Lifeblog Wasabi four month project from Dec 2004 to March 2005. I am grateful that Nokia has continued a six year run of excellence in producing the best camera phones, here is to another six!

To celebrate my 6th Anniversary of camera phone photography & blogging, aka Moblogging, I will be posting my fave photos from each of the six years over the next week, starting with my two favorites from 2004 above.

Celebrate along with me: take a photo or two or three or more with your camera phone and post them to your blog. To life & creativity!

After I wrote last night's post on "DIY Mobile Programming: Get Started with HTML, CSS, and Javascript", I realized that I assumed that all of my readers who want to learn to create | develop their own mobile apps are already familiar with and design | develop in HTML, CSS, and Javascript.

This is after I shut off my computer and was on my way to bed, when I realized that maybe those of us in the web & mobile industries need to give more than lipservice to the idea of web education but is it time for all of us to consider that HTML should be apart of the canon of literacy.

Should HTML, in a basic form, be taught in primary school along with reading, writing, and arithmetic?

Yes, I do think it should. The internet, in all of its permutations, is in every aspect of our lives regardless if one lives in the developed or developing world(s). If we don't teach the basics of the markup language of how to develop | create for the internet, then we are leaving literacy half-baked at best for the 21st Century, because if one does not understand the basic underpinnings of the internet, then one is illiterate to a major facet of 21st Century life.

The drive to increase literacy over the last 200 years has been more than making sure the most folks possible can read and write but it has also been the drive to give everyone the skills to participate on a more level playing field in society, as well as to open the opportunity for all of society to rise to the level of the educated. In every country where literacy has risen above 80%, poverty has decreased, self-sufficiency has increased, and the economy grows in proportion to the increase in literacy.

If you can learn to count to ten in another language, you can learn the 10 most used tags in HTML. If you can string to together a sentence or two in your native language, you can learn the semantics and grammar of HTML. With HTML, you are more than partially capable of creating simple pages and apps for the internet, be it mobile or desktop.

When one can create a page or alter a page in their care, then they are no longer audience, but a participant. No longer just a consumer, but a creator.

*******
Ms. Jen's DIY Programming Series:
DIY Dev: Program or be Programmed
DIY Mobile Programming: Get Started with HTML, CSS, and Javascript
DIY Programming: Should HTML be Required for Literacy in the 21st Century?

"If you can build your app with HTML, CSS & JavaScript, then you probably should." - @jonathanstark #wdx (via @garazi)

Some friends recently asked on Twitter what was the best way to start programming mobile apps with Nokia's Qt, as they found that it was not as easy as the publicity from Nokia had purported Qt to be.

I replied: "When devs say a 'framework' is "easy" it is code for "It won't take 15 months of 10 hour days & make you want to KILL yourself.""

Anyone who has developed an application, be it for the desktop or mobile, can tell you that framework makes it so much easier, but easy is a relative term. What easy may mean is that development time is reduced from 6 months to 6 weeks or less. Still not that easy, but easier and a big relief.

For folks who want to learn to create and develop their own mobile apps, but don't have much programming experience or little at all, I would like to suggest starting with developing a simple app in HTML, CSS, and Javascript to get your feet wet and see if you can get your idea up and running either as a mobile web app or as a native mobile app that is coded in HTML, CSS, and Javascript.

As I wrote in DIY Dev: Program or be Programmed a couple of weeks back, there comes a time when your own natural diy urge or curiosity or frustration with a lack of an app drives one to learn how to program a computer, server, or mobile phone so that the itch has been scratched.

Rather than get bogged down in the debate between mobile web apps and native apps, let me give a few links to resources out there to help get you started on creating your own mobile HTML, CSS, Javascript app be it for the mobile web or a native app:

Cross Platform HTML, CSS, Javascript Mobile Development Frameworks:
PhoneGap - http://www.phonegap.com/
Sencha - http://www.sencha.com/
JQuery Mobile - http://jquerymobile.com/
Qt Quick - http://qt.nokia.com/products/qt-quick/

Tutorials and Presentations:
Building Mobile Apps with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript
HOWTO: Create native-looking iPhone/iPad applications from HTML, CSS and JavaScript
Forum Nokia on Developing for the Mobile Web
Tips and Tricks for developing Mobile Widgets

Books:
Programming the Mobile Web
Beginning Smartphone Web Development: Building Javascript, CSS, HTML and Ajax-Based Applications
Building Android Apps with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript

Have fun, get coding, and send us/ let's us know what you have created.

*******
Ms. Jen's DIY Programming Series:
DIY Dev: Program or be Programmed
DIY Mobile Programming: Get Started with HTML, CSS, and Javascript
DIY Programming: Should HTML be Required for Literacy in the 21st Century?

Photos taken by Ms. Jen at Alex's Bar on Fri 11.12.10 with her Nokia N8.

Sat 11.13.10 - Last night I helped out Alex and worked the front door at the bar for the Ill Repute / Fang show that Ron Martinez put on. I used the opportunity of my favorite low light photography challenge to see how the Nokia N8 does at taking photos inside of Alex's, as the walls are all painted a deep red and suck the light out of photos making most photography dashedly difficult even with a flash.

With both the flash turned off and the flash turned on the Nokia N8 did a great job at capturing the scene and not either whiting out with the flash or being completely dark without the flash. Due to being at the door all night, I was not able to see how it performed in taking photos of the bands on stage.

Next time.

Mon 11.01.10 - Actually, what I really love about the Nokia N8 - the amazing low light photos!

View of Catalina Island, the Seal Beach pier parking lot, a container ship, and Palos Verdes taken this evening sometime after 6pm with my Nokia N8. The sunset and dusk was lovely tonight and the air was crystal clear.

Fifteen years ago, to prove a snotty engineering student wrong who said artists couldn't make websites, I taught myself in less than 2 hours how to code a website. Ten years ago, I wanted to do more than just write HTML and use Photoshop, so I checked myself into Long Beach State's Extension and took a class on Javascript and one on Flash Actionscripting, more classes and trainings followed. Five years ago, I wanted to learn even more programming and checked myself into a graduate program that took 1/2 designers and 1/2 programmers and taught them both disciplines.

My programming professor at Trinity after our classes were over encouraged me to learn Python, of which I have done over the course of the last few years. In the last two years, I have had the opportunity to write several full web apps from the ground up. All of this has been hard, satisfying, and more than a bit of a stretch.

But I am glad that I have pushed my own boundaries and didn't listen to the naysayers, not the ones 15 years ago or last week, who said that an artist/designer/webdev can't learn to code/program.

If you can learn to speak/write/read a language and can reason, of which most of us have done at least once, you can learn to program.

Over the last few years, I have found myself getting increasingly frustrated that there is not the mobile app that I want out there or the one that is out does not have the features that I want, etc etc etc. Up until recently, at least from my perspective, programming a mobile application has been hard as one has to be a "real" programmer, the kind that learned Java/C/C++ in a four year Computer Science bachelors degree.

I am an optimist and frequently over commit myself by getting excited about how easy it will be to learn a new technology or language and then find myself more than a bit overwhelmed. But a funny thing happened along the way, C++ doesn't seem so obscure/opaque and/or hard any more. In experimenting with it recently, I found myself delighting in how easy it was for me to learn it and make simple apps. All that programming in python for Google App Engine over the last 18 months has paid off.

This has me excited. Excited enough to go two weeks ago up to San Francisco for the Nokia Developer Day at CTIA to see the demos and presentations on Qt. Excited enough to then go to the Qt Training Days in Austin this week.

I have mobile app ideas running around my head and now is the time to start programming to get them out and about.

*******
Ms. Jen's DIY Programming Series:
DIY Dev: Program or be Programmed
DIY Mobile Programming: Get Started with HTML, CSS, and Javascript
DIY Programming: Should HTML be Required for Literacy in the 21st Century?

Stockholm Syndrome is defined by the of behavior of kidnap victims who, over time, become sympathetic to their captors.

According to some of the phrases that Ben Smith uses in his Nokia N8 review, I must have Mobile Stockholm Syndrome, as I *actually* liked the Nokia N97 from November 2009 to May 2010 and I do *love* the Nokia N8.

Ben says in his last paragraph:

The issue is, Nokia fanatics aside (and I mean them no slight - we all have to be passionate about something), the user experience hasn't improved nearly enough yet so most people will get better real world use from other devices. Only a small minority will accept - long-term - sacrificing general usability for one exceptional feature (in this case the camera)...

The N8 does have its flaws*, but as a camera phone, it is excellent. But as I read Ben's last paragraph, I started to laugh, as I realized that I do have Mobile Stockholm Syndrome, then again, so do most people when it comes to their mobile and carrier/operator relationships.

Come on, admit it: You are willing to put up with an amazing about of _insert_name_of_bovine_excrement_ in exchange for having the coolest/cheapest/bestwhaterfloatsyourboat mobile on your block. You, too, have mobile stockholm syndrome.

And if it is not with your mobile phone, it is with the carrier / company that provides the phone and data service. You haven't left AT&T yet, even with all your grousing about dropped calls, now have you? You are actually kind of fond of it, as it did get you off that uncomfortable call, right? You are just waiting for the iPhone to go to Verizon so you can deeply enjoy your iPhone and local AT&T network without all the hoi poloi junking things up, right?

I am right there with you. Really. Holding my Nokia N8 with the excellent 12 megapixel camera waiting for the teaming iPhone millions to trot away from my network. Darned folk, don't appreciate everything that AT&T has done for them...

While usability does matter for me in many instances, I would rather have a great camera phone with mildly OK usability in terms of the mobile's OS, than to have great usability and only OK to crappy camera. In this I differ from most of my designer friends who love love love their iPhones. Every time I use an iPhone, I just get frustrated and wonder how they can be so over the moon for a phone that is just ok.

Each to their mobile own. We all love our respective mobile captors while we yearn for the perfect mobile or perfect mobile carrier / network, which may only exist in our own minds for that day or week.

*More on this later, but right now it is the radio changing channels and crashing when I am walking due to the motion sensor that is driving me a bit mad. Angry enough to turn off the sensor, but then the radio app still crashed when I was changing channels.

I am not a super-uper-duper early adopter with device lust who *must* have a new device [Insert Name of Object] NOW - of which that now is every few weeks to month.

No, I am another person entirely. I am the person who knows and is friends with the super early adopter device junkies, who is conversant in the various bits about new devices, but whose dirty little secret is that I like to keep my mobile phones for at least 18 months and my computers for at least 3 years before purchasing a new one.

I like getting to know them and living with them over time. And I name them.

I name my cars. I name my computers. And I name my mobile phones.

I had my Nokia 7610 for 18 months. I had my Nokia N95 and used it for 3 years, on & off after the first 18 months. And I have only had my Nokia N86 (love the little beast) for 5 months now and am not sure I am ready to give it up for a new device, no matter how shiny, pretty, new and full of 12 megapixel camera goodness.

When I took my sim and memory chips out of the N86 and did the device transfer to the N8, knowing that it was not a couple week trial but instead for good, I was not ready. I was not ready to give up my N86 yet. I was not ready, no matter how delicious of a camera on the Nokia N8 to give up my precious baby N86.

I have been keeping the N86 with me most of the time without a sim chip in it, ostensibly to take photos for a side by side comparison with the N8. But the real reason is that 5 months is too short of a time with my beloved N86 8mp little tank of a slider phone.

Whatleydude was right, there will never be another mobile like the N86.

The Nokia N8:

The Nokia N86:

Sun 10.10.10 - All week I have been shooting digital photo stills and video comparisons with the 12 megapixel Nokia N8 and the 8 megapixel Nokia N86, of which this post is Part I of III. I will let you all be the judge here, of video quality - not my poor video'ing skills. I made an effort to not change my location but just do a 360 turn with each camera phone.

While I am not the biggest video fan, as I much prefer digital still photography, it is the 12 mp HD 720p video recording capacity on the Nokia N8 that has folks in a hot sweaty internet bother.

The above videos were shot today at Dog Beach in Huntington Beach sometime in the 4-5pm hour. The text introductions were added by me using the on-board native Nokia video editing bit, no extra editing was done, and then uploaded to Flickr.

Last monday at Mobile Monday Silicon Valley, a panel discussion on Native vs. Web apps was had. Here is two summaries of the disucssion:

Mike Rowehl on Apps vs Web Apps Recap at Mobile Monday SV: "[Mobile] Web rendering engines are evolving and getting better at pulling in hardware optimizations in a way that makes the web UI as smooth and efficient as a natively coded version. But there's also a design time solution, forming your UI in a way so that it's compelling to the user but also not overly taxing on the rendering platform. It's a set of design skills that are relatively hard to find currently, but as mobile grows so does the number of folks with the right skills."

Ronan at MobiForge on Mobile Apps vs. Mobile Web: "With all of the buzz around apps & app stores it would be easy to assume that mobile apps have unstoppable momentum and that the mobile web is taking a back seat. It's worth taking a step back to see how this is all going to pan out. Will mobile apps dominate completely and overwhelm the mobile web or does the mobile web still stand a chance?"

On another note, go check out the mWomen Connect initiative that aims to connect and increase the community of folks who would like to empower women in using mobile technology to advance their lives.

Ms. Jen, in one sentence please tell us what you think about the Nokia N8:

"Love it."

Yesterday at the end of the Nokia Developer Day at CTIA in San Francisco, the developers attending were given a laptop bag with a t-shirt, a usb key loaded with the Nokia developer tools, and a Nokia N8. I enjoyed the Nokia Developer day, of which I will write about tomorrow, as there was a lot of good information about native mobile app development with the QT framework & C++, as well as mobile app user experience, WRT widget development using HTML/CSS/Javascript web technologies and Java for S40. The Nokia N8 was a fabulous addition to an already good day.

Here are my first impressions as a photographer, developer, designer, and mobilista in a bit more detail:

1) The Nokia N8 is smaller than I thought or remembered. I did see a few in the wild in May and along with all the promotional photos, I thought/remembered it would be the size of an iPhone in width, but have been pleasantly surprised that it has a huge screen but is still small enough to fit in my little hands comfortably.

2) The screen is amazing and is even better than amazing in strong sunlight. Today at 11am, I sat on a bench on the edge of the San Francisco bay in front of the Ferry Building and was able to check into my flight on Virgin America with my sunglasses on! Yes, the screen, in strong sunlight with sunglasses on was very visible.

3) Which leads me to point #3, hello fabulous amazing Nokia N8 mobile web browser, you KICK SERIOUS BOOTAY. The N8's browser even kicks the Nokia N900's bootay, as I am able to blog to this blog's regular admin area which is heavy in javascript/AJAX that even makes the Nokia N900 gack. I was able to check into my flight this afternoon on the regular Virgin America website, which is heavy in flash & javascript, with the javascript fly down menus overlaying the flash promotional area and the N8's mobile web browser cleared the hurdle with flying colors and did not send be the promo parts of the website but to check in. Hello, Hot Stuff.

4) Symbian ^3 & all touch screen. Anyone who reads my Twitter or this blog knows that I am pretty agnostic about Symbian and not a big all/only touch screen fan, as I do like my buttons. But the Nokia N8 is the first mobile I have met that does not have me yearning heavily to the point of frustration for a keypad or a qwerty keyboard. To that end, while I would like a little more haptic feedback while typing on the virtual on screen keyboard, I am happy with the layout of the keyboard. Honestly, it would be nice to have a mashup of the best of capacitive with the best of resistive touchscreens, but the N8's capacitive touch screen is working for me.

I know that lots of folk have called for Nokia to send Symbian to the dustbin of mobile history, I do think the Symbian and Nokia folks have done a very good to great job of iterating the Symbian S60 5th edition that was on the Nokia N97 into a very usable and yet still familiar Symbian ^3. I have only had a few struggles to find where a function would be and for the most part everything is just so much easier on the N8's OS than on the N97.

5) My only real complaint is that I wish all messaging and all music functions were under one app/folder for each major idea. I would like my email and sms to be in the same folder/silo, as previous editions of Symbian, and not separated out into two different silos. Messaging is messaging, what technology and how long the message is should not matter to the user when tapping an icon. Once I have tapped the icon and am in the app, then I can choose if I want texting or one of my email accounts.

The same goes with Music. I would like one icon for the home screen that then opens a folder/silo where I can find the music player and radio, rather than a bunch of different icons and activities.

6) The hardware build is lovely. The aluminum body feels smooth and organic rather than cold & metal. I love the big screen. I would further love to flip up (twack!) the screen and reveal a physical qwerty keyboard, but I am told I will have to wait for that. And I am darned glad for the gorilla glass front, as my neighbor now has a shattered iPhone 4 front screen due to a gravity storm. Say what you would like about Nokia, but they do make great mobile hardware.

7) Last but not least, the camera is fantastic. Not good. Not decent. Not even great, but fantastic. If you see 'bad' N8 photos, blame the person pushing the shutter button not the N8.

Please look at the unretouched, though resized with the on board editor, sunset photo in the post before this. I purposely set the camera to the highest setting of 12 megapixels and have been just astounded at what a point & shoot camera phone delivers in terms of color, clarity, and color accuracy. The era of crappy camera phone photos is now over.

I would like to publicly thank Damian Dinning and the whole Nseries team, as well as the camera team, for making a truly revolutionary camera phone. Damian and the team's quest for excellence is highly evident. As a photographer who wants my camera with me wherever I go, I am very, very pleased.

In closing, I am not just excited for the camera, but also to develop apps for the N8. I have ideas, now I just need some time and there is that small matter to learning how to use PySide, the python bindings for QT. Thank you to Nokia for the lovely Developer Day and the Nokia N8 for the developers.

Imagine my surprise when my RSS feeder shows the Gruber has an opinion about something other than Apple and an iThingy... Gasp, Shock, ... Hey look he blogged about Nokia and give major link love to PPK. Per usual, Mr. G. is cranky.

PPK's article on "Nokia's problem" is informative and not cranky.

In the second paragraph, PPK links to mobile business analyst and marathon blogger extraordinaire, Tomi Ahonen.

Upon seeing Tomi's name, I remembered that I had seen that he tweeted about blogging about Nokia's New CEO Stephen Elop.

Tomi is quite the opposite in every way from Gruber. Gruber is cranky. Tomi is cheerful. Gruber usually likes to only give his readers bite sized links and posts with an occasional 3-4 paragraph post. If Tomi were only to post 3-4 paragraphs, folks would get very concerned for his health & safety. Gruber takes himself and his opinions/analyses very seriously. Tomi thoroughly enjoys his opinions/analyses to the point where he will insert a funny sentence mid-paragraph and end said sentence with haha.

Go read all three articles and I will conclude by saying that I agree with PPK's closing statement:

Nokia's basic OS strategy is sound: MeeGo for the high-end, Symbian for the mid-range, and S40 for the low-end. But now it has to actually execute this strategy instead of fooling around.

Nokia, release a MeeGo phone. Before Christmas. But don't bother with Android or Windows Phone 7.

Thur 09.16.10 - Test. Test. Test.

Thurs 09.16.1 - Will it post?

******

Update 5 mins later from my computer: Yes, yes it did. Major milestone #1 in my effort to write my own mobile app to moblog directly from my phone to my blog without any stops at a 3rd party server has been achieved!

Photo taken by Ms. Jen with her Nokia N86.

Fri 09.10.10 - Since my Mom is fond of going swimming with her mobile phones, two Nokia N82's lost to water in the last 14 months, I ordered from Expansys a water resistant little battle tank of a feature phone for her - the Nokia 3720 Classic.

It arrived this afternoon. There have been a few bumps, as going from a Nokia Series 60 smart phone with an excellent camera to a Nokia Series 40 feature phone was a bit rough for Mom from the software/OS usability perspective, but it is water resistant. Did I mention that the phone won't die if Mom takes it swimming or surfing?

Dear Nokia, my Mom, Surfer Sue, respectfully requests that you all make a water proof Nseries smart phone with a great camera, preferably a water proof camera.

;o)

I have tried to write this blog post at least 4 times over the last 5 months, and have several very different drafts littering my "To Blog" folder. I started this April when I was able to directly upload photos and blog to this Movable Type blog using the Nokia N97's web browser and not a mobile app. Go little N97 go! I was so happy.

Then in early May, another attempt at writing this post, as I was about to retire the the Nokia N97 in favor of my new Nokia N86 and I wanted to write about after nearly a year since its release, the N97 had really changed my mind about it and that I did like it, really like it. But I was very busy with work and didn't have the time to spend to write a quality post beyond, "Hey, the N97 isn't that bad after all."

Then came late May and early June, I had a some down time of which to think & write, and then the great N97 inspired blogger meltdown of June 2010 occurred: Dan, Micky & Jay, and then the big boom: Ricky & Rita. I watched over a period of 3 weeks in astonishment and wrote two whole drafts in response to their blog posts that did not leave my "To Blog" folder.

I was astonished for a variety of reasons, but mostly if one was going to meltdown about the N97 as a icon for Nokia's failures of the last three years, why not point a finger that the two phones that were much greater actual failures at being flagship devices: The N96 and N85. But those two posts didn't leave the draft folder, as I couldn't really sum up without anger what I wanted to say, as I wasn't angry at the bloggers in question but more the overall techno-cultural situation that has lead all of us to a place where we get frustrated with our relationships with a piece of plastic/metal/silicon&rareearths.

By late June, early July, I realized that I really had two blog posts in my head and in draft forms in my folder: One on how I do actually like the Nokia N97 and another on our evolving relationships with brands, devices, and blogging. Work was once again intense and I had even less time and creative energy to write two long posts about mobile devices and our relationships thereof. I did change the title of the draft post from "Nokia N97: Nearly One Year Later" to "Nokia N97: One Year Later".

For the last two months, I have two to do items in my notebook, my Google Tasks, and on my whiteboard: Blog: Nokia N97, More than a Year Later; Blog: Brands: Fans, Relationship, or Cult? Have either of these gotten written? No. I have designed & launched 2 websites, I have coded like mad on another one, I have done various other bits of client consulting stuff in internet promotion & social media. I have taken lots of photos and worked on developing my personal mobile application. I even upgraded my computer to Mac OS X Snow Leopard and my "To Blog" folder now lives on an external hard drive and isn't even on my desktop any more.

Let this be a lesson. Of what, I will let you all decide.

I popped my sim chip back into the Nokia N97 the other day, and other than photos being a bit washed out, I was very happy all day long. For the rest of the week, I flipped back and forth between the N97 and my N86. I love the N97's form factor. I love the touchscreen that tilts up to reveal a whole Qwerty keyboard. I love the solid thwack of the marvelously engineered mechanism that opens and reveals the keyboard, I love this in the most primal, inner five year old with new Christmas presents sort of way. Do it in public in SoCal and you get a crowd, "Oooh, what phone is that?"

Maybe I have been lucky to not have the memory and crashing problems that have greatly frustrated others with the Nokia N97. Due to the lack of Lifeblog and official Sports Tracker for the N97, I was not running multiple processes that drew heavily on memory or battery. The only time I had memory problems was early on with my Gmail, so I just put my email in the E: drive and not the system drive. Basically in my six plus months of full time plus the trial usage before that, the Nokia N97 was very good to me.

I understand having a good blog meltdown over a device, a brand, or the like. My own frustration over Nokia dropping Lifeblog in 2008 was my moment of "Nokia, I am so over you." But much like a really good fiery fight, in autumn of 2008 I expressed my anger in a series of blog posts, tracked down the last PM on the project and gave him a piece of my mind (Sorry, Danny, I am so sorry.), then nursed my grudge for a bit, but I was not going to give up Nokia's camera phones as they are still the best.

After my anger subsided, I did something that I had been meaning to do for sometime: teach myself to program in Python and Python for S60 so that I could write my own mobile apps rather than grouse about the lack of what I wanted on the marketplace.

All of this to say, Nokia N97, I like you. You are cute, you worked for me, and we had a lot of fun together. Thanks, you rock.

Photos taken by Ms. Jen with a Nokia N97, a Nokia N86, and a Nokia E73.

Fri 08.27.10 - At Tuttle Club LA today, I found myself in possession of a Nokia E73 (trial phone), my Nokia N86, and a Nokia N97 of which I was testing out Foursquare via Gravity (works) and Gowalla mobile (doesn't work).

When I first sat down at our table, I loved the contrast between Toorak Coffee's interior orange walls and the green shirts that Geoff and Al were wearing, so I pulled out the first camera phone, the E73, in my bag and took a photo. Then I pulled out the N97 to check in to Foursquare and the like and took the same photo (mostly) from the same angle (mostly). Out came the Nokia N86 8 MP to take the final photo.

When Matt and I looked at the phones' screens, the N86 rendered the best photo where the colors looked as they actually were, the E73 the second best, and on the N97's screen the photo looked washed out. But now that I have them transferred to my computer, resized to 800x600, and posted to this blog, the N86 and the N97 look better but the real color was somewhere between the two with the N97 being a bit washed out and the N86 being a bit dark/saturated, and the E73's photo is a bit blurred and the color a bit light/bright.

The interior of Toorak is a good challenge for a point and shoot camera or a camera phone as the ceilings are high with big halogen/fluorescent lights and orange paneled walls with dark wood furniture. It is a gorgeous interior visually but a bit stressful for a camera, then add on Geoff & Al's shirts.... A comparison waiting to happen.

What do you think?

Photos taken by Ms. Jen with her Nokia N900.

Sat 08.21.10 - More photos from the Nokia E73 Mode Beach Party, as taken here and there with my Nokia N900. Don't ask my why I had two camera phones running that day...

Let's consider these photos the outtakes.

;o)

Photos taken by Ms. Jen with a Nokia E73.

Sat 08.21.10 - This afternoon and evening was the very fun Nokia E73 Mode Beach Party with a set of 'challenges' in Sunset Beach as hosted by Nokia and WOMWorld.

Attendees were given the choice to dress up in suits provided by the WOMWorld folk and to be apart of the challenges that also involved a film crew. The film fellows were using Canon 7Ds to record the video of the adventures.

WOMWorld's Donna was our 'boss' and the best parts were going out kayaking in the Huntington Harbor and the volleyball game in front of the Beach Party house, as seen in the photos above.

I enjoyed using the Nokia E73 Mode to take photos, as the camera is 5 megapixels and much improved over the last ESeries device I trialed - the E71. The photos are clear, the color is fairly correct, and the camera was fairly fast. My only complaint with the E73's camera is that in automatic mode it does best focusing at objects about a meter (3 feet) away and is a bit blurry and anything closer as seen in the photos above.

As always it was wonderful to catch up with friends who are also passionate about mobile and make new ones. Big thanks to Nokia, WOMWorld - Donna, Adam, and James, for hosting a lovely party and weekend.

The big question is when will the video come out?

;o)

The big question of the day yesterday that everyone at the Nokia Beach House asked me was, "Are you going to pre-order the Nokia N8?"

Am I going to buy the Nokia N8? YES!

Am I going to pre-order? NO!

I have several reasons for buying the N8, which are:

1) Camera
2) Camera
3) Camera
4) Camera
5) Camera

Do I need to buy My Future Preciousssss before it is released, wait weeks, and then have the early adoptor's blues? No.

I will let all the I-gotta-have-it-first-or-I-will-explode-but-will-be-bored-in-3-weeks-and-sell-it-on-ebay crowd go before me. Then I will buy the N8 on Amazon or Mobile City Online or the like, whoever has the best color selection.

The real reason for not pre-ordering My Future Precioussss is that NokiaUSA only has black/dark grey. What?!?!?!?! There are 5 lovely color selections and the US only gets black during pre-order? Join me and Bill the Cat to sputter, "Pppffffffffttt!"

Now, if they had Purple available for Pre-Order, I would have already made my order, but no purple. So, wake me up when blue, orange, or green is available in the US.

Right now, I am favoring Orange, but I might end up with Green or Blue.

Photos taken by Ms. Jen with her Nokia N86.

Fri 08.20.10 - The nice folk at Nokia and WOMWorld are holding a Nokia E73 Mode Beach Party tomorrow, Saturday, in Sunset Beach. I am quite excited that Donna, Adam, and the other James (not Whatley) are in town organizing the event, as well as being very happy to see Nokia Open Lab alum Mike Maddaloni and Glenn Letham are in town for the party as well as meeting Lenny of Nokia Innovation and Dennis of Wap Review.

This morning Donna and I met up and we took Scruffy and Belle to Dog Beach, which is about 3 miles south of the Beach House. We had a lovely walk and talk.

I joined the group again later in the early evening at the Beach House to have a good hang out time and eat a lovely dinner that Donna made for us! Thanks, Donna!

It was good to have a relaxed time before the party started to catch up and exchange ideas, thoughts, and laughter. I am looking forward to the party tomorrow afternoon.

Recently I found myself thinking about camera phone apps, more specifically about Hipstamatic and do folks really use it past the week they bought it out of the App Store?

Amongst the photographers and designers I know and follow on Flickr, I will occasionally see a photo that looks like it was Hipstamatic-d but not often, which makes me to wonder if it is due to the fact that Hipstamatic does not make a back up of the original photo before it is processed or if folks just aren't interested in Lomo like mobile camera phone photos.

My curiosity continued to wander and I started to wonder really how many camera phone apps people were using past the first week of buying them. Furthermore, what iPhone and Android camera phone apps were people buying and using with any regularity. Do folks like the 'toy camera' apps or were they using camera apps with other functionality?

The Camera phone app world has quite exploded on the iPhone and Android is catching up, but when I searched the Ovi Store there were very few camera phone apps for Symbian devices and those that were there were more geared to an East Asian J-Pop photo booth cute overload on neon aesthetic than the Graham Parson-esque Silver Like circa 1972 via a yellow daisy filled green meadow in misty sunlight aesthetic of Hipstamatic.

There was one Symbian app, Joyeye, that promised Lomo style photos, but it did not work on my Nokia N86 and I did not try to download a version for the N97. It may be that it is only for touchscreen Symbian devices or it may be that the Ovi Store seems dead set on thinking my N86 is an N97.

Two weeks ago to satisfy my curiosity, I conducted a very small survey on Twitter by asking:

msjen: iPhone folk, what is your favorite camera or photo app & why?

Happy Day. I received an email today saying that Sports Tracker is back and ready to be downloaded.

Sports Tracker has been on hiatus the last year or so, after it was spun off as a beta software product at Nokia to become its own company. The nice folk behind Sports Tracker have updated the website, ported over all of the data from folks' accounts at Nokia's Sports Tracker server, and have created mobile apps for all the current Nokia phones with GPS on board.

I am quite excited as I have missed Sports Tracker on my Nokia N86. I have missed mapping my route as Scruffy and I walk each day and I take photos. It is good fun to have a record both in terms of a map and a data record of how fast or slow one walked, the altitude and other fun geo-athletic details.

Sports Tracker ported about 95% of my 'routes' to the new server, only leaving out all routes before the Chennai photowalk, of which those previous routes were when Sports Tracker was in beta and I was testing SP before departing for the Urbanista Trip to India.

My only two minor objections to the new Sports Tracker is that the new website is in Flash and the mobile app I downloaded from the Ovi Store for my Nokia N86 doesn't have an obvious way for me to log into the new Sports Tracker website to pair my routes with the site. Hopefully, the mobile app will ask me to pair the mobile to the server when I start my first 'workout'.

I look forward to seeing what the Sports Tracker team will do and am excited that I can now pair my photos with a mapped route of my photo walks again. Thanks, Sports Tracker!

Today, I broke out the Nokia N97 and the marvelous "Mobile Python" book by Jürgen Scheible & Ville Tuulos, between the two I had a grand good time working through exercises in Mobile Python for S60 and trying out some of the ideas in my head.

I bought the Mobile Python book about 2 years ago and worked through it then, but was not able to really get in to it or process everything that I was learning until I took the Python class last summer and worked on the Alex's Bar Booking app that was coded in python on Google App Engine. Now, as I read the Python for S60 docs and go back over parts of the book, it all makes sense and it seems so easy.

As I was coding today, I felt so good about it all, unlike two years ago or even last year, that I now have a 2nd app idea... I would first like to get my mobile app idea working on the Nokia N86 and N97 before I go deep into the PyMaemo docs to get it working on the Nokia N900.

One step at a time. Next, I have to conquer my sockets issue... ;o)

My personal project of the last few days is to start chipping away at my moblogging app. Roland Tanglao and I have been talking since the Big Adventure in May about working together to get my mobile blogging app idea off the ground.

Basically, I know that if I can get a php script to post to this blog via the Atom or XML-RPC protocol, then I can get my mobile to do it via a python app. I have now spent more than 12 hours spread out over 2 days researching the various protocols, reading docs, and then trying to get several different php scripts to post a simple blog post to Movable Type 4.3's Atom or XML-RPC scripts.

Tonight, I kept getting errors that either the scripts aren't able to authenticate (both Atom & XML-RPC) or with XML-RPC I keep getting a "32300:transport error - could not open socket".

Darned sockets, I shake my fist at you.

There are several interesting articles on mobile that came out in the last few days that would make a for good weekend down time read:

You Might Find Yourself on Future: Cell Phones As Personal Information Filters:

"Pay no attention to the man holding the receiver; it's the phone itself you'll need to impress.

A small army of editors, programming directors, critics, censors, librarians and curators have shaped choices of entire generations. But just like factory workers of the 19th century found themselves inevitably replaced by the more efficient machines, human gatekeepers are giving way to a new breed of automated tastemakers - sophisticated software that separates the information wheat from the chaff and whose influence is growing as fast as the amount of information we produce.

That is, pretty fast."

Engadget's interview with Nokia's VP talks N8, MeeGo 'milestone product,' tablets, Android and more!

"We're going to put our best foot forward when it comes to the user interaction with MeeGo products, and, of course, it's an evolution. Version two is always going to be better than version one, no question about that one. Then, on the similarities between Symbian and MeeGo, of course, from an iconography and the way it looks standpoint, we can do a lot to make sure that it's visible that it is the same family. I think we have to be very careful in not pulling the legacy with us to MeeGo on certain things. We will make some conscious decisions of things that will not be the same logic. For example, Symbian originally was built as a menu-driven operating system, which is not that practical when you are in a touch environment because the tree hierarchies back and forth. For MeeGo, we have taken a totally different kind of paradigm."

Marek Pawlowski at MEX on A mobile developer day too far:

"Handset manufacturers, network operators and software companies have for some time been falling over themselves to win over third party developers to their platforms. After attending Nokia's less than successful Ovi Developer day in London, I couldn't help but ponder whether this industry infighting is in their long-term interests and those of their customers?

These companies share a simple, common objective: increasing the value of their main product offering (be that handsets for Nokia, network capacity for operators or advertising for Google) by ensuring as many applications as possible are available within their eco-system, preferably exclusively. This is what drives all those developer conferences, free handsets and partnership marketing budgets.

It is hard to dispute the initial logic of this premise: customers will naturally be inclined to buy products which allow them access to the best services. Apple is the benchmark example, where the availability of iOS apps is a key selling point for the iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad. In our consumer research we are seeing increasing numbers of customers making handset and operator purchasing decisions based on the quality and economy of access they provide to specific branded services.

However, numerous companies in the mobile industry are simply trying to beat Apple's App Store at its own game without stopping to consider if this is in their long-term strategic interests."

Photo by Ms. Jen with her Nokia N900.

Thurs 08.05.10 - Belle, after being quite lovely and quiet this week, decided to step up & out in noise and activity level this afternoon and evening. I used the Nokia N900 to take this photo, as I like the grain when the light is a bit low.

Today on Twitter in the name of research for tomorrow's blog post, I asked iPhone and Android owners what their favorite camera or photo apps are? Now I will ask you all...

Do you have a favorite camera or photo app for your iPhone, Android, Blackberry, Nokia or other camera phone? If so, please tell me what it is and why you like it in the comments.

If you don't have any special apps but like the native camera & photo apps that come with the camera, say so.

Yes, I know that my Facebook Connect is not working for comments, I am sorry but I have been unable to troubleshoot why. Will work on it later in the week.

To follow up on last week's post, 2,045 Days with a Camera Phone, I would like to write a bit more on why I have loved camera phone photography and mobile blogging so much in the last 5.5 years and that can be summed up in one word: constraints.

The old adage in design, photography, and many other arts is that it is not unlimited creative freedom that sparks the best in a designer or artist, but it is limits and constraints that the artist or designer has to push at, be challenged by, and get around that create great art and design or at least cause the artist in question to grow in their craft.

It has been very easy the last 8-10 years to hone one's craft with a DSLR camera almost to the point where too many photographers get obsessed with megapixels, lenses, and processing in Photoshop than the actual act of taking the photo becomes secondary or farther down the line.

By choosing to shoot more than 90% of my photos of the last half decade with a small camera phone and then choosing to send them directly from the phone to the internet with no stops at Photoshop, means that I purposefully chose to constrain myself to a small camera that in many cases had less megapixels and less of a lens & digital sensor system than the contemporary point & shoots, not even considering what the comparable time period of DSLRs could do.

But the magic of setting the self-imposed discipline of the constraints of a camera phone plus no or very little post-phone processing seriously, meant that I had to really hone my eye, my composition, my observation of the scene, and then just shoot and shoot and shoot. I have shot a lot of bad photos in the last 5+ years, but I have also shot a lot of good to wonderful photos with my camera phones.

And it is the discipline of the constraints of a camera phone that make the great photos all the more sweeter than when I shoot a good photo with a Nikon film SLR or DSLR.

All of that being said, I have some to quite a bit of trepidation about the next generation of camera phones, particularly the Nokia N8, as it really is better than the point & shoots out on the market right now. The photos from its big 12 megapixel digital sensor & Zeiss lens are extraordinarily good.

After 5.5 years of pushing, working around, thinking, changing the angle, doing whatever I could to capture the vision in my head with a camera phone, to have a camera phone that will be not just good enough, but great... ...that is why I said in the last article that I started to think seriously about film rangefinders or purchasing a high end Nikon. My thoughts were - if the Nokia N8 is so spectacular then I won't have much in the way of constraints, then whole rubric for why I have shot with camera phones since 2004 will be over.

Yes, as I said in 2,045 Days with a Camera Phone, the Nokia N8 is the arrival of the maturity of camera phones as a photographing instrument and the pioneering era is mostly over, particularly if one was shooting with camera phones from the perspective of constraints or enjoying the toy quality of some camera phone's imagery.

But I am not going to run away. Why? Because I trust Damian. I trust Mr. Dinning's vision that he has had the last 6 years to push the technology of camera phones to meet that of the highest quality levels. He and I had several interesting conversations over meals at the big adventure in May that gave me an insight to his desire to make the Nokia Nseries line of cameras cross from good to great. Damian and his team have not failed me in the Nokia N86 or any other Nseries camera phones that I have taken photos with since 2004.

So, I will let go of my imposed constraints and walk into a new era and see how good camera phones can really get for the photographer who wants a camera on one at all times, with the N8 I will just have to find a few new challenges to set for myself.

Here's to the future.

On Dec. 9, 2004, I drove to Beverly Hills to pick up my first camera phone, a Nokia 7610 with a 1 megapixel camera. I was ecstatic.

In 2003, I first heard of mobile phone / camera phone photography and mobile blogging from Adam Greenfield & Mie Kennedy's blogs, as well as Joi Ito mentioning it at SXSW. I really really really wanted to start taking photos with my phone and upload the photos directly from my phone to the internet.

The last 2,045 days of mobile phone photography have been wonderful. I don't use the word wonderful lightly here. By wonderful, I mean a whole new world of wonder. A world of exploration, of pushing the boundaries of and of purposefully constricting the boundaries of photography.

In 2003-2004, most of my photographer friends were moving from their film SLRs to DSLRs and thought I was crazy for showing up at concerts and shows with a crazy little camera phone rather than my Nikon or my Sony Mavica digital camera. But as they watched me upload the photos directly from the phone to Flickr or Barflies.net or to this blog while I was still at the show, then their sense of wonder was activated.

In the nearly six years of taking photos and mobile blogging with a Nokia camera phone much has changed. In 2004, my Nokia 7610 was only 1 megapixel, but it was connected to the internet. I had a browser, email, and most importantly, I had Lifeblog - all the better to mobile blog with.

Today, I have a Nokia N86 8 megapixel camera phone which takes fantastic photos. It has a browser, email, GPS, and many more features, but unfortunately no Lifeblog so mobile blogging is more than a wee bit more difficult than it was 2004-2008. But I love the photos that the N86 takes, so I won't complain about the lack of direct phone to blog with no stops at 3rd party server mobile apps.

Having a camera on my phone in my hand, in my pocket, or in my purse has opened up many creative doors and worlds in my life the last 6 years - I wrote my masters degree thesis on how creative people use their mobile phones, I did a whole mobile geo-photo master's project by photo & video'ing while traveling around Ireland with a Nokia N80 and my brother's Garmin GPS (sorry, no GPS in phones in 2006). I have gotten to travel to India, Austria, Helsinki, and San Francisco as well as many other places in the name of mobile phone photography.

Lately, as I think about the upcoming Nokia N8, a 12 megapixel, HD video monster of a camera phone, I have been reflecting about how the camera phone has arrived. With the Nokia 5, 8 & 12 megapixel camera phones, the Samsungs & Sonys, and the just released iPhone 4, camera phones are now good enough that one does not need to carry a separate point & shoot and in many cases they can be better in crowds or public places than a bulky DSLR. And the camera phone in hand is always better than the DSLR that you left locked up at home or in the car.

The last few months, part of me has wondered if it is time to creatively move on, to purchase a high end Nikon DSLR, like the D700, with a few prime lenses or start exploring medium & large format film photography with a used Mamiya or pick up a rangefinder camera and explore that world.

As I researched other photography avenues, I kept asking myself if it is time to say goodbye to the now past frontiers of the camera phone photography world and move on? Is it time to say goodbye to the frustrations of sub-standard mobile blogging software and the further frustrations of trying to convince various industry folks that good software matters? Is it time to move away entirely and take back up with my paint brush, of which no software is necessary?

Then I met a Nokia N8 in the wild. What a beauty. I can't say more due to an NDA and complete respect for the owner of said device... but... Oh my, what a camera. Color, clarity, oh my.

Rather than get sappy at this point or descend into a drooling heap of gadget lust, I will refer y'all to the man behind the N8's camera, the man with 215 more days in camera phone world than I and more days in the Nikon world - Mr. Damian Dinning - who has penned a very thoughtful and thorough series of articles on camera phones, photography and the upcoming Nokia N8 for the Nokia Conversations blog:

Nokia N8 Camera - 2,260 days in the making Part 1/2

Nokia N8 Camera - 2,260 days in the making Part 2/2

Nokia N8 photography - all the FAQs

And yes, come release date in a couple of months, I will be purchasing a Nokia N8 and then tracking down a QT developer to help me flesh out the code of my mobile app idea. Here's to 2,045 more days of camera phone photography. ;o)

Follow up Post: Camera Phone Photography: Celebrating Constraints

Photo taken by Ms. Jen with her Nokia N86. Click for original sized image.

Wed 07.14.10 - This morning, as I woke up, I noticed a scarab beetle making out with my carpet, right on the edge of the area that I steam cleaned yesterday. The beetle was about 2cm (nearly 1 inch long) and when it had its head in the carpet, its butt was in the air. Very silly little creature.

Me being me, meant that I had to get up, walk past the beetle without disturbing it, grab my Nokia N86 8MP camera phone to take a photo or two. I put the camera settings on "Close Up" and zoomed in a bit to take two photos of which the one above was the one with the most clarity - click on the photo to see the original large size for details.

Oh what clarity the N86 captured! The hairs on the head of a 2cm beetle.

Of course the beetle got camera shy and lowered its butt by the time I got the camera to it, but the Nokia out performed my wishes. Not even my borrowed Nikon D70s could have taken the above photo.

Bravo!

Sun 07.11.10 - Ever since I wrote my master's thesis on how Creative Professionals used their Mobile Phones, I remain very curious how folks are using their phones. The tech and mobile blogs and blogosphere very much reward bloggers for writing on either the newest/latest/greatest or on the most detailed, esoteric atomic bits about the latest and greatest, all the while most of the folks around us seem to be muddling along with the mobile or cell phone that they bought from their wireless carrier for cheap.

When folks in my daily life find out that I love to take photos with my mobile phone and then moblog them to this blog, I frequently find the person I am talking to puts themselves down, discounts their own technology skills and knowledge, then confesses that they don't know how to get the photos they take with their phone off the phone.

A year ago, I decided that it would be fun to start a video blog that would, magazine style, ask a wide variety of folks the same five questions about their phones, plus a few sub-questions are asked in each interview, plus whatever other bits folks want to talk about their mobile phones:

1) Who are you, what phone do you have, where did you get it, and do you have a data plan?
2) What do you like about your mobile / cell phone?
3) What have you taught yourself to do on your mobile?
4) What don't you like about your mobile?
5) Either What do you wish you knew how to do on your mobile or what do you wish your phone did differently?

This idea has evolved and as of this evening, I formally announce the launch of Mobilefor.Us: Cell Phones for the Rest of Us.

Mobilefor.Us will be an online space that will seek to inform, share, and disseminate knowledge and confidence in using one's mobile phone regardless if you have the free phone from your carrier with no data plan or if you have the latest & greatest mobile with unlimited data or somewhere in between.

Please come join us at Mobilefor.Us.

My fave quote from Rant #1, US vs Them? American wireless industry, come meet me at Camera 3:

But no, Americans consumers get crippled versions of the cheapest lousiest phones you can find. Why is it that an Apple 'innovation' of a Forward Facing Camera is somehow radical in the USA? We've had these forward facing second cameras as standard features on essentially all 3G phones in Europe and Asia and Australia and Latin America and.. for Heaven's Sake, in Africa! I was the person flown in to place the first 3G video call on the continent of Africa when Vodacom of South Africa opened its 3G network for developers - and I used a forward facing second camera on that 3G phone - and this was in ...2004! Shame on you American carriers! That you haven't bothered even to bring this international standard to Americans and we have to wait for an outsider like Apple to bring it (now obviously, they do it on their Facetime proprietary solution, and can you blame Apple for that? You ruined yet another opportunity). The best phones? Isn't it time you joined us in the 21st Century and let American consumers enjoy what the rest of the world expects as normal.

My fave bit from Rant #2, Serious reply to CTIA Steve Largent - he's cruisin' for a bruisin':

In Japan, on just one carrier, NTT DoCoMo, there are today over a million content partners, application and service providers. When did they pass that 100,000 level? in 2004! You think Steve Largent that this is a sign of innovation in America in 2009? You are literally 5 years behind Japan - a country only a third the size of the USA in population. Shame on you! But I know the app store argument is fun to make today, eh? So you admit that the carriers can't do this level of creativity, it takes the outsider - like Apple - to do it. Thats exactly what I argued. So, one, I defeat your argument that the USA is 'innovative' because of the Apple App Store - but you then admit that the 100,000 in December 2009 and most of the 240,000 today (Apple having 225,000) is because of Apple who could not deploy these on the carrier systems, and had to develop its own app store. You are helping me prove my point that the carriers in the USA are dinosaurs, Steve.

The internet, the blogosphere, and the mobile worlds are all the richer for Mr. Ahonen's rants. Put Tomi on your RSS feed, it is always a good read.

Amongst bloggers in recent years there has been a decline in single author generalist blogs, be they professional or personal, and an increase in single subject blogs. Amongst tech bloggers, there has been a great deal of single brand blogs.

As a generalist semi-profession, semi-personal, semi-photography, semi-commentary blogger, I am always amazed when a person can keep a regular single subject blog up for longer than 2-3 years. Most of the personal bloggers I know have burnt out and then gotten reinvigorated by looking at different facets of their lives or by moving on to new passions. But what is a single subject blogger or even worse a single brand blogger to do when they are burnt out on that subject or brand?

Dan Carter of WorldofNokia.co.uk decided to close his blog this week. Dan writes:

"After what has been a up and down 2 years I am announcing that World Of Nokia will be closing it's doors for the final time on 5th June 2010 when the site will no longer be updated.

Both myself and Christian would like to thank you all for your support shown since day one and for everyone who has helped build the site up with comments, links or advertising,

Seeing as this is the final post I thought it only right to explain the reason behind the closing of the site and to be brutal its the fact Nokia have stopped being as creative as they once were not that long ago. The N95 was a modern masterpiece with the exception of the poor battery life but since then there has been a total lack in creativity

Nearly every phone launched until the new C/X series was a small update of the phone it was surpassing which itself was only a few months old (just how many versions of the 5800 and N95 did we really need??)
...

Over the past 2 years just concentrating on Nokia, all the phones ended up feeling pretty much the same due to the tired Symbian OS which only now on the new Symbian 3 due out in September has some chance of doing well. In fact when talking to Christian tonight about the Nokia N8 he said

"its too far off for me and runs Symbian which is putting me off"

"

In response, I commented:

"Dan,

May I make a recommendation? Keep the domain name, you never know what the future will bring AND don't just put your writing effort into someone else's site, but get your own blog and write about what you love right now.

With your own blog about whatever, there is no pressure to blog about a certain brand or even about mobile, but whatever you love.

Good luck!

smiles, jen ;o)"

All commentary about personal branding aside, I do think if one is a passionate person and is interested in observing the world around one or creating a space online, then having a string of single subject blogs or writing for a string of group or contribution blogs may end up being frustrating both for the blogger and their readers.

I will advocate my 2nd Law of the Internet in this case - "Own your Own Stuff".

I encourage anyone who has graduated from or wants to graduation from occasional posting blogger.com or wordpress.com to get their own domain, of which does not have to be in your name but can be an idea or conceptual name, and then set up a self-hosted blog in that domain and blog. Blog about whatever.

If this week you want to blog about mobile and Nokia or Apple, then blog about it. If next week or month or year, you are super passionate about Peruvian butterflies, then pay your domain registry & hosting and keep blogging be it about Apple, butterflies, politics, relationships, brands, travel, underpants, or whatever.

Put own your own creativity and consolidate it into one place, and if you must use tech tricks such as tags, categories, and .htaccess files to drive the SEO traffic to your new generalist blog.

Why? As a gift to your regular readers. People subscribe by RSS or Google Reader or Feedburner, etc, and they will want to keep reading you. Treat your regulars well, give them a consistent RSS or Atom feed.

Also as a gift to yourself. Allowing your own intellectual and creative curiosity to grow and flourish by the ability to explore new ideas over time rather than be limited to a single subject or brand.

Earlier this year, James Burland, a creative from the UK that I admire greatly did all but shutter his "Nokia Creative" blog to move on to his "iPad Creative" blog. While I love James' various passions for creating on the devices he is most excited about right now, I would love to see him for the long term not commit to a single brand, even if it drives more traffic in terms of SEO, but instead have one central blog of James' thoughts on how to create with [_______insert name of device_______]. Otherwise in 5 years' time, where will some of his best pieces be?

Ok, my inner Micki Krimmel will now argue to me that none of this matters to the reader, they don't care and technology will solve the problems of aggregation of all of our content for the reader to find over time. Someone else may argue that in 5 years time, James won't care about the iPad but will think his blog about it is a quaint relic of a different time.

Be that as it may, one of the great breakthroughs of the internet age is that if we want to, we can all be creative producers, so why not set up our own channel that is not dependent on one idea, subject, or brand, but instead a channel / blog / site that allows one to grow in one's passions and creativity over time and still allows the readers to consistently follow and participate.

Dan, I hope you set up your own space that allows you to blog about whatever suits your fancy right now without apologies and allows those of us who read your writing to continue to follow you, even if it is sporadic.