Samsung Galaxy Tab was presented at the IFA show in Berlin today. This is the first real competitor to the Apple iPad and it’ll be fun to see how it will be received.  The Galaxy is running Android 2.2 and has the size of 7″. It also has both front (1,3MP) and back (3MV) cameras, something I’ll envy as long as I have my iPad…. You can also use it for phone calls, with headset/mic or as conference phone placed on the table. Screen resolution is 1024×600 and it comes with 16GB internal storage and is expandable with another 32.

One thing I’m not quite sure about is the recommended retail price of  kr. 7 400 NOK  (about $1 200 USD and €940 EUR) . A bit expensive.

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Building native apps in HTML/Javascript and CSS. The idea is good, and it just might some day rid us of the programming language fragmentation…. Some day…

But not quite yet. Not in my opinion anyhow, after giving WebOS from Palm a try.  My previous experience with HTML/Javascript/CSS based native apps was by using PhoneGap in an iPhone application, that actually works the way I expected, with the “look and feel” of how i would create any other ordinary web/html application.  With WebOS and the Palm WebOS SDK there’s a different way to do it….

Firstly, you download and install the SDK and the VirtualBox WebOS emulator. To start a new project you fire up a command prompt or terminal window and type the generate command: Continue Reading

On friday i got my new iPad device and it’s been a fun weekend.

At home i also have Asus EEE and a MacBook Air laptops, small computers that is light and easy to use while surfing from the couch.  The EEE is running Windows XP, and I must say that for my liking its too small. With a screen resolution of 1024 x 600 i just find it sad to browse most sites. It get marginally better when you run either Firefox or IE in fullscreen mode and set zoom level to 80% but using it has never been something I’ve considered fun. Up until now, my choice has been to use the Air. It’s thin, quite small (13,3″) and works like a charm. But it’s damn hot… For some reason the fan keeps spinning at full speed.

I’ve read a lot about iPad’s and one of the key issues seems to be that it’s got no apparent use.. What’s it for and how useful can an iPad be in your digital life. Continue Reading

You could wonder? What is happening in the Oracle halls after the acquisition of Sun and Java? I must admit that as an MSFT .netter I haven’t been following the Java community for a veeeery long time, so I am not really sure how “healthy” it is, but my general understanding has been that Java and the platform has been moving more and more towards the Open Source, GPL licensing policy.

I remember reading something about fears for discontinuity of Java from Oracle, but this is not likely. Oracle is most certainly trying to figure out how to make money out of Java. Suing Google is one way of making money out of Java.  What could be another way is to make Android go away leaving only one major java based mobile phone operating system left, Research In Motion (RIM) and the Blackberry.

Stephen Jannise, an ERP market analyst at Manufacturing Software Advice
has been following Oracle and had a close look at Oracle’s Mergers and Acquisitions. One of the companies he has nominated for merge/acquisition is in fact RIM, so could this be the angle? Push out competition, acquire RIM and then “own” the whole java developer community? Continue Reading

Ahh…. Finally!

I’ve de-mystified the use of OAuth authorization and authentication for integrating services like Twitter, Foursquare and Gowalla into my mobile applications.

While I was playing around with MonoTouch and selected (like many, many others) to create a twitter client as a learning project. This is my first attempt to create anything connected to twitter so I thought it smart to not only learn the MonoTouch environment, but also try to learn as much as I can about the underlying technologies. Continue Reading

As of 9th of July the Windows Phone 7 development tools are out of CTP and entered it’s final stage before release, Beta. There’s a lot of news and features.

One of the tings available now is the Windows Phone 7 application certification requirements. You now have a full overview of the requirements and tests your application needs to pass to be allowed submission into the Microsoft Marketplace.

Expression Blend 4 for Windows phone is now integrated into the beta tools install.

As we are getting ready for launch of developer and consumer devices there’s a new registration tool for development devices. Continue Reading

Through this spring i’ve been playing around with some iPhone development to teach myself Objective-C. It hasn’t been all fun..

With 10 years of .NET development behind me i’ve got a good understanding of development, and I  read  code in almost any language. Now a few days before i start my summer vacation have learned two things…

• I really enjoy developing software.
• I still find it painful to take joy in developing software in Objective-C.

It is two-folded; I don’t really like the language, and  the standard IDE Xcode is an incomplete and non-productive IDE in my opinion. Continue Reading

On June 17. 2010 Microsoft announced their roadmap for the new and improved Microsoft Windows Embedded platform, suited for LOB (Line of Business) type of devices and applications.

One of the major changes from the earlier versions from a developer perspective is the upgrade from the Windows CE 5.x kernel to the 6.0 kernel, which now can handle more than 32,000 simultaneous processes. A huge improvement from the 32 processes the previous 5.x could handle. Each of the 32,000 processes has a upper limit of 2GB of virtual memory space, in 5.x you had 32MB…. Windows Embedded 7 will also support touch, gestures and Silverlight, something that improve the UI and UX capabilities immensely.

he full set of features for Windows Embedded can be found here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/windowsembedded/ce/dd630616.aspx and “What’s new in CE 6.0″ can be found here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa924105.aspx

Windows Embedded will come in 6 base flavors and below  is a short description of each copied from http://www.microsoft.com/windowsembedded/en-us/products/default.mspx. Continue Reading

Got news on a quite new project on CodePlex through twitter and @gcaughey; A database framework project for Windows Phone 7 Silverlight and XNA projects.

From the project description it looks quite promising.

This project implements a Isolated Storage for Silverlight (IsolatedStorage) based database for Windows Phone 7. The usage of this software is very simple. You create a new database by Calling CreateDatabase. You can add tables to the database by calling db.CreateTable<T> where T is the type of entity to be stored in table rows. You can save database by calling Save, and open the database by calling OpenDatabase. This database supports version changes, so you can update your application and still be able to open the database. You can look for basic use of this database by examining test Silverlight application. Encryption has been implemented; just provide a password to use encryption. Also lazy loading has been implemented. If you open database with lazy loading flag, tables will be loaded when first accessed. Feel free to look documentation help file under current download for API details. The source code file contains unit test project that you can also examine for usage details. The database consists of table objects, each one supporting any number of columns. Continue Reading

I asked a the question on twitter if anyone knew anything about someone trying or had tried to implement SQLite in Windows Phone 7 Silverlight projects, and through gcaughey, a device application development MVP, I got a link to Dan Ciprian Ardelean´s blog; Mobile Development.

SQLite is a software library that implements a self-contained, serverless, zero-configuration, transactional SQL database engine. It is an embedded SQL database engine. Unlike most other SQL databases, SQLite does not have a separate server process. SQLite reads and writes directly to ordinary disk files. A complete SQL database with multiple tables, indices, triggers, and views, is contained in a single disk file. The database file format is cross-platform – you can freely copy a database between 32-bit and 64-bit systems or between big-endian and little-endian architectures. These features make SQLite a popular choice as an Application File Format.  It would be the perfect database “engine” for the Windows Phone 7 platform.

About a month ago he wrote an article on a proof-of-concept application for Windows Phone 7 and SQLite. Maybe this is how we can work around the lack of database support on wPhone7, bringing back the power of relational data. Continue Reading