Nokia WRT (Web Runtime Toolkit) API Documentation Available

Recently, I have begun tinkering around with the WRT tools for my Nokia 5800 so I can start to develop some handy widgets for my phone (and others).

Nokia has something called the Web Runtime, which allows, developers to write a applications using standard HTML/JS/CSS/DOM based applications that can tap into some of the native functionality of Nokia devices as well as be nicely packaged into installable files.

They even have a plugin to help developing these widgets in Aptana/Eclipse. The only problem is that the documentation online is very bad and incomplete. They information is scattered in various places and no where online can you find a decent set of API docs detailing all of the classes and functions. Whatever you find online is incomplete, at best.

Another developer Jappit pointed me in the right direction to find good documentation, but only available inside of Aptana. I have pulled the WRT help / API documentation from Aptana and uploaded it online.

You can view the WRTKit API Documentation online.
Otherwise, you can download the complete WRT API Documentation for Aptana as a zip file.

I also have uploaded the latest WRT Library (1.4) online as well.

Hopefully, now I can start creating a few interesting apps for S60 users...

Dropbox has been banned from my work

Update: The problem is now resolved. Dropbox was able to get their domain off of the "malicios sites" list and now they are OK once again. Now if only they had an app for Symbian s60v5...

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I love the dropbox service. I have been using it since it was in private beta. I even wrote a google gadget for dropbox to have immediate access to the service whereever I login.

Starting this morning, when I tried to access a file in my public dropbox folder, Firefox told me that this was a restricted site which was known for malicious attacks.

Since then, they seemed to have changed the subdomain from dl.getdropbox.com to files.getdropbox.com.

However, it is too late for me because the entire domain is now banned by my work proxy server. It does not matter that they changed the subdomain. The entire domain is now unavailable and unlikely to get unblocked any time soon, if ever.

Balsamiq Mockups - it Roqs (Web Prototyping Software)

Recently I heard about a piece of software for creating mockups for web apps. After a brief read of the features and nature to the tool it sounded almost too good to be true.

Striking the prototyping balance...
For many years, I have tried virtually every type of prototyping method for web page design.  Each has its own dedicated following (fanboys), advantages and disadvantages.


Examples of prototyping methods used previously

Method	Description	Advantages	Disadvantages
Pencil & Paper	Just as it sounds, sketch it out on a pad of paper.  Other variations include cutting and pasting paper to show interaction	Focused on ideas and functionality (if done with layers) Anyone can have input Less pride of ownership Can do it anywhere more info	Very tedius (especially if you have little to no drawing skills) No scale to duplicating elements
PowerPoint / Visio	Create a background image and start building on top of it with boxes / cut screenshots	Easy to duplicate elements Can show animation (PPT) On most desktops more info	Animation is very tedius Stuck with 1 page size (for all intensive purposes this is the case)
Photoshop	Use the industry standard image softwrare to build your comps	Powerful use of layers Easy to duplicate elements Lots of tools and templates available more info	Not always available Expensive Not easy for a novice Often focuses on "sexiness" instead of usability Animation not easy more info
Fireworks	Similar to Photoshop (and Illustrator) but handles reuse and "animation" better	Powerful use of layers Easy to duplicate elements Good animation tools more info	Not always available Expensive Not easy for a novice Often focuses on "sexiness" instead of usability
Dreamweaver	Use the most popular WYSIWYG tool to write HTML	WYSIWYG click and add elements Quick edits (small changes) Templates more info	Not always available Expensive Not easy for a novice Bad tradeoffs in having semi hi fidelity and inability to reach quickly to big changes (CSS can be a pain)
Straight HTML/jQuery	Grab your favorite Text Editor / IDE and start coding.	Closest approximation to the final product Adds real interactivity Forces designer to think of practicality jQuery adds lots of powerful tools to speed up layout and functionality more info	Strong technical knowledge needed Hard to react quickly / in real time to radical changes Often focuses on "cool factor" instead of usability

And then came Balsamiq Mockups...perhaps the perfect balance

Balsamiq Mockups (BM from now on) is from a micro-ISV called Balsamiq.  The founder is a former Adobe employee who decided to head out on his own and moved back to his home country of Italy to focus on the company.

The product's objective is to give you most of the advantages of Paper Prototyping but with the added value that comes from being digital (quick repetition and duplication, capture state easily, collaboration across long distance, etc...).

The interface is simple and the usability is very high.  Although it is a young product from a young company, the software so far has worked fairly reliably.

Every element acts a lot like a visio element.  They can be resized (I really like the autosize feature), grouped, layered, duplicated, etc... There are a minimal set of properties that many controls have to adjust background color, to add a real image (the sketch it feature is helpful to not lose site of the mockup's purpose), or adjust font sizes (this last feature is limited and something I suggest improving below).

Since I installed the application (it is Adobe AIR based) a couple of days ago, I have used it to mockup some important page changes that we are considering.  It is amazing how fast I was able to whip up the new design ideas using this tool.  Most recently, I have been doing these mockups using a combination of Firebug, Firefox, jQuery, and SnagIt.  For small changes I will continue to use these tools, but Balsamic Mockups was much easier and quicker for me to sketch up big changes to the pages, especially when it came to layout.

Examples of mockups from Balsamiq (I cannot show my mockups due to our corporate policy e.g. trade secrets)

  

 

What is still needed for the software right away:

• Zoom - You cannot zoom in or out of the page.  Needed, especially for us without fancy monitors (or on noteboooks)
• Adjust font size & style for all (or most) controls - font size and styles can only be changed in certain types of text controls but not all (ej, lists, some  text, etc...)
• Personal Library for Custom controls - Lets say that you created an image using an asset from your site.  You should have a simple way to add this to the collection for use in other prototypes.
• Naming Exported PNGs - you can export mockups at any point to a PNG file, but you are never given an option to name the PNG file.

Other items to add in the future...

• Interactivity - add clickable links to navegate between mockups (or PNGs), perhaps add common effect features (slide, fade, lightbox)
• Integration with other services - Balsamiq will focus on creating plugins and small opps for the web office.  It would be great to be able to export mockups or PNGs to photo sharing services like Picasa or collaboration sites like Basecamp.

Conclusion - it Roqs!
I love this software.  Looking over the blog posts, there seems to be a healthy rate of updates to the software, so I can only expect the features to become richer over time.  You can see on their site that they already have a fairly large following.  They can happily add one more (and any one else that I can convince) to that list of happy users.

You can try it using their online trial (benefit of being AIR based) although it is time-limited.

Zune Y2K8 Global Meltdown (1st Gen 30GB) (AKA Z2K)

UPDATE: My Zune now works.  The MSFT people "jumped onto the problem" and came up with the precise technical solution of telling us to wait and see if all is good come Jan 1st 2009.  So they worked really hard to tell us to do nothing and excuse their error.

They need to make amends and win back the group of users that the likely have lost due to this mistake.

Also why does the Zune have an internal calendar anyway?  What purpose does it serve? Perhaps for syncing....would have been nice if they gave a real explanation.

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I am a rabid user of my Zune.  I bought it on woot last year for $99 and have greatly enjoyed it.  I use it to listen to about 20 regular podcasts, house my music collection and photos, and keep tons of videos on it (especially useful with the TV out to have movies to entertain my kids just in case when at other people's houses).

So this morning I was listening to the zune without problem as I went to work.  I even showed some xmas photos to some coworkers right after I arrived.  However, soon after 9 AM in Spain (where I live) I tried to listen to the Slate weekly Gabfest and the device rebooted but froze in the bootup screen.  I just sat there with the loading bar full but non responsive.  None of the normal reset options were working.

Quickly I found some recent forum posts in Google and saw that this was d-day around the world for the 1st Gen 30 GB zune.  Later generation zunes seem unaffected.

I was able to fix the problem by unplugging the battery.  To do so:

• Remove the clip covering the connector port
  
• Remove the 2 small Phillips screws
• Gently open the case (I used a credit card) starting from the bottom and moving to the top slowly
• Unclip the battery connector (small ribbon coming from black battery)
• Let it sit for 10 seconds
• Reconnect everything by following the above instructions in reverse order

It will be interesting to see how MSFT responds to this disaster.  I sure hope that they make things right for their loyal users.  Giving freely the firmware updates to all users was a very smart move in my opinion (unlike some others who charge for their updates ).  Now they need to continue in that direction and do the following:

1. Make a big public apology
2. Get a fix out ASAP via firmware update
3. Offer some good compensation (Free $ for music in their marketplace or decent discount on new device)

If they do not do this correctly:

• They will have a big PR problem - the last thing they need is to hurt the Zune brand, especially if they are looking to expand it to mobile (for other branding problems see Vista)
• They will undermine one of their differentiating factors against Apple.  Apple basically screws ignores its users and makes most pay for updates or ignores them completely (hello copy/paste in iTouch)
• They will lose a large group of potential repeat purchasers that feel alienated and have lost their trust in MSFT.

Some of the more active forum threads:
http://www.zuneboards.com/forums/gen-1/38112-stuck-load-restart-screen-help-2.html

http://www.zuneboards.com/forums/gen-1/38110-help-total-freeze-20.html

http://forums.zune.net/0/32/403986/ShowPost.aspx#403986

Yahoo Mail in iGoogle

iGoogle is my homepage and although I have a Gmail account, I still prefer the Yahoo! Mail experience.

Here is a link to the Google Gadget using the mobile interface of Y! Mail

However, the mobile interface has a lot of fluff and does not fit perfectly in the gadget frame. Therefore I created some gm scripts to make it more useful and provide a better fit.

Greasemonkey Scripts
Main Script: http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/33874
Detail Page Script: http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/33875

Chrome 1st Impressions

I have been testing out Google's new webkit-based browser, Chrome, for about 1 day now and so far I am pretty impressed.  The performance is generally fantastic, although I did have some sluggishness switching between open tabs when some CPU intensive activity (loading a lot of JavaScript and playing Flash video) was going on in my current tab.  Otherwise, it seems to be very very fast and lightweight in the memory department.

I wanted to compare Chrome vs. Firefox 3, especially in the area of JavaScript execution.  My favorite js library is jQuery, so I decided to test how well each of the two browsers can rapidly process all of the appear/disappear effects.  Here are the video results:

My Dropbox Gadget

Update 01/12/2009: Dropbox changed their primary domain and iGoogle does not handle the redirect correctly, nor have I found a way to update the link via iGoogle.  Here are the new links to add a new module that works. Sorry for the delay.

http://www.google.com/ig/directory?url=files.dropbox.com/u/232/gadgets/dropbox_redir_mf-v2.xml

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Update: I have made a greasemonkey script to optimize the Dropgadget Gadget UI for Gmail as well as improve the iGoogle interface.

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UPDATE #2: I have just released v2 of the dropbox gadget. I have changed the gadget type to URL instead of HTML and I am hosting the gadget files directly using Dropbox. This allows the gadget to test if 3rd Party Cookies have been allowed for the getdropbox.com domain.

It seems that Dropbox has updated their privacy settings on their site so that IE now will let users access the gadget using the default privacy settings. In Firefox, however, if you have deselected "Accept 3rd Party cookies" you need to add getdropbox.com to the exceptions list.

The V2 version of the gadget is available:
Download V2 My Dropbox Gadget

Thanks for all of your support and the for the mention from Lifehacker.

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UPDATE: After the initial release of the gadget I did some more testing based on feedback that I received. In the end, there appears to have been two separate issues:

• The new iGoogle gadget.* API does not appear to be available for all users and browsers just yet. I switched back to the legacy API for all of the code.
• The cookies set by Dropbox are considered 3rd Party cookies and so they are blocked by the default cookie security rules in IE 7. These are usually blocked because of advertising servers, but there are "white hat" uses as well...such as the case with dropbox.

I will add a test to the gadget to see if 3rd party cookies are enabled. Separately, there might be a way for Dropbox to change their cookies so that they will be accepted as a 3rd Party cookie.

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If you have not heard of it, Dropbox is a fantistic service for syncing files between computers and a central web repository. They are in beta but you can signup here. Here is a screencast they have that shows the tool in action:

Although you can sync multiple boxes, I only sync the service with 1 PC currently, but I use the web interface frequently and a common file backup and anywhere access solution.

The idea occurred to me to build a Google Gadget where I could have even easier access to my dropbox whereever I go, especially on the computers that I frequently use but do not want to install the client software. So, I created the My Dropbox Gadget.



I submitted it to the Google Gadget Directory and will update the link soon. In the meantime, you can download the Dropbox Gadget here.

Once I got that working, I found that the natural width of the dropbox table did not fit well with the standard module width for iGoogle, so I created a greasemonkey script that adjusts the table style so it alwasys fits the gadget with in iGoogle. you can download the Fix Dropbox Width script here.

Google Captcha Gotcha!

So we are setting up some new buisness processes at work using Google Video and I had the lovely task of creating new Google Accounts for various groups in my business. Actually, the form is quite simple and easy except for the captchas. I think google uses some of the most difficult captchas today (they range from simple to impossible). I guess that is something they need to do.

However, it seems to me that they could make it more difficult for bots without making it so hard for humans to understand.By surprise, I came across what seems to be a bug in their system today. A few years ago, Google added an Audio Captcha to improve its accessibility.I was totally stumped with this captcha:

I really could not tell if that was gnttyled or grityled or what....so I decided to click the wheelchair icon to hear the audio. This however, is what I heard:

It would be easier to decipher a drunk Bob Dylan arguing with Tom Petty, in Japanese, than to figure out this audio captcha.

Now Google does admit that they audio will be challenging:

To keep the audio captcha as challenging as the visual captcha when confronted by automated agents, we add some distortion to the spoken digits, and we're still experimenting with different distortion techniques to ease the burden on the genuine human user while locking out automated agents.

However, that is just ridiculous! Try it for yourself and you can send them feedback.