Reassessing the feasibility of creating a decent phone book

 Mobile Phone, Software Development  2 Responses »
Oct 172005
 

As I started playing with Motorola’s SDK, I realized there was little to no mention of a phonebook API. Some more poking around revealed that it was not present in the JARs associated with the emulator.

Ahem.

Turns out that the materials required to make use of this API are only available under NDA from Motorola. And for some random yahoo like me, that process is started by filling out a questionnaire on the Motorola developer site. And as of this writing, submitting that form yields a server error.

Lovely.

 Posted by at 3:19 am

Revisiting NetBeans

 Mobile Phone, Software Development  1 Response »
Oct 152005
 

I’ve never cared for NetBeans. Historically it’s been slow, ugly, and the UI has been chock full of (what I found to be) unintuitive contrivances. With recent releases the speed has improved dramatically. The appearance has also improved; though there are still significant problems: notably a lack of antialiased fonts.

So why revisit it? Well, from what I’ve seen so far, the mobile application development support is very slick. And this 5.0 beta I’m playing with addresses some of the more glaring UI issues. The mobile application development support just might be enough for me to forgive NetBeans’ remaining flaws. After all, I use emacs normally; obviously I can live without antialiased fonts.

 Posted by at 6:38 am

Assessing the feasibility of creating a decent phone book

 Mobile Phone, Software Development  1 Response »
Oct 152005
 

Okay… If I do this, I don’t want to create some application that lives in a totally different world from the standard phone book; even though it sucks, the standard phone book is too integrated with the overall function of the phone. It has to be leveraged for an enhanced phone/address book app to be any use to me.

The Bad News: MIDP 2.0 doesn’t appear to provide an API for accessing the phone book.

The Good News: Motorola provides an extension API that does.

This could actually happen.

 Posted by at 6:14 am

New RAZR V3

 General, Software Development  3 Responses »
Oct 132005
 

My Motorola V551 got washed about a week and a half ago. And dried. It’s dead.

After weighing my options, I purchased an unlocked black RAZR V3.

Damn, it’s sexy.

I’m partial to carrying my phone in the front pocket of my pants; so I appreciate how thin this thing is. Much more comfortable to carry around than the V551. I also get somewhat better reception; and the sound is definitely clearer.

The software is basically the same as the V551. Which means that like the V551, the V3’s phonebook sucks balls. Let’s see…

  • You can group together entries that are stored in the phone; but not the ones that are stored on the SIM card. So if you try to back things up to the SIM card, you’ll have a lot of entries to scroll through with the same name.
  • There are categories; but entries can only be in one category and you can either view all categories or one category.
  • There’s no differentiation between first and last names.

And furthermore, why do I have to get a PDA just to store physical addresses? Why can’t phones provide an addressbook?

Which gets me thinking, how hard can it be to create a decent phone/address book for a phone? Maybe I should find out.

 Posted by at 8:03 pm

So this is WordPress

 General  No Responses »
Oct 132005
 

This is the second time I’ve installed WordPress on endoframe.com. The first time I fiddled a bit with the themes and then abandoned it. I’ll probably fiddle with the themes again later. Not now.

So will I actually use this thing this time? I’ve used advogato.org intermittently in the past; but stuff that isn’t (free) software-related seems out of place there and I would like to write about other things some of the time. I’d also kind of like to have the content more under my control.

 Posted by at 7:27 pm