Rich Mobile Experiences with SVG Series

Monday next week, MobileMonday NY will host the first event of what I hope will be a long-lasting Rich Mobile Experiences with SVG series. I have pointed out before that I think initiatives promoting Mobile SVG to smaller companies and eager individuals are still somewhat lacking. This is what I hope will be a way to spread the word throughout the world about Mobile SVG. The point of this series of events is to go to all the major cities around the world where a significant mobile community is established, and have a lineup of speakers, putting forward locals, that will give concrete examples of how they make use of Mobile SVG for live mobile services and applications, but also highlight the next evolutions of this technology. I want first and foremost for these events to give attendees pragmatic information that they will be able to put to use straight away.

So for our New York event next week on Monday January 29th at the Samsung Experience, for which you have to register for free, we have put together the following great lineup including browser makers (Opera), SVG viewer vendors (BitFlash and Ikivo), authoring tool makers (Hyperion, Ikivo, QUALCOMM), developer tool providers (Sun), mobile services creators (Ikivo, Hyperion, BitFlash and Vodafone) and a major carrier (Vodafone). The goal here is to show attendees the diversity of the Mobile SVG offering, and the full lineup is as follows below. Hope to see some of you in New York next week, there will even be some free authoring licenses to win at the end of the event, courtesy of Ikivo and Hyperion!

QUALCOMM’S SVG Solution
Brent Sammons, Product Manager, QUALCOMM

Learn about QUALCOMM’s SVG solution, how to make use of SVG within the CMX® file format, and about QUALCOMM’s developer and OEM support activities for SVG.

Combining the Power of Java ME and SVG: Developing JSR 226 Applications Using the NetBeans IDE
Brian Leonard, Java TechnologyEvangelist, Sun Microsystems

This presentation will cover the advantages of combining the full functionality of the Java ME platform, with access to all the phone functionality provided by the Mobile Services Architecture set of APIs, with rich user interfaces based on SVG Tiny. The talk will include demonstrations of the support for developing such applications using the NetBeans Mobility Pack and will include demonstrations of JSR 226 applications.

Rich Media Comes Alive With Mobile SVG
Brad Sipes, CTO, Ikivo

2007 is poised to be the year when widespread availability of rich mobile multimedia experiences becomes a reality and not just a marketing exercise. Deployment of mobile services based on music, video on demand, live TV, etc. are now occurring at an accelerating rate introducing consumers to a new way of interacting with a world of information and entertainment by allowing them to do so without sacrificing mobility. Ultimate success or failure depends on delivering a quality experience in a timely manner. With its inherent open standards based eco-system and functional advantages such as true vector scalability, advanced graphics and OTA logic and UI updates, Mobile SVG provides the perfect platform for enabling operators and service providers to realize the dream of brining the promise of rich media to mobile.

SVG - Going Everywhere With the Web
Charles McCathieNevile, Chief Standards Officer, Opera

This presentation will present SVG as a format that can be applied everywhere, helping to ensure that the power of the web can be offered on all devices.

Growing the Ecosystem, Evolving the Web
Daniel Appelquist, Senior Technology Strategist, Vodafone

Why is a British phone company so excited about graphical user experiences? At Vodafone, we envision a future where the Web is accessed from the phone as much if not more than it is accessed from a PC. Indeed, in some parts of the world, this is already true. We’re working on a number of initiatives and standards efforts to help grow this mobile Web ecosystem. However, the Web is also evolving and becoming a dynamic application platform. What will this intersection of Web 2.0 and the Mobile Web mean both to the users and developers of Web applications?

SVG Tiny Solutions to Empower the Mobile Professional
Don Liberty, Director of Business Development, BitFlash

With more than 160 Million SVG-enabled mobile devices on the market today, combined with the new and powerful feature set offered by the SVG tiny 1.2 specification, mobile solution providers are beginning to offer innovative SVG-based applications. This presentation will touch on productivity applications and use cases targeted at the mobile business professional.

Accessing and Displaying Data on a Mobile Device Using SVG
Marc Verstaen, Senior Director Software Development, Hyperion Solutions

Developing custom applications for the corporate world on mobile devices is often considered as a very difficult task. Applications need to be adapted for each device, results is most the time not attractive at all and impact usability. Using SVG-T 1.2, some basic AJAX concepts and the Mobile Designer authoring tool can solve this problem.

SVG Screen Savers in S60 with Carbide.ui

Forum Nokia, Nokia's ultimate resource for developers, published today a video tutorial showing how to create screen savers for S60 3.0 Feature Pack 1 devices using their Carbide.ui user interface customization tool. This is a great example of the kind of simple tutorials that people need to see to understand what can be done concretely with a versatile technology such as Mobile SVG.

The Venice Project is Now Joost!

Today was a big day at work as the code-name we operated under for a year now, The Venice Project, was put to rest for the official brand name that we will be using from now on: Joost! This does not mean that we're quite ready to let the cat entirely out of the bag about our "TV meets the Web" venture: we are still in a closed, invite-only beta program for a while. However, to celebrate on this auspicious day, I will send an invite to the first few people who drop a comment here with their first name, last name and email address. Also, now that we have reached a more public level, I will try to post about some of the cool things that we are doing with SVG and other sweet XML technologies in the client application, which is the part of the application I work on.

Sorry, no more invites for the moment.

Logging In and Out of Adium, iChat and Skype using AppleScript

Even though I'd rather not, I use not one, not two but three instant messaging applications on my main machine: Adium, iChat and Skype. While Adium allows to connect to almost all IM networks in a slick little interface that feels right at home on Mac OS X, iChat has some unique features going for it, for instance Bonjour as well as audio and video chat, and Skype of course is the only app that can run Skype. Besides, everyone at work uses Skype, so I just have to have it running at all time. Using all three together it not a big problem to me, at and even less of a problem since I wrote two little pieces of AppleScript that allow me to connect and disconnect from all the applications using a command-line scripts. Here are the scripts, both wrapped in an executable (chmod +x) script called either online or offline using the osascript command.

Going offline:

on IsSkypeRunning()
  tell application "System Events" to (name of processes) contains "Skype"
end IsSkypeRunning

on IsAdiumRunning()
  tell application "System Events" to (name of processes) contains "Adium"
end IsAdiumRunning

if IsSkypeRunning() then
  tell application "Skype"
    send command "SET USERSTATUS OFFLINE" script name "Make Skype go offline"
  end tell
end if

tell application "iChat"
  log out
end tell

if IsAdiumRunning() then
  tell application "Adium" to disconnect every account
end if

Going online:

on IsSkypeRunning()
  tell application "System Events" to (name of processes) contains "Skype"
end IsSkypeRunning

on IsAdiumRunning()
  tell application "System Events" to (name of processes) contains "Adium"
end IsAdiumRunning

if IsSkypeRunning() then
  tell application "Skype"
    send command "SET USERSTATUS ONLINE" script name "Make Skype go online"
  end tell
end if

tell application "iChat"
  log in
end tell

if IsAdiumRunning() then
  tell application "Adium" to connect every account
end if