SymbianNote - Evernote for Symbian - My first WRT Widget

Evernote for S60 v5: hosted on Google Code.

After playing around with the WRT kit and navigating the documentation for the WRT kit and the beta version of platform services 2.0 (you would think these would be more easily available online!), I have created my first WRT App for Symbian v5 phones (eg, 5800XM and N97, etc...).


Version 1 of the app does the following:

1. Provides 1 touch (or run in the background) access to Evernote online
• Add quick notes
• Search and view notes already uploaded to the service
2. Send notes with /  without attachments to Evernote via e-mail.
3. Add your personalized Evernote incoming e-mail address to your contacts list with only 1 touch.  As a contact, it is easier to send files and notes to Evernote from other applications on the phones.
4. Check for updates (in the About view)
   

Some obervations about WRT:

1. The 5800 is not powerful enough or does not have a recent enough version of webkit for its browser to properly display jQuery UI effects.  Effects that are very smooth on the PC and emulator are jerky and incomplete on the actual phone. Hopefully, the new firmware rumored to be coming in October will improve the performance of the browser and JavaScript engine
2. WRT still needs a lot more work before it is a very useful toolkit
• Its APIs are still fairly limited. I wanted to use the Messaging API to send e-mails directly from the application but no such API exists yet. It only supports MMS and SMS (and even the addressing of those messages is limited).
• Users should be able to set security preferences one time for an app and not have to approve every use of an API by an application.  This is a problem with some Java apps as well. Users should have the choice to setup the security preferences one time for each app.  The constant request for approval (just like Vista) is very frustrating.
• The new camera API looks promising, but until the e-mail api exists it will be useless for Evernote (although other apps could work fine).

I hope you enjoy the app and I welcome your feedback on bugs and improvements.  Once I figure out how to upload source code to Google Code and not just final packages, I'll put up the source code as well.

Direct Download link:
http://evernote-s60.googlecode.com/files/SymbianNote.wgz

Link to Google Code Project Page:
http://code.google.com/p/evernote-s60/

I'll try to add some screenshots soon.

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...

Where did Charlie Rose go? (Appears to be victim of Google Video's demise)

I love the Charlie Rose Show.  It is a fantastic forum for reasoned discussion and it covers a broad set of topics to stay fresh and topical.  There are few places where you can find these types of (usually) non-trivial conversations with this depth and level of thoughtfulness.  He is a master of building rapport virtually immediately without almost any guest.  Tavis is very good as well, but his show suffers from being only half as long as the CRS.

I really only have three complaints against the show:

1) Charlie is friends with a lot of the powerful guests he has on the show, and sometimes is too soft on those guests (especially Wall St. executives such as Mr. Dimon at JP Morgan).  Although he is still better than most popular journalists, being tougher would yield responses and ultimately create a better show.

2) Charlie says the word "exactly" too much in response to a guest's response as if he needs to show he is smart enough to have had the same insightful thought as his guest.  I am probably splitting hairs here, but I had to say it because it happens so often.

3) The show is not available as a podcast (neither video nor audio).  

It was not until I moved to Spain that I began my regular appointment with the CRS.  I used to see it every once in a while while I lived in LA, but being on late at night and with a young kid at home, I did not stay current with the show.  Once I noticed that the show was available via Google Video, I realized that I could hack together my own podcast of the CRS.  In fact, Google Video was the video platform that the official website, www.charlierose.com, used to power its online video.

At first it was easy because Google made the MP4 download available via the rss feed on its site.  Then the rss feed changed at Google Video, eliminating the MP4 from the standard enclosure, and someone uploading the videos for CRS stopped making the MP4 download available.  So, I decided to use Yahoo! Pipes to make my own personalized feed to view the videos.

Everything was good, and I was receiving my daily dose of the CRS until the end of July.  That appears to be when Google Video stopped accepting new videos.  Google had announced previously in January that Google Video would be closed to new video in the near future and others had reported this.  At first, I noticed that I was not receiving any new episodes in my podcast feed.  Then, I went to the official site and I saw that there were no video clips available for the most recent episodes.

Contacting the "contact us" folks for the show via the web, they told me that they are migrating their streaming servers and that video would be back online "soon".  It was only after I contacted them, a small text notice was added to the site indicating that "Videos are temporarily unavailable...".  

It has been now 2 1/2 weeks since the last updated Charlie Rose video has been made available.  It seems that they were not prepared to handle the switch away from Google Video as their service provider.  

I do not know what kind of advanced notice about the actual shutoff date Google made to its main video suppliers, but with the public notice made back in January, the folks at CRS should have migrated away to another platform well before and avoided this situation.

I sure hope they figure it out soon and go ahead and add proper podcasting support (video and audio).  It is public television so they should not rely only on paid services (they have a paid audio version via audible.com).  Furthermore, they are looking to syndicate via Bloomberg TV so this should be seen as another way to spread the CRS brand, influence and public service.  Tavis Smiley serves as a pretty good example for syndicating out his content in many useful ways. Charlie could learn a lot by following Tavis' example.

Hopefully he'll be back online soon and those of us without easy access to PBS channels can go back to getting our CRS fix.

Yahoo! Mail New Home UI

Yahoo! Mail has a new UI for its homepage.  Trying to be more social.

Posted via email from Spanish Gringo Posterous

Newly Updated Script for Uploading GA reports directly to GDocs & Spreadsheets

UPDATED 05/04/09: All fixed now. However, I am starting to notice some odd 404 errors coming from the Google Docs API. The file uploads nonetheless, but every once in a while the confirmation message comes back as a 404. Any suggestions? Please add them in the comments.


Original post  - Integrate Google Analytics ... Google Docs

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.

Microsoft & Yahoo! Search Partnership already happening?

I do not know if this is anything new, but today I was telling a friend about bing and that he should try it out because it is starting to drive traffic to our sites.

To our surprise, he tried some searches and we started seeing our own ads appearing in the results. Looking at the ads and links of the ads, we saw that they were from our Yahoo! CPC accounts.

Here is a screenshot today. It is not our ad in this case, but look at the URL in the status bar. It is pointing to Overture (Yahoo!).

Am I missing something, or has the Yahoo! / Microsoft partnership already started (perhaps in silent beta mode).

I am going to try Bing as my default search provider for a little while to see how well (or not) it works.