Archive
Schematic’s San Jose office has just launched Costa Rica’s first-ever PHP group. Starting with a group of about 30 programmers from a wide range of companies, the group will meet on a regular basis to discuss skill development, new ideas, and everything else in the world of PHP.
http://www.costaricaphp.org (in Spanish)
The new Nokia MOSH launched today. Schematic and Nokia teamed up to deliver this combo website/WAP site that allows users to easily download and upload content from their mobile phones.
The Schematic team that delivered this project worked incredibly hard and delivered a fantastic product. It works on all handsets (not just Nokia’s), so go check it out!
http://mosh.nokia.com/
It’s a camera. It’s a gamepad. It’s a PDA, a phone and/or a remote control. It’s the new grasp-sensitive handheld device from MIT’s Media Lab. They call it “Bar of Soap” (which is what it looks like), and it actually figures out what you want it to do depending on how you’re holding it. Hold it like it’s a camera, and it’ll take pictures; hold it like a cellphone, and it’s a cellphone. The plastic casing hosts a touchscreen, 72 touch sensors, an integrated accelerometer, and Bluetooth connectivity.
Read more at Gizmodo.
Nero AG and TiVo announced yesterday that the multimedia software provider will embed TiVo’s timeshifting solution in its next generation of software. Maybe this means benighted countries around the world will finally get TiVo services (and not just the HD-free Series 2 that has finally made its way to Canada).
Read more.
The latest from Google
Read more at The New York Times.
Three of Schematic’s brightest technologists are slated to speak at the php|tek conference in Chicago, from May 20-23 2008.
Ben Ramsey will be running the Zend PHP 5 Certification Crash Course on the tutorial day of the conference.
Brian DeShong will be presenting on two topics: “The Grown-Up Company’s Guide to Development,” along with a new talk entitled “Robust Batch Processing with PHP.”
Maggie Nelson will also be speaking on two topics: “Keeping Your Database and PHP in Sync,” and “Angering Database Gods.”
A big congratulations to all three!
Salt Lake City’s Sarcos, which has been developing robotic exoskeletons for the US Department of Defense, has just released a video of a prototype in action. Soldiers will be able to perform superhuman feats, and, down the road, so perhaps will the rest of us. Implications for the physically disabled are enormous.
Read more (and be sure to watch the video) at Gizmodo.
It’s been called “astonishing” but there are lots of other adjectives that might apply.
What you’re looking at is Toshiba’s experimental 6-pound virtual-reality helmet. This baby sports infrared sensors that detect the movement of the wearer’s head, and synch with a projector in the back of the helmet to produce the illusion that the wearer is somewhere else. The 16-inch dome-shaped screen enables a full 360-degree view. Eventually, Toshiba thinks this might enhance computer games or even movies. They’re going to have to make wider seats.
Read more at The Daily Mail
Today Amazon.com launched Kindle, an eBook reader that allows customers to download titles directly to the hand-held device.
While eBook readers are nothing new, Kindle is a killer app. Why? Because it solves the problem of adding content quickly and easily. In the past, eBook readers required repeated syncing with a PC. With Kindle, content is delivered via WIFI and EV-DO. That means you can get your content–like books and newspapers–at home, at work, in your car or on a bus.
The Kindle device is priced at $399 and books are $10, so we’ll need to see a price drop before this really takes off.
By Franklin Garcia, Software Developer, Java Group
OpenAlliance recently released an “early look” edition of its Android platform. Android is a set of software for mobile devices: an operating system, middleware and mobile applications. Built on the open Linux kernel, it utilizes a custom virtual machine called Dalvik. OpenAlliance hasn’t yet released the SDK code, but promises to “open it” in the future. The SDK provides a phone emulator, debugging tools and sample code.
Looking at the official Google Group page, there is a lot of documentation available– everything you need to get started. However, when I began to code my application I found incomplete or wrong information on some pages; for example, if you look at the List of Views in Reference Information, the list is not exhaustive. This is understandable as we’re dealing with a recent release.
To see for myself if all the good things that OpenAlliance and Google are saying about Android are true, I took a couple of days to build an Android application (which I named “Twitt3r”). The first good thing I found: the SDK is based on Java and other libraries from Apache (or at least it’s good for me, a Java developer). The application to code from scratch uses Twitter.com REST API to retrieve and send data. Twitter.com is a micro blog site, where users “post” simple messages responding to the question: What are you doing? As an anonymous guest, you can see others’ micro blogs, and see the public timeline (all posts ordered by post date and time). As a registered user, you receive your own blog (http://twitter.com/<yourusername>) and can “follow” your friends from post to post.
While developing this simple application I was able to test networking access (accessing the REST API) and authentication (needed for user-only features), parse XML (Twitter REST API has three flavors, XML, JSON and RSS) and code a normal application with multiple screens.
In general, I really like Android. It is as easy to develop as Java Micro Edition, but with the full power of the core of Java Standard Edition (you won’t need to use Swing here). You only need to take care of your code and what you want to display on the screen. How to display it and how to handle events are managed by the system. Actually, you need few code lines to get a good looking application running. This is because you can define your entire UI using just XML. But if you like the old school programming style, you can code the whole UI.
The Android Developer community is growing quickly and is very active (the official group is hosted by Google at http://groups.google.com/group/android-developers). With such notable companies as NTT DoCoMo, Samsung and Motorola being part of OpenAlliance, I think Android has a lot of potential and it will give us great surprises in the coming months.
Inside the Box is an open forum for Schematic’s employees, partners, and friends to discuss the things that matter most to them. Be it strategy, design, technology, user experience, content, products, services or digital innovations. Here, is where we analyze, proselytize, theorize, ponder and debate. Here is where we share, collaborate, and grow from collective ideas and thinking.
/
/
/
/
