Some useful links for mobile development:

• Very Useful Table of Mobile Browser Compatability
• PhoneGap - Develop Apps for iPhone, Blackberry & Android with Javascript

The Web Developer Toolbar for Firefox and Firebug are essential tools for web development. However, did you know that you can get similar functionality in Apple’s Safari browser now?

To turn this on, go the Advanced tab in the Preferences menu (Apple + ,) and check the Show Develop menu in menu bar.

You will now see a Menu bar item along the top.

Choose Show Web Inspector to get a similar tool to Firebug. The Network module is particularly useful for determining what elements on your page are taking a long time to load.

Technorati Tags: safari

My friend John Ballinger has submitted a heart monitor application for the iPhone to the iTunes App Store that lets you use the mic in the headphones or built in to the base of the phone to get an accurate heart rate.

iPhone App - Heart Monitor from John Ballinger on Vimeo.

This is extremely innovative and really starts to show the potential of the iPhone as a development platform. Nice one John, I hope you are an App Store Millionaire soon.

Technorati Tags: iphone heart monitor

Chrome is Google’s own browser project. When I first heard that Google were doing this, my own reaction, and that of my colleagues, was “What the…?”. The last thing the web development industry needs is another browser to deal with. I had a conversation with a fellow web developer friend not long ago about how we were pretty much heading back to the situation of the late 90’s where the individual vendors starting going so far away from the agreed W3C standards, that as a web developer you had a make a choice of which browsers you could realistically support. Back then, getting a site to work in all the different browsers was incredibly time consuming and most clients weren’t prepared to pay the extra cost involved.

Now, I think I counted by the end of the year we would have 10 major browsers, that we would realistically have to support in all our web applications and site. That is before you start looking at mobile browsers, and the smaller guys who are still hanging around, like Opera in the Nintendo Wii and a few other devices.

Then you’ve got Apple’s WebKit project going completely away from even the next planned version of HTML/CSS standards, developing powerful, advanced features that will only work in WebKit. This browser is literally changing every day, they do a nightly build with new code. Incidentally, Google are using WebKit for the base of their browser.

That said, this article on TechCrunch puts the Google strategy in perspective. They already have their Gears technology that allows web applications to run whilst disconnected from the Internet, they have an alternative to the Microsoft Office suite, they are partnered with Salesforce.com for CRM and business applications, Instant Messenger, email, wikis, blogs, social networks…etc, etc. If they can wrap all of this into a Google browser that can also run offline, why would you need an operating system really? You don’t need lots of hardware like high capacity hard drives, you can store everything in the Google “cloud” and retrieve what you want, when you need it.

It is interesting and could well be the plan that Google had all along. At times it had been difficult to understand how they would bring all these disparate applications and services together, but obviously their own browser would do just that. What I find even more interesting is I have just downloaded an application called GMDesk, which is an Adobe AIR application (not developed by Google) that allows you run all your main Google applications in a single interface.

There is obviously the demand for the concept, and I have to say I’m finding it really useful. I’ll continue watching the progress of Chrome with interest.

Technorati Tags: chrome, google, gmdesk, webkit

I love this script from Cabel. Very cool Javascript zooming. Similar to the Prototype Lightbox, but I think I actually prefer this.

Just click on any of the thumbnails below. These are screenshots from the work we have been doing for Mountain Dew recently around turning much of their content into widgets that can be distributed to various platforms, such as NetVibes, iGoogle, Facebook, etc.

Is it just me, or has there been a significant decline in broadband capacity lately? Shouldn’t it be getting faster, not slower? I started to think it was just my network or possibly an issue in my area, however, I have spoken to other people on different ISP’s in different areas, experiencing similar issues.

There is a common misconception about broadband connectivity. Your connection is like a pipe, this is generally static, the size of the pipe won’t change. If you get 2mbps downstream and 500kbps upstream, that is fairly static, with ADSL, which most home users have, it will change when you restart your router. For connections like fibre or DDS, it is absolutely fixed. ADSL does vary, and there can be a number of factors that affect the actual bandwidth you get, including distance of your connection from the local exchange, other broadband connections in your area (we all still sharing the same copper), local lines issues, and a host of others.

The size of your pipe though, does not determine the performance you get. It is a factor. Chances are, you have plenty of capacity on your "pipe" between you and the ISP’s equipment in the local telco exchange. The problem with the Internet, is that it will only be as fast as the slowest part of the connection. The weakest link in the chain if you will. If there is a major bottleneck in part of the core ISP’s infrastructure, for example, they have a router or switch that is completely at capacity, then this will determine the actual upload and download speed you get. Don’t get me wrong, if we could all have fibre into our houses, that is absolutely the best option, but it is not the entire solution. Wellington has wide availability of fibre optic cable connections for nearly over 10 years, but there are customers I know on that type of connection with major performance issues because whilst fibre is a very high capacity connectivity option, it is now, at capacity.

It could be that you are connecting to a server in the US somewhere, in which case, it might have nothing to do with your ISP at all. It could be the data centre where the web server is hosted has network capacity issues, or any hop along the route. All you can expect from your ISP is that they take all reasonable measures to ensure no bottlenecks on their domestic network, and they should be able to get you out through the international gateway to the major International destinations, particularly the West Coast of the USA as many, many services will be hosted there.

I eliminated the possibility of a local network issue and I checked my router and the actual connection between my house and exchange is fine. So next I did some testing on my actual throughput at Speedtest.net. Here are the results:

Auckland to Auckland

This is very disappointing. With XADSL connections, which is what we all have now, you should not really have a connection less then 2mbps. The upstream is even more disappointing. If all you want to do is download, then it is not such an issue, but I have many applications where I need fast connectivity in both directions.

Auckland to San Francisco

This is even worse. The further away you are going, the slower it will be, but any way you look at it, this is not good.

The Dirty Little Secret of ISPs

I used to work for an Internet Service Provider years ago, and so I know a lot about how that type of business works. This is how it breaks down:

• As an ISP you are basically buying big "pipes" and then looking to sell usage of that pipe to lots of customers
• So you start out by buying a pipe big enough for 1000 customers to use it concurrently
• When you have 100 customers, you are losing money, but the performance for those 100 customers is unbelievable.
• Based on this, you actually get a great name in the marketplace and get more customers
• When you get to say customer 500, you are starting to make a small profit because you are now more than covering the costs of your big fat pipe
• The performance is not quite as good though, but still good enough that the customers are happy
• Once you get to customer 1000, you are making good profit. You count on not all 1000 customers using the pipe at the same time, so that you can maximise profitability. The problem though, is that when they are all using it, the performance is not good.
• Once to get to customer 1500, you are making mad money, because your costs haven’t really increased, as you’ve still got the same pipe. This is where it gets tricky, and some ISP’s can choose to just keep costs low and monitor the churn rate (the rate at which customers leave versus new customers signing up). You tell the help desk to tell the customers it is their router, the telco, their WiFi network, anything other than the truth, which is that they just don’t want to pay for extra capacity because it will screw their profit margins.

Now this isn’t necessarily true of all ISPs, however, my personal experience has been that when new companies enter the market, their performance is fantastic, but as they obviously gain more traction and market share it seems to decline. This has been the case 3 times in the last 6 years that I can recall.

Therefore, the best thing to do is to keep moving to the newest ISP in the market and once performance starts to decline, move on to the next new one.

Some developers have figured out how to turn the new Nokia Jaiku phone into a portable WiFi hot spot that you can use to share your 3G cellular connection.

This is a brilliant idea, and must surely be possible on the iPhone from a hardware perspective. I hope someone is busy working on that now.

As an existing user of both, I’m very excited by this new integration. Key benefits are:

• Your email (which is basically Gmail) is automatically linked to your contact records in Salesforce. No more adding emails manually!
• Your calendar will synch with Salesforce.
• Documents can be stored online with Google, taking care of the expensive excess data storage charges that you get from Salesforce if you exceed your allocation

I’m sure there are many more. I’m very much looking forward to doing a trial of this as I think it could be a wonderful solution for small to medium businesses.
Check out the details on Salesforce.com.

Thanks for listening to my presentation.

If anyone would like to be involved in the beta, please leave a comment and I’ll contact you as soon as we are ready.

This should be helpful for Mac users who use Gmail and/or Salesforce. For various reasons, I sometimes use all of these apps/devices for accessing email and contacts.

• Address Book on Mac OS X
• Outlook 2007 on XP (on Parallels on my MacBook Pro)
• Google Apps - IMAP (Gmail)
• iPhone
• Salesforce.com - All our customer data is in this system

How do you get all your contacts in all these places?

Step 1

You have to use Address Book as the primary data store. I have contacts in here that I don’t need in Salesforce, because they are friends and family.

So the first step is supplementing this with all my customer data from Salesforce. No problem in Outlook 2007 as you just install Salesforce Outlook Edition and sync with Salesforce. However, there is no equivalent solution from Salesforce for Address Book on Mac OS X.

Luckily, these clever chaps are working on an open source tool that does this:

sfCubed

This is in beta, but it works fine for me.

Step 2

Now I just sync my iPhone via iTunes and I have all my customer information on my phone. Easy.

Step 3

Now I want everything in Gmail as well so that I can access all the contacts, if for any reason, I can only use web mail.

Download A to G

This simple utility exports your Address Book to a .csv file that can be imported into Gmail.

Conclusion

This is a satisfactory but still manual process for getting all contacts data everywhere I want. Ideally this would be all achieved via iSync on Mac OS X, however, I think this will probably be a little while away.