Let it snow let it snow let it snow

I woke up this morning and this is what I saw.

The access to the freeway was closed off so that meant work from home ;) I realize that in other countries and parts of the states, this would just be any other Monday in Winter, but here... they are not prepared (much like when it rains in LA).

The snow has not stopped all day. Sometimes light. Sometimes heavy, but it has not stopped. Too bad that it is so cold because the sea forecast predicts some big big waves (up to 7 meters), which are not too common for the western med.

Schools here are closed and even the city hall is handing out letters to justify people's absences from work.

Luckily we still have our power, internet connection and especially natural gas to keep the house toasty.

Here are a few more photos and a video of the snow. Tomorrow should be spectacular since the skies are supposed to be clear and hopefully we get a great show of Montserrat.

Try Piped TechCrunch Feed: More TC, Less MG

I am a big TechCrunch fan and I read it pretty much every day.  It is one of the best ways to stay in touch with the world of Tech and the Internet.  In general, its posts are well-written, informative and seemingly unbiased.  That is, with the notorious exception of MG Siegler.  His posts, besides being boringly formulaic, give the sense that he majored in Apple Fanboyism at college with a minor in Google studies.

So, I decided to take action and go back to reading TechCrunch as it was before MG came on board.

One of my favorite sites is Yahoo! Pipes. It lets you remix the web in as sense as you want it.  I went there with a simple goal: More TC, less MG.

Thanks to Pipes, I now have made a TechCrunch feed that filters out all posts written by MG Siegler.

Here is the link.
http://pipes.yahoo.com/spanishgringo/techcrunch_no_mg_siegler

Just add it to Google Reader (or your reader of choice) and enjoy!

Evernote Widget for S60 Updated

I have updated the Evernote widget for S60v5 that I wrote back in Sept with some minor improvements.

• Updated jQuery version to 1.4 with jQueryUI 1.8b
• Cleaned up the code a bit to make it a little faster (not much more improvement will come until Nokia updates the browser engine... (it is so old that webkit-border-radius is not even suported by WRT)
• The Nokia soft keys only appear at launch and in Portrait mode. This way when viewing a note from Evernote you can use a lot more real estate on the screen.

Enjoy.

Get the code/links from the original post:
Evernote for S60v5

5800 FW Available with limited Kinetic Scrolling

Nokia just made a new firmware available for the Nokia 5800 XM.  A lot of the existing users have been waiting for this for a long long time.  Nokia has taken a lot of flack, justified in my opinion, for dragging their feet to fix a lot of the things missing/broken in their first mainstream touch device.  Apple and Android are eating Nokia's lunch in smart phones because they have been more innovative and faster at bringing meaningful updates to market.

I sure hope that Nokia starts changing its ways, although I do have to say that I am overall quite pleased with the phone.

Firmware 40 brings a few things to the phone so far that I have seen:

1. Kinetic Scrolling (move around the page by flicking your finger) in many of the apps although it is sorely lacking the the normal device menus 
2. New Home screen similar to the 5530 with a music player widget, 4 shortcuts and a contact carousel
3. Better input option to allow one preferred method for portrait and other for landscape
4. Camera seems a bit quicker to me
5. Hopefully many many bug fixes (alarm bug, downloaded videos from feeds, corrupted podcast database, etc...)

Not included and disappointing:

1. Updated webkit browser (still stuck at webkit 413 whereas Chrome uses 532.8). This will be needed to greatly improve the somtimes shoddy WRT experience.
2. True Kinetic Scrolling in the device (eg, menus, better implemented in browser)
3. More flexible input options for portrait and landscape (why can't  I choose mini querty for portrait and full querty for landscape?)
4. More shortcuts in Homescreen
5. Landscape Homescreen

Gmail Dropbox Gadget Script Available

Updated with instructions to install gadget

Step 1: Go to GMail Labs and enable Add Gadget by URL feature

Step 2: Go to the Gadgets Settings Tab in Gmail Settings and Add the Gadget

The gadget URL is: http://files.dropbox.com/u/232/gadgets/dropbox_redir_mf-v2.xml

Step 3: Add the Greasemonkey script for Dropbox mobile:

Download Script Dropbox Gadget UI for Gmail

---

After receiving a request from a user for creating a dropbox gadget for Gmail, I went ahead and made a User Script that modifies the Dropbox Gadget UI for use in Gmail. I could not rework the UI remotely, so the script was the only practical choice.

I have tested it and it works both in Firefox and Google Chrome.

Enjoy.

Download Script Dropbox Gadget UI for Gmail

Script Homepage

Original Dropbox Gadget Post (with link to gadget XML)

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...