wubbahed.com

I’ve been doing some pro bono web work recently for Children’s Pressline, a youth news service that trains kids to be reporters and editors who write articles for mainstream media partners. It’s a non-profit open to any child in NYC, and currently their news stories are being run in the NY Daily News, Metro, and the Amsterdam News.

The work I’ve done involves some basic tweaks to their website, setting up a Children’s PressLine Facebook page and creating a Children’s PressLine RSS feed that shows you their latest stories and links to the major media outlet running the story.

There’s not a mobile website, but just by having an RSS feed, that’s all you really need to get started reading the content on your mobile. If you’re reading this on your S60 device, you can just click on the RSS feed, and automatically subscribe to the latest news articles.

If you’ve got one of the newer S60 devices, though, then you can get a richer experience using this widget I made which pulls in the RSS feed and displays the latest news stories directly on your phone.

You can download the Children’s PressLine widget directly, or scan in this QR code to get it straight to your mobile:

Total development time for this widget was less than an hour, and most of that time was just deciding which colors to use in the CSS. If you haven’t seen the Nokia Web Run Time, then I’d recommend checking it out as it’s going to be a great way to build quick applications for S60 devices. Right now, it’s only drawback is that it has almost no access to the device itself (e.g. GPS, Contacts), but Nokia has already announced these features will be included in the next major release.

If you want to see the source code of the widget, then just download the file to your PC and change the file extension from .wgz to .zip. Then open the zip file and all of the source code is there. It’s a very simple setup with one HTML page, and one XMLHttpRequest call to retrieve the RSS feed.

Let me know if you have any questions about how the widget was built, and I’m also interested to see how other people are using widgets not just for their personal use, but also to help promote causes they believe in.

So I’ve read a couple of articles lately about the new Google Maps that’s available for the Nokia N95. This is particularly exciting because they now offer Transit directions in some cities. Being able to get this type of information on your mobile is wonderful.

So I installed the app, and noticed that this updated version of Google Maps has a new icon. One that looks surprisingly like the Nokia Maps icon. Here’s some screenshots:

	Nokia Maps icon
	old Google Maps icon (compass)
	new Google Maps icon (ripoff)

I have a hard time believing that this new icon is just a coincidence… Thoughts? Is Google trying to intentionally confuse users so that they run Google Maps on their phones instead of Nokia Maps?

Digital Picture Frames are becoming more ubiquitous, and I was thinking it would be great if picture frames also had a camera lens embedded in the back. That way, not only could you look at photo galleries, you could also pick up the entire picture frame and have it act as the viewfinder of a camera. Click a button, and voila! The image would be saved automatically onto the picture frame (or into the cloud).

It’s a little meta I know, but it would work so well for family photo albums over time.

TodayFeels.com is a little website I’ve been putting together in my off hours and will be talking about in more detail today at MobileCampSF2. It’s a site that gives you a weather forecast relative to what it felt like the day before. So instead of just telling you highs and lows and the percentage chance it might rain, it says that today “is going to be a little warmer than yesterday” or that it’s “going to be wetter and colder than yesterday”. The idea is to create something more human and personal to you and your experience.

The site is still in early development, but check it out and let me know what you think. The biggest issue most people will encounter is that it might not work in your area. Right now, the service only covers about 25% of the zip codes in the United States, so if you’re international or in an area not supported, send me feedback with the area you’d like to see included. Eventually, the service will expand to the rest of the US and beyond, but if you ask for coverage in your area, I’ll be sure to give that top priority.

Text TODAYFEELS to 41411

In addition, to the website, there are several other ways you can use Todayfeels.com, including:

• text ‘TODAYFEELS’ to 41411. You can also include your zip code as well to get an immediate response back. For instance, sending ‘TODAYFEELS 94114′ to 41411 will tell you how today feels in San Francisco.
• for newer Nseries/S60 phones, you can download a widget (requires WRT)
• add it to your iGoogle page
• add it to your NetVibes page
• if you have some other widget, blog or place you’d like to include TodayFeels, let me know and I’ll see what I can do there as well.

Next Steps

I’m going to keep adding functionality to the site, based a large part on user feedback. Also, it’s pretty obvious I’m not a designer, so any design contributions are completely welcome! Finally, I wanted to give an API Shout Out to the open source libraries and free web services on which TodayFeels.com is built, specifically:

• Yahoo! Weather
• Google Charts
• TextMarks
• Jott
• SimplePie

If you happen to be in the SF area on Saturday June 14th, be sure and check out MobileCampSF at the Swedish American Hall. If you’ve never been to a BarCamp before they’re lots of fun. It’s completely free, and as of this post, it’s already around 70% full so RSVP now if you’re going to come. I’m hoping to talk some about this simple little project I’ve been working on lately. If you want a sneak peek at it, just scan the QR code below. Otherwise, wait until after BarCamp when I’ll post a full writeup of the project.

more on Flickr

My co-worker turned me on today to Blueprint, a CSS framework that’s based on typography rules so it helps you design websites in a clean way. Needless to say, I think it’s brilliant and beautiful.

A quick Google search turned up a few Wordpress themes that had been developed using Blueprint, but the Blueprint theme by Fire and Knowledge stood out head and shoulders above the rest, so I’ve added it to my site. I still need to tweak a few things like the color palette of the Google ads, but if you’re like me and you typically just read RSS feeds in Bloglines or your favorite reader, then pop back to my site for a change and check out the theme.

So I’ve been playing around with the new Widgets / Web Run Time for S60. It’s a great tool because it allows you to write what seem like native S60 applications when in fact they’re built entirely with a combination of HTML and Javascript.

Web apps are okay, but they really become powerful when you can tap into the phone’s features directly. Luckily, the S60 Widgets give you some capabilities in this area, and I put together a small widget to demonstrate. This widget is a text-to-Morse Code translator. The widget takes any text you type in and turns it into Morse Code either through beeps, flashing lights, or vibrations in your device.

I think I’ve got this working fairly well, but alas, the N95-3’s firmware doesn’t support these types of widgets yet so I can’t do a real world test. I’ve only been able to test in the S60 emulator and while the beeps work just fine, I can’t test the vibrations or the lights. If you have the N95-1, the N95 8GB (global), or some other newer Nseries models, then you can run this widget with the latest firmware.

If you happen to be one of the lucky people with a WRT compatible device, then you can download this widget directly to your device via this link, or this mobile code and try it out:

I’m curious what kinds of experience people have with this. Yes, I realize if you’re stranded on a desert island the last thing you want to do is waste your battery life buzzing out Morse Code to yourself, but it could be a good helper tool for people wanting to learn Morse Code.

Once I’ve confirmed that the widget works well on some real devices, I’ll post it along with its documentation on the Forum Nokia Wiki as a learning example. In the meantime, here’s a video preview of what the interface looks like.

Too many social sites, too many status updates. I’ve been trying for a while now to find one place where I can type in one status update and have it show up wherever I want — Flickr, Facebook, LinkedIn, Plaxo, you name it. Isn’t that what this whole Web 2.0 crap is supposed to be about?

Well, I finally found a solution in hellotxt.com. It has the ability to post one update in multiple places, there’s a Facebook app so I can do it in Facebook if I want, there’s a mobile app so I can do it from the device, I can login to their own site and post there, etc. etc. etc. But now I’m faced with a bigger problem.

Verbs.

You see, when you submit an update to Twitter, it posts the update, and all of your Tweets read like a first person account of what you’re doing. When you submit an update to Facebook, it automatically puts your first name at the beginning of the update, so now all of your status updates are presented in the third person. For instance, if a guy named Bob were to submit “Go Red Sox!” as a status update, it would look like this:

Twitter: Go Red Sox!
Facebook: Bob Go Red Sox!

Which makes no sense (at least on Facebook). So how can we solve this? The best thing i’ve come up with so far is to start each status update with a verb. But no ordinary verb. Only verbs that are identical in the first and third person. Verbs like ‘can’ or ‘will’. So if Bob posts “will take out the garbage later”, it reads:

Twitter: will take out the garbage later
Facebook: Bob will take out the garbage later

Unfortunately, ‘can’ and ‘will’ are the only two verbs like these that I’ve come up with so far. Any others people want to contribute? Only rule is that it has to be identical for both first person and third person. Post them in the comments, or email me…

UPDATE #1: Talked about this with friends last night. Added could, should, and oughta to the list. For being publishing/grammar types, though, they generally didn’t think this was a very interesting problem.