iPhones and RSS

doYouFeed turns any RSS feed into one that's friendly for the iPhone.

It allows you to select a series of properties for the feed such as title, theme, update period, date format and then it generates a tinyURL for easy navigation to your new site. If you navigate to the URL using a regular machine then it kindly shows your site in a skinned preview similar to HawHaw.

Here's the feed for Its a load of WAP

.Mobi

The Aficionado.mobi domain lapsed this month and I've not asked for it to be renewed. The problem is that people just don't need that facility. Yes it would be good to have a search postcode option on the site but given the small number of shops it does not take a lot of brainpower to work out where the closest cigar shop will be.

The next issue is more fundamental, as reported back in January there are new ways that mobile phones support the internet and they don't really need you to jump through hoops to produce a page that will render and be usable on mobiles. How many phones still require a WAP based site? It's also possible to support multiple clients on one page so why would an extra domain actually be wanted and is Aficionado.mobi really more memorable than Aficionado.org.uk/Mobile especially if you get to the site via a search engine in the first place?



Finally my question to my registrar was who's heard of a .mobi? Yes, the big corporations such as Amazon and Google have them but they just redirect to a sub directory of their main sites. Since the initial rush of registrations there has not been lots of people asking for .mobi sites. The man in the street when using their mobile does not type in Amazon.mobi they type in Amazon.com and expect it to work. It would be interesting to see the statistics of how many domains lapsed and were not renewed. I doubt that there will be a queue of people rushing to snap up aficionado.mobi.

The Computer Museum

With the rapid rate of change in the computer industry it's hard for us to keep up but spare a thought for the Computer Museum based at Bletchley Park who are attempting

"To collect and restore computer systems developed primarily in Britain and to enable people to explore that collection for inspiration, learning and enjoyment."

Mobiles and different cultures

The Data Mining blog makes a good point about how different cultures can produce different opportunities for mobile applications. The comparison is between Japan and the US but this would also apply to Europe. This is definately something to consider when designing applications for different mobile environments and a good reason not to have a fixed resolution website or mobile application.

Windows Mobile phone from Sony Ericsson announced

Microsoft have announced that Sony Ericsson will be using Windows Mobile in their new phone, the XPERIA™ X1.

The phone has:

• XPERIA™ panel interface
• Arc slider design
• 3.2 Megapixel camera
• Video call
• Integrated camera
• Web, RSS feeds, Blogging
• Bluetooth
• Qwerty Keyboard
• 4-way key
• Optical joystick
• 3G
• Push email
• Video Clips
• Handwriting Recognition
• Wi-Fi
• aGPS

For more details of the functionality of this phone see the Xperia X1 Home Page.

Mobile Security Seminar, Feb 27th London

Building a Security Infrastructure with Microsoft Forefront
presented by Ronald Beekelaar

Want to learn more about the future of Windows Mobile? Want to get greater management control of your Windows Mobile devices? This event will share with you Microsoft's roadmap for Windows Mobile as well as comprehensive insight into Microsoft System Center Mobile Device Manager 2008, a security and device management solution that provides greater reliability, lower-cost manageability, and more secure access to your corporate network. As well as the opportunity to talk directly with Microsoft's experts you'll also hear from a customer who has deployed Windows Mobile and how our partners can help you make the most of this latest technology.

http://go.microsoft.com/?linkid=8151759

Date: 27 February 2008
Location: London

IPhone Emulator

Whilst testing the Aficionado.mobi site against an Iphone, we realised that it was not properly detecting that the IPhone was a smaller mobile device and it was showing the full screen version as above. I digged out the logs and saw that it was reporting as:

Mozilla/5.0 (iPod; U; CPU like Mac OS X; en) AppleWebKit/420.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/3.0 Mobile/4A93 Safari/419.3

I looked at the HawHaw site and saw that there was a new version available that supported IPhone so I installed this on the site.

Also whilst looking at this I spotted that there's a couple of emulators for the Windows Mobile and Mac platforms.

• IPhone Emulator for Windows Mobile
• IPhone Emulator for Mac

Windows Mobile Exams

Changes to enrolment requirements for the Mobile Competency within the Microsoft Partner Programme come into effect on 1 January 2008. Partners will be required to employ or contract with at least two individuals, each of whom must pass at least one of the following Microsoft certification exams.

• Microsoft Exam 70-500: Windows Mobile 5.0, Implementing and Managing
• Microsoft Exam 70-540: Windows Mobile Application Development.