Posts tagged with: "mobile"

If you have both a car and an iPhone, then you might be as excited as we are that Car Finder 2.0 is now available in the App Store! Car Finder 2.0 is chock-full of additional features and makes finding your car easier and more accurate than ever. One of the best new features of Car Finder 2.0 is Parking Meter Notification. When you mark the location of your car, you have the choice of setting a time for when your parking meter will expire and then be alerted when your parking meter is about to run out. Also, if you don't want to use the augmented reality view to find your car, there's now an option to just view your car on a regular map.

For those of you who haven't heard of Car Finder, it is a super smart mobile app that uses augmented reality to help you find where you parked your car. Car Finder has been featured in many publications such as, Gizmodo, Consumer Reports, Wired Magazine, Cult of Mac, and the The Unofficial Apple Weblog. Just last week, Consumer Reports named Car Finder one of the must have smart phone applications for smart drivers.

Car Finder relies on the GPS and compass in your iPhone to accurately mark the location of your vehicle. You can see the accuracy of your GPS signal in real time and you will be alerted when you are trying to set the location of your car when the accuracy is not optimal. We use augmented reality to overlay real-time information about where your car is parked while you look at the world around you with your iPhone.

Car Finder 2.0 is available now in the App Store for $0.99. Car Finder was built by the talented mobile dev team at Intridea. Intridea offers services for application development on all major mobile platforms, including iPhone, IPad, Android, BlackBerry, and webOS. If you need your mobile idea brought to life, contact us for a quote.

Last month Intridea released Oil Reporter, a mobile application for iPhone and Android devices. Oil Reporter is currently being used by NGO's and citizens on the ground to report affected areas of the spill, including the impact to wildlife, the presence of wetlands, and the amount of oil that is present. All of the data collected by Oil Reporter users is publicly available on our website at OilReporter.org.

Now we've gone one step further and created a new Oil Reporter application specifically for the iPad. Oil Reporter for iPad enables you to see the latest reports as soon as they come in. You can view a detailed mapping of all of the submitted reports along with an easy-to-read list. You can even drill down and view detailed information about each individual report.

The code has also been open sourced on GitHub, so feel free to help us add some great new features to this application that we can push out in later updates. Oil Reporter for iPad is available right now and is completely free. The crowdsourced data gets analyzed by groups that can point relief efforts at the distressed areas according to the urgent reports that are filed with Oil Reporter. Start using it today!

Google’s Android has seen an incredible rise in popularity since its first handset was launched less than two years ago. Google has worked hard to earn that popularity, regularly releasing fantastic new improvements to the platform in the form of Donut, Eclaire, and now Froyo. Unfortunately, many users of the Android ecosystem won’t see these improvements for years, if at all. The reason? Manufacturers of Android handsets are building custom versions of the OS to add eye-candy and make the UI seem more attractive, at the expense of upgradeability.

HTC has its Sense UI and Motorola has MOTOBLUR. Samsung and Sony have also thrown their hats into the “heavily modified UI” ring. While these packages may serve to help differentiate from the competition, they are hammering the Android ecosystem by causing fragmentation (and yes, I do think that’s the right word). But it isn’t all their fault. One can certainly understand how, when competing against the likes of the iPhone, manufacturers would want to “pretty up” the Android experience. So I’ve got a few words for these OEMs, and Google as well.

Dear Google

I’m really happy that you’re ‘laser focused’ on the user experience for the next release. Now that you’ve got it humming at lightning speed with Froyo, it’s time to add some polish. Fantastic. But making a better stock UI isn’t the only thing that needs to happen to prevent this fragmentation.

You should be doing everything you can to prevent version fragmentation because it’s hurting developers and consumers. When people with G1s see “official Android Twitter client released” but can’t download it, they’ll get frustrated. They don’t know or care about the fact that the G1’s limited internal storage means that it can’t get the next upgrade, they only care that they’re supposed to have an Android but they can’t get the software they want.

Here’s my advice: take the feature lists of Sense and MOTOBLUR et al as a laundry list of areas where your API needs more robustness. If the capabilities of Sense and MOTOBLUR were exposed at an application level, this problem would simply disappear. You’ve built your platform to be backwards-compatible; if HTC wants to build a “Sense UI” app that changes the appearance of the UI and adds a bunch of widgets, and they want to make that only available on their handsets, more power to them. When the next version of Android comes out, it’ll all work seamlessly because they’ve simply built an app, like any other developer.

So keep up the good work on Gingerbread, I’m looking forward to the UI improvements. But also make your UI reachable by applications, provide hooks into the very guts of Android so that manufacturers and developers alike can really “make it their own” without building a custom ROM.

Dear HTC/Motorola/Samsung/Etc.

Thank you for making Android handsets. I’m a huge supporter of the platform, and the level of competition and innovation on Android phones has been amazing. Keep it up! But you’re doing yourselves a disservice by building these custom UIs that inhibit the Android version upgrade process.

Google has huge teams of people working to continuously upgrade the Android experience. You get the fruits of this labor 100% for free. I understand that as a handset manufacturer the idea of upgradeable phones isn’t necessarily the most appealing: if people can upgrade the software on their phones, maybe they won’t want a new one in 2 years! But trust me, you’ve shown that you’ll make the hardware good enough that people will want new phones.

Instead of locking down a handset to a specific Android version, create an unbeatable suite of applications that comes pre-loaded on your phone. Work on top of, instead of within, the Android operating system. Then you can leverage all of Google’s work and all of your own work to provide customers with a great experience. Work with Google to add pieces of API that will help you provide all of the value you want to provide; I’m sure Google would be happy to help as best it can.

Also, while I’m at it, can one of you please create a 4.3" handset running the stock Froyo UI sometime before November? I’d love to get a big-screen phone when my contract’s up, but I don’t know that I can handle dealing with these custom UI jobs. It’s just not for me.

Unicorns and Rainbows

I think that Android is a very important project that came along at just the right time. It has applications far beyond mobile handsets and we’ll begin seeing Android in cars, tablets, and more in the very near future. This will mean even more work will be poured into the Android ecosystem creating greater and greater benefits for everyone from consumers to handset manufacturers. All that needs to happen to take advantage of those benefits is for Google to help handset manufacturers free themselves of the idea that they need to “make it their own”.

I’m looking forward to the next 40 Android phones, and the 100 after that. I truly think that Android is going to dominate the mobile market five years from now (Apple will still have about the same piece of the pie, but Android will have displaced RIM and Microsoft entirely). So keep up the good work, but how about we all just get along in the meantime.

“Mashable is excited to launch our new iPad app and we think Intridea has done a fantastic job. There’s high demand for Mashable on the iPad, and we think our readers will be as excited as we are about the launch”, Pete Cashmore, CEO of Mashable, Inc.

Mashable is one of the world’s largest blogs focused exclusively on Web 2.0 and Social Media news, with more than 15 million monthly pageviews. We were very excited when approached to develop their iPad application. Mashable already had a very popular iPhone application and it was our job to figure out the best way to take advantage of the iPad’s increased real-estate and new user interface to be able to deliver something that all of their readers would enjoy.

One of the best things about the iPad is that it’s a wonderful device for reading. Whether you’re reading the news, a book, or a comic, the increased screen size makes the experience much more enjoyable. We wanted to make reading the latest articles on Mashable just as enjoyable. Not only can you see the latest news from all of their different news channels, but the articles themselves are formatted in a way that makes them very easy to read.

There are many other applications that allow you to read news on the iPad, but none of them take into account the way that you hold the iPad. Normally, when you hold the iPad with two hands, your thumbs are able to touch the screen. Other iPad applications have very un-intuitive ways of jumping to the next article by having small buttons on either the top left or top right corner of the window. We took into account the way that people hold their iPads and enabled them to easily go from article to article just by tapping on either side of the window.

Reading the latest news from Mashable is just some of what you can do with the application. With Mashable! for iPad, you can also share what you’re reading in many different ways. You can e-mail the article to a friend, share it on Twitter or Facebook, and you can also save it to Read Later on Instapaper.

Mashable! for iPad is now available for free on the App Store. Also, you can expect some exciting new features for Mashable! for iPad soon. There are some great new features that are in the works.

Intridea offers services for application development on all major mobile platforms, which include iPad, iPhone, Android, BlackBerry, and Palm webOS. If you need help with your mobile application feel free to contact us for a quote.

This was my second time speaking and attending the MobileX conference. Last year there was one event that was held in Lexington, Ky. This year the MobileX Conference has hit the road with events in Columbus, Ohio, Chicago, Ill., Nashville, Tenn., and Lexington again. You can view their whole schedule at mobilexconference.org. The MobileX Conference in Nashville had a pretty good turnout and was well received by those who attended.

 

Noah Kagan, Founder of kickflip, Inc (makers of GetGambit.com), who also spent time as the CMO at Mint.com and was the original creator of Facebook Mobile, gave the opening keynote. Noah's talk was titled "Making Money in Mobile - It's not just the iPhone", which was very informative and entertaining. It definitely set the mood for the rest of the event.

The conference was broken out into three separate tracks, "Entrepreneur/Investor," "Technical," and "Mobile Music." There was also an "iPhone Beginner" course offered at the same time. My first talk was on the topic of "Building Native Apps Using Titanium Mobile".

I went over Appcelerator's Titanium Mobile platform and how you could build truly native applications for iPhone and Android just using JavaScript. I event went into detail about how we built certain elements of the iPhone version of Grub.it.

Sam Soffes from Tasteful Works had a talk titled "Reuse Your Code", which went over how to create static libraries and bundles for your iPhone or iPad application. Nick Holland from Mobile Assassins had a great talk titled "What I Wish I Knew Before I Started a Mobile Gaming Company".

Another great thing about this conference was that there were panel sessions throughout the day. These panels allowed the audience to ask specific questions regarding a topic and get all of our opinions. I was fortunate enough to be on one panel with Jackson Miller and Sam Soffes about native applications versus the mobile web, which actually didn't get all that heated since we were mostly on the same side. We took questions from the moderator and answered questions from the audience and I felt like it ended up being pretty informative.

Sadly, Michael Mettler from AdCru and former Product Manager at Admob, could not make it to the event. I was asked at the last minute to do the closing keynote that I did at last year's MobileX conference in his place. Instead of updating my talk from last year, I decided to do a whole new talk around the current state of mobile and why it is such a great time for us as developers, entrepreneurs, and investors to be in mobile right now. My closing keynote talk was titled "I'm Mobile, Who's Coming With Me", and I believe it went pretty well.

The MobileX Conference in Nashville was a great event. I had a great time and judging by the tweets I can tell that I wasn't the only one. The MobileX Conference in Lexington, KY kicks off on April 16, 2010 and I'll be there speaking again. If you're in the area and would love to hear about great things in mobile, I highly suggest that you attend.

Today we are excited to officially launch Grub.it, a location-based web and mobile application that enables people to find or review individual dishes at restaurants wherever they may be. Grub.it exists to help you find top notch meals wherever you are and aims to connect you with local specialties, hidden gems and exquisite dishes in general.

Unlike traditional food review sites, Grub.it focuses on individual dishes instead of restaurants as a whole. Now people can see what dishes are the most popular at a given restaurant and ratings for restaurants will solely be based on dishes that have been tried - which is far more accurate. Also, since people can see the ratings for each dish, never will anybody need to guess what would be the best dish to order off of the menu. Grub.it is also a very powerful tool for business owners, since they can find out why certain dishes are more popular than others at each individual location.

Grub.it's mobile integration plays a very important role. From the Grub.it iPhone application, you can 'grub a dish' (rate, add photo, and attach a review) at nearby restaurants. When you grub a dish, you also have the option of sharing what you've just eaten and the rating to all of your friends on Twitter or Facebook automagically. You can also view dishes that have been reviewed that are close to you, your network activity, nearby restaurants, your reviews, and much more.

The mobile version of Grub.it is currently available for iPhone and iPod Touch in the App Store. We are currently working on bringing Grub.it to Android and Palm webOS in the near future. The current version of the mobile application was developed using Appcelerator's (www.appcelerator.com) Titanium Mobile platform.

All of us at Intridea hope that you and your friends enjoy Grub.it and find it to be very valuable and fun. We'll be adding many new features within the next few weeks. So, the next time you go out to eat, make sure to grub it!

On the heels of U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton's Net Freedom speech, Intridea was delighted to receive notification Apple had approved the official iPhone application we developed for Voice of America's (VOA) Persian News Network (PNN).

This new application gives Iranians a unique opportunity to get the latest news on their mobile devices and to share with the world the news as it happens in their country," said Acting PNN Director Alex Belida. "It is a groundbreaking way to expand our reach inside Iran and deepen our relationship with a key VOA audience."

Following Iran's troubling elections in the Summer of 2009, the Senate aptly passed the Victims of Iranian Censorship (VOICE) Act, which provided much needed funding and support to the Broadcasting Board of Governors to expand Farsi language broadcasting into Iran by the Voice of America's Persian News Network.

This application empowers Iranians at a time when the government is staging a crackdown against opposition protesters, Mr. Belida said. As with the disputed elections [last] year, VOA's Persian service continues to be a leading source of news and information for Iranians.

In this video, Hamed Behravan, Sr. VOA Correspondent showcases the newly released mobile application to millions of Iranian television and web-based viewers, on his weekly Technology Roundup segment.

Built under the technical leadership of Brendan Lim, Intridea's Director of Mobile Solutions, the application is designed for iPhone and Android Devices, and features the ability to read the latest VOA News Stories and share them through Facebook, Twitter, or e-mail. Users can also keep up-to-date with the VOA PNN's Twitter feed (@voapnn). Additionally, "the application allows users to anonymously report news accompanied with either an image or video captured directly from their mobile device" says Lim; "enabling a new wave of citizen journalism."

Intridea is dedicated to supporting Gov 2.0 projects and programs that promote human rights, uphold democratic principles, and strengthen civil institutions. In the case of the VOA PNN App, we have been given an opportunity to create a platform that extends the Iranian people the freedom of speech --- in real-time.

Many important security measures were considered to operationally defeat or circumvent censorship and/or surveillance of content created, shared or stored by users. And with future guidance from the VOA & US State Department, Intridea plans to develop other sophisticated transmission techniques to counter the Iranian government's use of filtering systems, and general stranglehold of internet & mobile transmissions.

The VOA PNN application was built using Appcelerator's Titanium Mobile platform. Using Titanium Mobile, we were able to create an application for both, iPhone and Android, using just a single codebase. Also, Titanium Mobile allowed us to develop these native applications using only HTML, CSS, and JavsScript, which greatly reduced the amount of development time.

Here's how to get it:

On iPhone or iPod Touch
You can download it directly from the App Store. You can also find it by searching for 'VOA PNN'.

On jailbroken iPhone or iPod Touch
If you have a jailbroken iPhone, you can find the application through Cydia or Rock. The application is listed under the BigBoss source, which is included by default on both of these applications. Just do a search for 'VOA PNN' to install the application.

On Android
The application is listed under News & Media in the Android Marketplace. You can also search for 'VOA PNN' to install it.

The Android version features the same functionality as the iPhone version. However, since Google doesn't officially support the Farsi language, users who wish to use the app on their Android devices will have to add Farsi character support on their own. To install Farsi on your Android device, check the links below.

• arabicandroid - http://code.google.com/p/arabicandroid/
• XDA Developers - http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=616384

Stay tuned for more.

A new version of the Presently application has just been released for iPhone and is now available on the App Store. Presently for the iPhone is the best way to keep in touch with your co-workers where you're not in front of your computer. The new version of Presently brings a completely new application, developed using Appcelerator's Titanium Mobile platform, that is packed with many more features than the previous.

Below is a list of just some of the great new features that have been added to the latest version of Presently for iPhone.

• Completely redesigned user interface
• iPhone 3GS users can now post videos with their update
• Can view a list of all users and groups
• Profiles for individual users or groups
• Follow or unfollow specific users
• Join or leave specific groups
• View followers and whom an individual is following
• Search through all users
• Search through all groups
• View last updates for any user or group
• View mentions for any user or group
• View updates from any of your custom feeds within Sources
• View updates from any of your groups within Sources
• Offline-capabilities for your main feed

The new version of Presently is now available for free on the App Store.

We released Car Finder just over a week ago and the amount of attention we've received is much more than we could have ever anticipated. For those of you who don't know, Car Finder is an iPhone application that utilizes augmented reality to help you find where you parked your car. We use augmented reality to overlay real-time information about where your car is parked while you look through the camera view of your iPhone.

Note: Car Finder developer Brendan Lim and his brother (with the dollar) sold separately

Throughout this whole process we've noticed that the Twitter mentions that came after these news articles proved to play a huge part in Car Finder's success. Below are a list of a few articles that covered the release of Car Finder.

Wired UK
Save face with the Car Finder augmented reality app

The Unofficial Apple Weblog
Use Augmented Reality to Find Your Car

Autoblog
Latest auto iPhone app: Augmented reality parked car finder

Holy Kaw!
Can't find your car? There's an app for that. - Holy Kaw!

Cult of Mac
Car Finder iPhone App Uses Augmented Reality To Find Your Wheels

Boing Boing
Car Finder app for iPhone

Car Finder is available now on the App Store for $0.99. Intridea offers services for application development on all major mobile platforms, which include iPhone, Android, BlackBerry, and Palm webOS. If you need help with your mobile application feel free to contact us for a quote.

If you’ve ever parked your vehicle in a large parking lot you’ve realized that it would be great to have something help you memorize where your car was. Intridea’s latest iPhone application, Car Finder, helps you do just that. Unlike the cookie-cutter car finding applications in the App Store, Car Finder helps you find your car using augmented reality.

Using the camera, A-GPS and the compass built into the iPhone 3GS, Car Finder allows you to find your car by positioning an overlay on top of a live view of what’s in front of you. Also, when you mark your car Car Finder allows you to set a note for your parking spot. This is particularly useful if you know what section you’re parked in or if the GPS is spotty in the location that your car is currently parked in.

Car Finder is available now on the App Store for $0.99. Intridea offers services for application development on all major mobile platforms, which include iPhone, Android, BlackBerry, and Palm webOS. If you need help with your mobile application feel free to contact us for a quote.

Adding to Intridea’s collection of great food finding applications for the iPhone, like iPho and iCurry, comes SushiMe. SushiMe allows you to find great sushi restaurants around you using your current location or any location that you specify. You can sort through a list of restaurants by their rating (provided by Yelp) or by their distance. With SushiMe you can also view a map of all of the restaurants around you and even call them directly from your iPhone to make reservations.

SushiMe is a free application and is available right now in the App Store. Intridea offers services for application development on all major mobile platforms, which include iPhone, Android, BlackBerry, and Palm webOS. If you need help with your mobile application feel free to contact us for a quote.

Present.ly, our enterprise microblogging platform, which is used daily by many large corporations and government organizations, offers native versions of the application on all major mobile platforms. Today, Apple has approved the latest version of Present.ly for iPhone.

Included in this latest version is an updated user interface. The new user interface ditches the previous dark theme and replaces it with a look that is more familiar to iPhone users and is easier on the eyes. Uploaded attachments can be viewed directly from the phone. Updates with one or more attached files are indicated by a small paperclip icon within your feed.

In addition to attaching files, photos from your photo library or the iPhone camera can be added to your updates — a highly anticipated feature. This version of the app provides a more robust user experience by enabling many of the most useful features of the web client. Present.ly is a free application available in the App Store. To get Present.ly for your iPhone click on the link below.

Sometimes you just want an application that gets something done quick and gets it done right -- especially if your stomach's calling. That's why we've decided to create iPho and iCurry for the iPhone.

iPho will help you find the best phở around you using your current location or any address you use using the built-in search. iCurry does the same but allows you to search through the best Indian food around.

Both of these applications will show you a list of restaurants sorted by their average rating or their distance relative to you or the address you search from. You can also drill down into each restaurant so that you can get their address, get directions, give them a call, and even see if they are open. There's even a map view which overlays all of the restaurants around you. Ratings and listings are provided using the Yelp API. Both iCurry and iPho are free applications and are available now on the App Store.

Along with the announcement of these two great applications, we at Intridea are kicking off our mobile development services for our clients. We are offering services for application development on all major mobile platforms, which include iPhone, Android, BlackBerry, and Palm webOS. We've built a great team of talented mobile developers that can help bring your product or service to the mobile market. Expect to see more mobile related announcements soon.

Need help with your mobile app? Contact us for a quote.

I recently spent a day hanging out with a few of the guys at Viget Labs hacking on the iPhone.  Ben Scofield, the Technology Director at Viget Labs, was leading an iPhone development primer for a few of Viget's finest, and they were nice enough to let a handful of "outsiders" join the fun.

My iPhone development experience at that point was very minimal.  I had done a few online tutorials and walk-throughs, but nowhere near enough to really understand what I was doing.  On top of that, my Objective-C knowledge was pretty much non-existant.  Fortunately, none of this was a problem.

We spent the first half of the day going over the basics.  Ben walked us through Xcode and Interface Builder, and we talked about basic project layout, the different types of iPhone apps (list, view, and navigation-based, etc).

We then broke off into small groups, pairs mostly, to do a little hacking.  David Eisinger and myself put our heads together on something amazing.  The Text-EmBIGiner, we called it (or something like that).  Picture this, a text field, a button, and a label.  You enter your text, hit the buttom, and BAM -- the label is updated with your text.  It was amazing.  We thought so at least.  Many high-fives were had.

Lunch was provided in the form of Amante Pizza.  Thanks Viget!

In the afternoon we moved on to talk about ways of making iPhone development less painful.  In other words, removing the Objective-C.  We briefly talked about Rhomobile, an open source framwork for building cross-platform mobile apps.

The remainder of the day was spent talking about and playing with two other frameworks, Appcelerator's Titanium and the open source PhoneGap.  Both frameworks allow you to build your app using primarily HTML and javascript, but they still give you access to the iPhone native controls and features.  They were very cool and I could definitely see myself playing with these more in the future.

Overall it was a really fun day, and I'm looking forward to putting my new knowledge to good use.

Thanks again Viget!

Our Director of Research & Development, Pradeep Elankumaran, and I attended iPhoneDevCamp 3 during the first week of this month. For those of you who haven't heard of iPhoneDevCamp, it is supposed to be setup as an "unconference", sort of a "Barcamp" type of an event, featuring content from the attendees and dedicated time for hacking on your own applications. Last year's iPhoneDevCamp was hosted by Adobe Systems in San Francisco. This year's iPhoneDevCamp was kindly hosted by the good guys at Yahoo! in Sunnyvale, California.

Yahoo! has an amazing campus that was more than capable of hosting the large amount of iPhone developers there for the event. There were also many "satellite" events going on in different cities around the world at the same time. One really interesting feature that they had at the event was a live stream of presenters of developers hacking away that could be viewed on any iPhone thanks to the new HTTP live streaming available in OS 3.0.

   

The event kicked off on the first day with a mixer, which allowed everybody to walk around and introduce themselves to other developers and vendors that were at the event. Chi-Hua Chien gave the keynote and talked about the general growth of mobile and the Kleiner Perkins iFund. After his keynote was another chance to meet others, followed by a musical performance by BT. Pradeep and I "accidentally" had a chance to walk on stage and check out BT setting up his equipment.

   

The rest of the event on the following two days consisted of teams hacking on different iPhone applications, which could be entered in to win a bunch of prizes for many different categories. Other keynotes from these days were by Andrew Stone of Twittelator fame and Steve Demeter, developer of Trism. There were also various talks held within different classrooms. Of those in attendance, the majority were experienced iPhone developers, but many others were not. People who didn't have any Objective-C experience helped out web interfaces, graphics, etc. I'm pretty comfortable with Objective-C but Pradeep hasn't had much experience with it at the time. For our project, which we weren't planning on submitting at the end of the event, Pradeep worked on the Rails back end and I worked on the iPhone interface.

   

There were some really interesting applications that won awards at the event. Some of those that stood out to us were AR Kit (Best iPhone Open Source App), Nurse Brain (Highest Potential Startup Idea), and iSign (Best iPhone App for Accessibility). AR Kit is an open source augmented reality UI library for displaying location based data in spherical coordinate systems mirroring UI Kit on the phone. Nurse Brain allows nurses to hand-off important data about patients during shift change. iSign opens up people accessibility on the iPhone by introducing a gesture based sign language. There were many other great applications that received awards. You can see the complete list of the winners here.

We had a great time at iPhoneDevCamp 3 and hope that we can have the chance to participate again next year. Thanks again to everyone who organized the great event, BT for performing (and not getting your security to throw us off stage), and Yahoo! for allowing the event to be hosted at a great campus. Hopefully, we'll soon be able to reveal what we were working on at the event!

I finally had the time to write up a recap of Rails Underground in London, even though it’s a little overdue. I’ve really come to enjoy smaller regional conferences. Since it’s such a smaller crowd than larger conferences, you get to meet and spend more time with the same people — getting to know them better and pick each other’s brain. Rails Underground was great because of this reason, but not this reason alone.

I was attending Rails Underground to give my talk on Mobilizing Your Rails Application. The point of my talk was to get developers more focused on the mobile web and other mobile technologies and explain how to use certain plugins and gems to accomplish this. I believe my talk went well judging from the response afterwards — and since it was recorded, you’ll be able to judge it yourself as well. If you’re interested, feel free to view the slides here. I’ll be adding a link to the video of the talk as soon as it’s posted.

The conference was spread into two separate tracks for two full days. When I gave my talk, I was up against Pat Allen’s talk about the Community, which was another great talk also being presented at the same time in a different room. I enjoyed all of the talks that I attended but some of the talks that stood out to me were James Wilk’s talk on Cucumber, Pat Allan’s talk on Thinking Sphinx, Dr. Nic’s talk on Blue Ridge, and Jim Weirich’s talk on the Grand Unified Theory of Software. One talk that was extremely creative and entertaining was Paul Campbell’s talk, An Agile Workflow with Rails, which ended up being a hand-drawn story presentation. There were also keynotes on each day of the event. The opening keynote was delivered by Fred George and by Yehuda Katz on the last day.

There’s no doubt that the first Rails Underground was a success. Everybody that I talked to had a great time and learned a great deal of information. I met some new friends, learned some new things, had a great time and would love to attend again next year.

You may have already noticed by following us on Twitter or just by clicking around on the site, but we've launched a number of Present.ly clients in the past weeks.

Desktop Application

First up is our cross-platform desktop application that runs on Adobe AIR. You can view your update stream, post updates and more from a simple interface. You can also get notified automatically as new updates come in.

This application is a great way to access Present.ly in a compact, always-on way right on your desktop. We will be rolling out additional features for the application in the coming weeks, but we're happy to be able to give people what they've been asking for since we launched.

Mobile Applications

We’re also very excited to announce the release of our native mobile applications for Present.ly. Now you can use these applications to interact with your co-workers on your iPhone, BlackBerry, or Android device anywhere you go. With these applications, you can update your status, view your main stream, view your replies, direct messages and more.

The iPhone application is based off the open-sourced Natsulion Twitter iPhone application. It is available for free in the App Store on iTunes. On the Android platform, the Present.ly application is based off of another open-sourced Twitter application, TwitterDroid. You can download the application for free at the Android Marketplace. The BlackBerry application can be downloaded by going to our BlackBerry page. From there you can enter in your e-mail address and we will send the application right to your phone.

For those of you who have another device not listed above, you can use our mobile web version of Present.ly. All you have to do is go to your account from your device’s mobile browser to access the mobile web version of Present.ly. You can also interact with Present.ly through SMS, MMS, or e-mail. Depending on your carrier though, standard rates may apply. Go here to view a list of our supported mobile carriers.

An Open-Source Initiative

We believe strongly in open-source and supporting the open-source community. As part of that, all of the clients discussed today are open-source and available on GitHub. We hope that open-sourcing these applications will serve as a great foundation for building more cool things around Present.ly as well as giving the community the chance to beat us to the punch on improvements if they so choose.

Let's face it, iPhone interfaces are awesome, but they can only cater to a fraction of the mobile market. What are you to do if you want to satisfy the rest of the mobile world? Mobile Fu helps to make this job much easier by automatically detecting mobile devices that access your Rails application. People can access your site from a Palm, Blackberry, iPhone, Nokia, etc. and it will automatically adjust the format of the request from :html to :mobile.

Learn Mobile Fu

First off, just install the Mobile Fu plugin into your Rails application.

script/plugin install git://github.com/brendanlim/mobile-fu.git 

Start by adding this one line to your ApplicationController.

class ApplicationController < ActionController::Base
  has_mobile_fu
end

Once this is in place, any request that comes from a mobile device will be be set as :mobile format. It is up to you to determine how you want to handle these requests by creating the .mobile.erb versions of your views that are to be requested. Also, I recommend that you setup a before_filter that will redirect to a specific page depending on whether or not it is a mobile request. How can you check this?

is_mobile_device? # => Returns true or false depending on the device

You can also determine which format is currently set in by calling the method below.

in_mobile_view? # => Returns true or false depending on current req. format

If you want the ability to allow a user to switch between ‘mobile’ and ‘standard’ format (:html), you can just adjust the mobile_view session variable in a custom controller action.

session[:mobile_view] # => Set to true if request format is :mobile and false
                           if set to :html

What About Custom Mobile Styling?

Different devices need different styling. Don’t worry though, we’ve got this baked in to Mobile Fu (thanks to Intridea's own Michael Bleigh, who created Browserized Styles for letting me modify his code). If you are including a css or sass file via stylesheet_link_tag, all you have to do is add _device to the name of one of your files to override your styling for a certain device. The stylesheet that is loaded is dependant on which device is making the request.

Supported stylesheet override device extensions at the moment are: blackberry, iphone, mobileexplorer, nokia, palm

e.g., Accessing a page from a Blackberry.

<%= stylesheet_link_tag 'mobile.css' %>  

Ends up loading mobile.css, and mobile_blackberry.css if the file exists.

Feature Requests

You can check out Mobile Fu's very own project page at Acts As Community. If you have any problems or would like me to add a certain feature, please create a ticket at http://blim.lighthouseapp.com/projects/14490-mobile-fu/. Also, feel free to fork Mobile Fu and make any enhancements you please from its GitHub location at: http://github.com/brendanlim/mobile-fu/tree/master