2Lines Software

It seems pretty clear that the future of mobile development will be based around smartphones. Given the success of Android, RIM, iPhone, Symbian and WinMo platforms it doesn´t look like many device manufacturers will be heading back to the old days of custom OS builds (Motorola, Sony you´ve done well with your own firmware in the past but its time now.). This report highlights the growth of mobile applications based on smart phones.

So the question is, Given that smartphone users are many times more likely to download and pay for mobile applications is there any point in developing for the mass-market phones anymore?

Just thought I pass this little bit of information on. Fedora 10 (and Ubuntu also) is a little screwy when it comes to connecting the ADP1 device to Eclipse for testing.

Any USB device automatically gets connected as read-only which means the adb server and Eclipse won´t see the device when you plug it in.

This post gives a little information on how to fix it.

The idea is to create a rules file that listens for the Android device and sets the permissions differently. The rules are all located under /etc/udev/rules.d. So in detail,

Create a new rule for Android devices

vi /etc/udev/rules.d/99-android.rules

Add the following code

SUBSYSTEM=="usb",SYSFS{idVendor}=="0bb4",SYMLINK+="android_adb",MODE="0666"

And run

udevcontrol reload_rules

Plug it in and it should work.

Here it is the new logo for the company is up and paid for! I liked the design and simplicity of the logo. In the end I had over 200 submissions from 67 designers for the logo design all of which were excellent designs.

More importantly it showed the power of the crowdsourcing model when it comes to getting work done. I am very happy with the logo and the design process. The designers were very flexible and accomodating to anything that I requested. Also you can’t argue with the price $250 for a logo.

Now, updating the website…

Here is the fully functioning WikiWhere Application.

Feel free to add / remove / update or delete the app as you see fit!

Continuing from Part 3 we are going to spend the 30 minutes or so to finish the WikiWhere application. So far we have a mapping and location application on the device. The final step is integrating the Wiki sites and displaying them on the map.

1:45 Foosball, Reddit, Digg and Google Reader Break

1:55  Getting the XML feed for the Wiki sites

Now that you’ve had a long break we can get to the more complicated sections of the code. The Wiki information is collected and provided as a web service by Geonames.org. We will be using the wikipediaBoundingBox XML API to get the information from the service. By making a call to http://ws.geonames.org/wikipediaBoundingBox?north=51.1&south=50.1&east=-113&west=-115 you can get the XML feed of the Wiki Entries in the bounding box in the following format:

So to get our wiki items displayed on the map we need to:

1. Call the Geonames XML API

2. Parse the XML

3. Display the icons on a MapOverlay

4. Implement the “Search For Wiki Entries” Button

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