Recently I moved house which involves the move of ISP and various accounts. In total my ISP is taking 28 days to move my ADSL setup to another telephone exchange and set up the services that I use. 28 days of almost zero Internet.
So checking around I discovered JoikuSpot for my N95 which allows me to open a WIFI hotspot on my N95 and use the UTMS (3G) connection to get online. It’s pretty awesome all round, I can use my corporate VPN, surf and email.
It hasn’t all been plain sailing with Vodafone, who seems to have poor UMTS coverage here. I noticed very strange behaviour with various Internet sites, Facebook for example is delivered in the form of the mobile site. Why would I want the mobile site on my Macbook?? Why are Vodafone making decisions about the content that I want to view?
JoikuSpot is pretty amazing kit, but I’m fully aware that it’s stretching the device beyond its design. My N95 agreed that it was all too much and died. No beeps or flashing lights, just sudden death. After playing with the battery, charging for a while reset reset reset, nothing was working!
As a last ditch effort I called my good friend and resident know-it-all Steve Hartley (Adobe) who imparted this pretty weird how-to.
- Take the battery out
- Get a copper coin
- Press against the battery pins on the inside of the phone for 2 secs
- Replace battery and turn on
And voila, the phone powered back up!
Steve explained that Nokia devices hold a charge for the clock and certain states, even when they are apparently powered down. Shorting the pins causes a full power down, and thus reset of the device.
So there you have it: How to fix your N95 in case of total death 
Sony Ericsson have been doing a lot to update the look and feel of their site, what a great job particularly the mobile device Gallery. Today saw the launch of the Capuchin Packaging Tool to add to the release of the first supported device the C905 which has received great reviews already.
The device includes a huge array of features including aGPS, WIFI and an 8.1MP camera. I can tell I’m going to like it already due to my camera being stolen at Heathrow 
Update, here are some pictures taken 28th July and reduced in size by 50%:
The Capuchin Tool is Windows only at this stage, simply install the exe file and this will place the relevant packaging piece into your chosen install path. From there all you have to do is launch the little batch file.
Check it out..
A few days ago our good friends at Forum Nokia released a basic set of components for Flash Lite 2.0 beginners. They have included documentation and sample assets so that a user might change the look and feel for their own UI. The memory requirements for the examples that I tried appear high for this level of functionality, but its a good start and they come with documentation. Scott reminded me that Jesse Warden released a good component set for mobile devices some time ago called Shuriken, they are definately worth checking out.
With this is mind I dug around to find some other components that we have sitting around. Happily our own Matt Snow from our Experience Design team was able to provide a set of Flash Lite 1.1 and Flash Lite 2.0 UI example components. You can find them over in the example section, though as you might expect they are a little rough round the edges.
What will you get from them:
- Discover how to create low memory yet rich components
- List, Slider, Tile, NavModel and Gapper components for Flash Lite 2.x/3.x
- Carousel, Menu, Story and scroll bars in Flash Lite 1.1
- Key Handling for Flash Lite 1.1 and Flash Lite 2.x/3.x
- Image Handling, loading and unloading etc (TileMenu)
- Creating device UI and multi-screen applications (NavModel)
Unfortunately I don’t have time to polish these for installation and add documentation. The majority of the components are extremely simple and not compiled so that you can freely edit them whilst retaining the size and memory benefits. You can consider them free to use or change in your projects.
Future Thoughts
In time it would be great if these could be absorbed into a community effort to create components for mobile devices. For that, I do have another set of mobile components and a mobile framework to hand that are more complex but unsupported.
Although extremely well documented and stable, the memory requirements from 1 year+ ago were such that it’s gathering dust. We are now starting to see devices with the right levels of RAM (2mb+) and so it might be time to give it a go.
The following graphic is a basic RSS reader built in about 10 mins!
My question to you is: If I was to hand these over, would you be willing to package, support and maintain them for everyone?
This week I’m in Spain, first in Madrid for a customer meeting and then off to Barcelona for the S60 Summit.
Before the main event Forum Nokia are having two days dedicated to S60 technologies, one for Location Based Services and another for Adobe Flash Lite 3.0. I’ll be presenting for a while and helping out at the code camp afterwards.
I’m really looking forward to meeting you all!
Here is the Agenda:
Tuesday 27th May 2008
09:00 Registration, coffee & getting settled
09:30 Welcome note - Riku Salminen, Forum Nokia
09:45 Using extended device capabilities with Flash Lite in S60 - Riku Salminen, Forum Nokia
10:30 Adobe Flash Professional CS3 and Device Central - Mark Doherty, Adobe
11:15 Forum Nokia Success Story - Ugur Kaner, KuneriLite
12:00 Lunch
12:45 Hands on coding session, using Adobe’s tools and KuneriLite
Refreshments served
Including a coding competition
Tutors: Riku Salminen, Mark Doherty and Ugur Kaner
17:00 Announcing the Winners
Prerequisites:
Adobe Flash professional CS3 installed (30 day trial: here )
KuneriLite installed and tested (Free download: here )
Some experience in designing Flash content
Loads of creativity and go-get attitude
With regards to this reported problem we have been listening and working with Nokia and Forum Nokia we have agreed a workaround.
As well as that we have agreed on a more permanent fix for the future. I’ll have more details soon…
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