Fring API Could Shake Up The Mobile Web
Posted by James | Filed under Geek, Mobile, Web
Popular mobile IM and VOIP service Fring just launched an Application Programming Interface that could bring some awesome new applications to mobile phones around the world. The new API offers the Fring mobile interface, IM, presence indication, file transfer and other features to developers seeking to build apps in standard server-side languages. Fring ties in to users’ Google Talk, MSN Messenger, ICQ and Skype IM accounts.
While the iPhone App Store will open some day soon, will be available around the world and will be usable on more affordable handsets than is the case today - Fring may still be more globally accessible than iPhone apps will be.
At launch the API is only available for Symbian S60 9.2 phones and there are no working examples of apps yet. The platform should expand and a catalog of applications open by the end of July.
What would you like to see tied into Fring? I’d love to see some FriendFeed integration, perhaps Qik and I imagine interesting things could be done with VOIP and Yelp and Fring presence and Fireeagle location tracking. How about a notification when I’m near a contact’s physical location and they are available online for IM contact? That would be great.
The company is well funded, has an app for the jailbroken iPhone and reports that it’s seeing more than 100k new downloads every month around the world. Presence data, knowing when contacts are online and off, adds a particular exciting dimension to any application - mobile apps leveraging presence could prove wildly useful.
Tags: Application Programming Interface, Google Talk, ICQ, iPhone, Mobile phone, MSN Messenger, Skype
Opera Releases Firebug Competitor - Dragonfly
Posted by James | Filed under Code, Geek, Mobile, Web
For web developers, the Firefox extension Firebug is a killer app and major time saver. It lets you deconstruct the page currently loaded into Firefox to get a better idea of how HTML, CSS, and JavaScript needs to be modified to work properly (even allowing live changes to CSS/HTML on the fly).
Opera has just released an alternative set of developer tools called Dragonfly. They will be automatically included in Opera 9.5 beta 2 and newer versions of the browser, and you will be able to enable them by going to "Tools > Advanced > Developer Tools".
The Norwegian software producer is highlighting several innovative features of Dragonfly that could give it an advantage over Firebug, all depending on how well they work.
Dragonfly will make it possible to debug web pages whether they’re on your desktop computer or any remote device, like a mobile phone, that runs the Opera browser. This has the potential to make development for mobile devices much easier.
To JavaScript developers’ delight, Dragonfly will display the most up-to-date document object model (DOM) of a page, not just its initial construction. This means the effects of dynamic changes to a page, whether Ajax-driven or not, will now be much more transparent and traceable.
Dragonfly is also said to have a sophisticated JavaScript debugger that lets you diagnose errors on a line-by-line basis. JavaScript notoriously lacks any real debugging capabilities so this feature holds a lot of promise for developers tired of inserting alert functions throughout their code to see where it breaks.
A couple downsides: it will only be available for Opera, certainly not one of the most widespread browsers, and it won’t initially support in-browser edits to CSS styles. This latter shortcoming is a big one since CSS editing constitutes perhaps the most useful feature of Firebug.
Dragonfly will be released as open source under the BSD license. Microsoft announced at MIX that it has also worked on a set of developer tools for Internet Explorer 8, still in early beta.
Tags: debugging, development, javascript, mozilla, opera, tools
Instant Messaging 2.0
Posted by James | Filed under Code, Future, Mobile, Privacy, Social, Web
There are some interesting things going on in the world of Instant Messaging these days. There is potentially going to be a shift from proprietary networks to ones built on an open standard called Jabber (aka XMPP, Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol). The technical details of Jabber which I’ll example below, make this a very big deal.
The biggest IM providers are MSN, AOL, Yahoo, and Google. For years, the first three operated proprietary, closed protocols. If you are logged in to AOL, you can’t talk to people logged in to MSN (there have been some efforts to link these networks; but in a such a way that the closed protocols are still used). You can’t reuse your contacts across accounts, just as MySpace contacts can’t be reused by Facebook (until DataPortability.org gets going maybe…).
Then Google entered the game. Instead of creating their own IM protocol, they implemented an existing well known IM protocol originally called Jabber, now called XMPP. XMPP had been around for a while and had been implemented most notably by several enterprise collaboration suite providers. But Google implementing it caused the big three to wake up and take notice.
Tags: instant messaging, jabber, open standard, protocols, xmpp
Welcome to Jimmahdigital.com, personal blog of James Simm, Wigan/Manchester-based .Net developer.
