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.

I mostly read news sources from around the world, use Facebook and Twitter mostly, and for this the iPad just makes it easy.

The first application I installed on it was Flipboard for iPad. This is the BEST news aggregation software I’ve ever used. Flipboard makes my Facebook wall fun to read, It makes my Twitter timeline fun to read and it makes news RSS feeds fun to read. What it does is that it transforms everything  to  look like a digital magazine. Flipboard reads the content of your twitter timeline, or facebook wall and then lay it out in a design with headlines of status updates, it fetches content of links shared and display photos shared and you flip through the pages backward in twitter/facebook time.

Flipboard also has a predefined sett of news sources besides facebook and twitter. My favorites here is Engadget, Wired, ReadWriteWeb, TechCrunch and you get the same redesign and nice UI on all news sources.

Flipboard is out in version 1.0.1 and it’s quite a new release so here is some bugs and features that could be added that would have made this the only news aggregator you’ll ever need. The most annoying bug i’ve found is that you cannot play shared youtube videos. The just don’t play. Not in “magazine” mode or when you choose “view on web” and use a web controller inside the application… it works when you (in the  web controller) choose to open the url in Safari.

A feature I am hoping they’ll add later is the possibility to add my own custom RSS feeds, but all in all, this is well worth a download and hopefully they’ll update and fix the Youtube bug pretty soon.

One of my favorite iPhone software now is the Hipstamatic camera application. I’d love to get a version of this for Aperture 3.

Olaf Ryes Plass in Oslo seen from Dakota restaurant (btw: try the Dimmu Burger, it's great) thrugh Hipstamatic

This post was written with the iPhone WordPress application as a trial to see how it looks and feels to blog using the phone. Apart from the tiny keyboard that sports a lot of typos and that it’s not possible to add links to post this is a good application and it’s no problem to get a short post published.

What you should be aware of is that you cannot use any theme spesific features in the WordPress app, so for instance this theme called Premium News uses the Excerpt field for frontpage content and a custom image field for thumbnails. You would need a custom app for each theme using custom fields to handle that or do a lot of coding doing it very generic.

Just a post to give kudos to a new service I just found. bloglovin.com – a social blogging site that makes it easy to follow a lot of blogs… I’m sure there are other services like this, but I like this one. Visit http://bloglovin.com and sign up.

Only thing pain about it is that when you try to visit the “about” and contact us links on the bottom of the screen, it keeps on loading more posts and more post moving info links downwards.

Hopefully, future features will include a mobile readable version but for now the desktop version works for me.

If you are curious about developing your first Windows Phone 7 application, either using Silverlight or XNA, Charles Petzold has published a free preview  of his “Programming Windows Phone 7 Series” book due for release in the fall of 2010. The free eBook contains 6 chapters (150 ish) pages walking you through the basics of programming with Silverlight and XNA for the phone.

For the book he assume that you know the basic principles of .NET programming and you have a working familiarity with the C# programming language. If not, you might benefit from reading his free online book .NET Book Zero: What the C or C++ Programmer Needs to Know about C# and the .NET Framework, available from www.charlespetzold.com/dotnet.

Download a copy in either PDF or XPS of the book from http://www.charlespetzold.com/phone/index.html. You can also download sample source code to easier get you started with your development.

The Windows Phone 7 Series development blog has published a set of icons for the app bar. These icons fits the UI theme of wPhone 7 and very useful helping you maintaining the native look and feel for your application. It´s a set of png icons for general functions, media content and hardware integration icons like camera etc.

The icons can be downloaded here. On the dev blog you learn how to add them to your application here.

It had to come and competition is great. We are seeing more of 3rd party application stores for mobile solutions. Freeware Pocket PC has opened up an alternative application store for Windows Phones promising instant free downloads for your Windows Mobile phone.  OpnMarket is compatible with most of the Windows Mobile Professional devices with touch-screens, once installed it lets you browse, download and install FREE applications directly on your device. OpnMarket will use your mobile network connection or a WiFi connection to download software to your phone. It’s simple, instant and FREE  with access to more than 6,700 free windows mobile games, tools and themes.

The installer cab can be downloaded from here.

Finally! There is something on the move here. In May i was writing about that I was looking for a Norwegian Compact Framework User Group or something like a dedicated compact framework development forum for us .netcf developers here up north. With no luck finding one I have been brewing on the idea of trying to start a compact framework community, trying to gather some people that are willing to help promote and arrange.

Myself I am quite happy (and lucky) being able to work dedicated in a mobility department for mobile solutions. From designing enterprise back-end systems that can be used by mobile devices, to client applications interacting with existing business systems. Not to mention being a mobility consultant helping organizations streamline their work flow and processes to mobilize the workforce.  This has been both industrial applications running on dedicated ruggedized devices, one which is out running on 9000 windows mobile devices today and general business applications delivering back-end data to windows mobile devices within a company.

As i said, i am quite happy, but also I feel quite isolated. It’s no community feel to it, and there isn’t much buzz around it, for instance when was the last time you went to a Norwegian convention and anyone talked about mobility and development for devices? The closest thing is going to TechEd Europe.

This is hopefully about to change a bit now, together with my “mobility evangelist” colleague Per Ola we had a meeting with Microsoft today talking about creating developer driven community, and about what kind of backing would it be possible to get from Microsoft. Would it be possible to arrange for some resources from Microsoft to come to Oslo some time and talk about Windows Phone? If possible being able to have some connections to the platform dev. team? Would it be useful for Microsoft to have such kind of community?  The feedback was that they like the idea and see that it could be useful to get closer in touch with Windows Phone developers.

The meeting was very interesting, and I am looking forward to continue work on this. Hopefully this community could be a place where we meet, discuss best practises, show of smart solutions and gain more knowledge on mobility. A forum for both experienced .netcf developers and those curious on how to get started.

Keeping this as a developer driven initiative for developers is imo important and requires people to be willing to share knowledge and help out building it. It should not come down to one or two people to drive this. The only thing that can stop it, is the lack of interest from developers. But, with the launch of Windows Mobile 6.5, the Marketplace and the awaiting WM7 I think  we are only seen the beginning of Windows Mobile and the compact framework.

For last, I encourage everyone, both netcf and “regular” developers to sign up for the free Windows Mobile 6.5 and Marketplace developer seminar that Microsoft hosts on October 15.

If you are working with rugged devices or are interested in knowing more about these types of devices there is a site called ruggedpcreview.com that is a good source of information.

As the name say, ruggedpcreview.com reviews rugged devices of all types and they have a huge database of tested devices

Their about page say;  ”The purpose and goal of RuggedPCReview.com is to be a information provider and clearinghouse for anything related to rugged computing: hardware, software, peripherals, definitions, terminology, case studies, white papers, and, most of all, unbiased product reviews and roundups.”

If you are considering using ruggedized devices they are worth a visit at http://www.ruggedpcreview.com

Another quite useful site is groupmobile.com, it is a online store for ruggedized devices with product reviews, and configure & buy options. Handy to have if you need a price for a demo unit or two.

If you are working with barcode readers and need to generate barcode test data there’s a few online sites that do that for free. My current favorite is Barcoding Inc.

I prefere barcoding.combecause the no-fuzz generation, just enter data, select type and preferred output format. Barcode symbologies supported is Code 39, Code 39 (Full ASCII), Code 39 (HIBC), CodaBar, Code 93, Code 128, UCC/EAN 128, Interleaved 2 Of 5, PostNET, UPC-A, UPC-E, EAN/JAN-8, EAN/JAN-13,  Bookland and output formats are PNG, GIF, JPG or bitmap

Wasp Barcode Technologies also has a web based barcode generator. It supports all the same symbologies as Barcoding, but since you need to enter your email to generate a preview, and have it emailed to your address if you want to save a copy i don’t use it much. Wasp has a couple of extra features that gives you options for with, height, caption alignment, barcode rotation and image dpi that is useful if you need to test scanner capabilities for size, quality and rotation.

curiously enough, both sites as an “Please link to this barcode generator”  an industry standard maybe?

I live about 1 hour of commuting with bus and subway from my office and my favorite past time getting there or home  from work is to listen to music and read blogs.

One of the blogs I like to read in the morning is www.smallsurfaces.com. A good blog about mobile user interfaces, but as irony strikes it, not very reader friendly on a small surface.

More blogs should be available with mobile friendly user interfaces!

I have used both my HTC Touch Diamond, and now an iPhone.

The Diamond is in every case a worthless pice of junk when it comes to browsing, both with pocket IE and Opera. way to small screen to read anything but specially optimized content.

The IPhone works a bit better, Safari is an OK browser, and for some reason web developers love to do the extra development  needed to get the safari webkit look and feel… -  If it was Microsoft that had this browser and you needed special techniques to get it to look good,  there would be a massive uproar and demand of anti-trust lawsuit followed by every open source advocate’ scream of closed and proprietary technology… oh well… digression…

My blog here, is powered by WordPress and I’ve found two nice plug-ins that enables automatic small screen rendering of my blog content without me having to do anything. First one is WPTouch IPhone theme and MobilePress.

WPTouch is a plugin which reformats your site with a mobile theme when viewing with an Apple iPhone, Apple iPod touch, Google Android or Blackberry Storm touch mobile device by Dale Mugford & Duane Storey.

The MobilePress plugin does exactly the same, but not so good. The IPhone look and feel is not as nice as with WPTouch, but it works for Pocket IE and Opera Mini.blog

Both great plugins, and if you have a blog about anything you should install them both in the name of publicizing your own blog.

If you use blogger or other blogengines i am sure there are similar tools for each and every engine. Go install! and let me read your stuff.

My topics of interest is technology in general, development on Microsoft .NET, mobility, punk rock and heavy metal music. I want to find more blogs that are accessible from my mobile device, so please leave a link in the comments to help me get through boring subway rides.