digitalsean@typepad

random links about mobiles

Some odds and ends from people who like developing small but interesting apps:

• SMS vote counter by Dave Glover, could be nice for teaching, education and conferences wanting small scale votes without needing to outsource.
• Wiki for pocket pc and desktop bLADE wiki, developed by Dale Lane (who also released a nice del.icio.us plugin for pocket ie

Other random other links:

• Stephen Fry writes an interesting blog, and knows his mobile device history
• mms over email - NueMMS which relies on pktpix who forward emails to (phonenumber)@pktpix.com via MMS
• cool web design for a Microsoft conference (via BinaryJam (not that I'll have an interest in coding using silverlight), but the website header is nice. (and I note that it works in Safari, Firefox and IE -- unlike the web app framework that the conference is all about)

In other news, our "music" playing neighbour has been a lot quieter ever since a visit from a rather grumpy Louis, to explain in detail why he doesn't really like European dance music and drum and bass. He was quite persuasive in the only way he knows how.

• xkcd on dealing with noisy neighbours
• xkcd on grapefruit, and a response: grapefruit on xkcd (via Nielsen Hayden).

twitter overload as text messages

Suffering a little from twitter overload. It's been fantastically useful over the last few months, leading up to the birth, and the first few weeks with a new baby.

However my stats over 3-4 weeks : only 15 out of 207 text messages in my inbox were real text messages. The rest were all messages received from twitter. Added to this were three facebook wall messages via the Mobile App and a couple of notifications from T-Mobile mean that the imaginary friends are definitely winning here.

My new problem is that when I hear my message tone[1], I tend to ignore it. This means that the handful of real text messages are sometimes being ignored. Perhaps I could switch off text notifications while I'm at a computer, and start to use twitterific or instant message connection to twitter properly.

The other plan is to make the phone treat twitter texts differently. Lots of ways to have contact groups have different ringtones on Windows mobile, different text tones seems to be more complex -- seems you need to hook in and receive new SMS events and do your own notification.

Software to try to apply rules / message tones depending on sender:

• SmartSMS Filter Lite from Palmary Soft
• smsOrganiser from zedSoft
• Text Message Manager from DBG Soft

Oh and ContactCM mentions something about this for their next release.

Surely there must be an easier way of implementing this.

[1]: note to self - don't use PhoneAlarm to have loud repeated reminders on every SMS delivery when leaving your phone in the same room as your pregnant wife. This can be hazardous to both your and your phone's health

some programs to try out

Catching up with weblog stuff. Trying out the baby-bjorn style baby carrier this morning, carrying Louis around with some success. It kept him entertained for a couple of hours while we tidied up and caught up with things around the house.

Now while he is still quiet got time to catch up on some of the tech and mobile weblogs which I have been leaving to build up.

Spotted an interesting program for fixing 'slow' and 'unresponsive' windows machines, Process Lasso from Bitsum. Useful when the computer seems to stop responding due to a process from getting out of control, it can be set to limits the proportion of processor time any one process or application can use, and also change the priorities of processes in a 'nice' way. Recommended by Boston PPC

Pocket PC Thoughts mentions that Newsgator has changed to a free model for personal use. This might compete with my longstanding use of Bloglines (beta) as my RSS feed reader of choice as something I can use on Mac, PC and mobile.

Some other software to try out on Windows Mobile: * Avot MV online video portal and player * Upgraded version of Pocket CM iphone-like contact and SMS browser. * Trivial but useful looking NoteToSelf from Web IS. This is a program which was previously called Voice Minder and a forum competition helped to rename. I think they missed a trick by not calling it 'Captains Log'. However, wouldn't that make a great voice shortcut for the program.

It may also be interesting to take a look at the new web browsers for windows mobile which are on their way over the next few months. Opera 9.5 has announced but not been released to consumers yet. Netfront has released their new version too. There also a couple of projects for windows mobile browsers based on the Apple Safari core webkit. These are 'Iris' from Torch Mobile and 'WebKit for Windows Mobile' from Wake3, both in limited tesing stage and not made a first public release yet.