So I'd abandoned this blog quite a while ago and have been blogging over at metosphere, but I thought I'd resurrect wombatmobile for grins.

Even though this blogging software is ancient, I actually kind of miss it. It's easy to just dump thoughts here quickly and move on, so that's how I'll use this. For posting quick stuff without worrying too much about spelling, grammar, etc.

ideas.txt

So I have this massive text file called ideas.txt. I've kept this file for years copied from computer to computer and use it to record anything that strikes me as an interesting idea. Sometimes I get up in the middle of the night with some wacky idea, add it to ideas.txt, and then wake up the next morning and laugh and wonder what I was thinking. Other times after getting home after a long drive, I'll run into the house to get my thoughts down quickly before I forget everything.

I separate the ideas in this file into three different tiers:

Tier 1 - ideas that will take a lot of effort, most likely need outside investment and a team. big upside possibilities.

Tier 2 - simple ideas, things I can crank out quickly and see what happens as an experiment. not much upside, but would be fun to see if people would use it.

Tier 3 - these are the more out-there ideas. Some of them need certain things to happen technically first or maybe be several years away. To be honest, I'm either never going to get to these or don't have the background/resources to even attempt them. Examples include snack food recipes, beverage containers, aircraft designs ideas from my old aerospace engineering days, etc.

Lately I've been focused on working my way through my Tier 2 list. Get the minimum viable product out there. If it gets traction, let users determine what features to add.

Prayers to Share

One of the Tier 2 ideas I cranked out recently has taken off much more than I expected. The concept is simple. Let people share their prayers on their phones (praying to find a job, sick relative, etc.) Other people can tap a button and pray along. (i.e. 8 people have prayed with you)

Surprisingly, people are really using it! It's now the 18th ranked Android app in the social category. With great ratings and comments! "God bless this application." "Blessing be on he that has developed this application."

The iPhone version just got approved and people are buying it. Here's the website for it: http://prayerstoshare.net/

In hindsight, after being continuously surprised at simple iPhone apps that do well, I shouldn't be shocked that a simple app like Prayers to Share would be popular, but time after time, I keep succumbing to the Engineer's Conceit that an app should be "chock full o' features."

This was hammered home to me over the past week while using the Android ADC2 Contest Judging App. Looking at app after app with my User hat on, I had no patience for an app that I didn't grok right away. If the first thing I see when launching an app is two pages of Help to scroll through, I've lost interest.

So basically this post is yet another "Keep It Simple, Stupid" rant, but maybe if I write it enough, it'll sink in. (especially regarding mobile)

Top Social Android Apps (10/7/2009)

1. MySpace Mobile
2. Facebook for Android
3. facebook lite
4. Myspace lite
5. Pickup Lines
6. Love quote
7. twitter lite
8. Babbler Lite
9. meinVZ
10. Wertago
11. LinkedIn (beta)
12. LED Scroller 2
13. Facebook Video uploader
14. LED Scroller
15. studiBZ
16. Swift Twitter App
17. Comeks - Fun Photo Blogger
18. Prayers to Share <==woohoo!
19. Speed Dial
20. Twidgit Lite

I've been tinkering with Adsense for Mobile on my experimental mobile sites.

First of all, that gray background has got to go. Luckily, it looks like you can set the color_bg, color_link, color_url, and color_text properties.

I've had varying amounts of success using blended vs. contrasting ads on my non-mobile sites, so we'll see which works better for mobile sites. I've also got some theories on ad placement on mobile devices, so we'll see if those prove true. More on this later....

PHP version example:

$GLOBALS['google']['format']='mobile_double';
$GLOBALS['google']['https']=$_SERVER['HTTPS'];
$GLOBALS['google']['host']=$_SERVER['HTTP_HOST'];
$GLOBALS['google']['ip']=$_SERVER['REMOTE_ADDR'];
$GLOBALS['google']['markup']='xhtml';
$GLOBALS['google']['output']='xhtml';
$GLOBALS['google']['ref']=$_SERVER['HTTP_REFERER'];
$GLOBALS['google']['url']=$_SERVER['HTTP_HOST'] . $_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'];
$GLOBALS['google']['useragent']=$_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT'];
$GLOBALS['google']['color_bg']="FFFFFF";
$GLOBALS['google']['color_link']="003333";
$GLOBALS['google']['color_url']="003333";
$GLOBALS['google']['color_text']="666666";

I never realized how addicted I was to the Adsense Notifier extension until it suddenly stopped working for me.

And sure enough, there's a new version out today to handle a change from Google.

Version 0.9.4 — September 2, 2007 — 62 KB
Fixed screen scraping to accommodate Google change in the earnings display

Info:
http://code.mincus.com/3/adsense-notifier/

Aargh, I'm looking kind of massive in this cnet picture of iphonedevcamp (on the right).
Summer Camp for iPhone Geeks:
http://news.com.com/2300-1041_3-6195568-1.html?tag=ne.gall.pg

All the bagels, coffee, red bull, pizza, beer, sandwiches, tortilla/kettle chips, and tacos I consumed over those 2.5 days probably didn't help either.

Just kidding, it was a great event. I'd been kind of burned out on the mobile space for a while, especially after seeing all the cool things going on in Europe and Asia and continuously running into hurdles here. It was inspiring to meet so many folks and feed off their collective enthusiasm and creativity.

From Digg

The root and another "mobile" account password of iPhone OSX 1.0, have been obtained from a passwd file and been cracked by the famous fellows from hackint0sh.org. The hash turned out to be old plain 1979 DES. Sadly this is not of any use so far, as the iPhone does not (yet) present us with a nice and tidy login screen to explore it's system.

Original: http://www.hackint0sh.org/forum/showthread.php?t=1323

The password for root is "alpine"
The "mobile" user accounts password is "dottie"

LMAO @ Ron Paul 2008 - Hope for America - iPhone Headquarters
http://www.ronpaul2008.com/iphone

Wow, that experience could have been better. Buying it was a breeze, but activation took 18 hours. I was probably an edge case, though, as an existing customer with an outdated calling plan.

Still, there are lots of folks having activation problems here. In my case, persistence paid off more than patience. It took 3 calls to AT&T to get activated.

My first impression of the iPhone?
"The fingers you have used to dial are too fat. To obtain a special dialing wand, please mash the keypad with your palm now."

How big is the iPhone?
http://www.iphonesize.com/

Where to go on the go?
http://www.mizpee.com/

Heh, I've been wondering what the User-Agent would look like for the iPhone. Someone from an Apple IP address stopped by Mowser the other day. Excellent.

Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; PPC like Mac OS X; en) AppleWebKit/420+ (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/3.0 Mobile/1A001a Safari/419.3

Our traffic has been crazy in the past week, it's interesting to see all the devices out there.

We just pushed out a cool feature at Mowser today called Mowser Shortcuts, combined with a cool Twitter mashup. The site (http://mowser.com) already dealt with one of the most painful parts of websurfing on a phone (sites not formatting properly), but now it helps with the problem of long URLs on a phone.

Here's an example:
1) When I take the train into work, one of the sites I visit on my phone is http://www.thatsgoodknowledge.com/forum/viewforum.php?f=3 , a forum about a local morning sports radio talk show.


The site is pretty rough on my phone, though. There's a lot of <table><tr><td> formatting and the page is around 75-80kb.

2) Passing it though Mowser removes much makes it cleaner and chops it up to make it easier to view on the phone. http://mowser.com/web?url=http://www.thatsgoodknowledge.com/forum/viewforum.php?f=3

 

3) That's a long url, though, and if I wanted to SMS that to one of my co-workers riding the train in from Dublin, it's unlikely to happen. This is where the TinyURL-like Mowser Shortcut can be created:
http://mowser.com/ek0ux <=> http://mowser.com/web?url=http://www.thatsgoodknowledge.com/forum/viewforum.php?f=3
(plus, you can also submit it directly to your twitter status :)

This article completely blew me away. I rarely do much more than skim everything I run into online these days, but I was entranced by this.

Pearls Before Breakfast
Can one of the nation's great musicians cut through the fog of a D.C. rush hour? Let's find out.
link to Washington Post Magazine

I've been searching for a good Ajax chatroom for a while for a site that I run. I originally had a Java chat applet in place, but it wouldn't work with everyone's browsers.

After installing several of them and getting feedback from users, we've settled on phpFreeChat until something better comes along.

Here's a list of the Ajax PHP chatrooms that we evaluated with a few comments:

• phpFreeChat
  This chatroom had the best response time and was almost as peppy as a java chat applet. It had the least lag of all the ones that we tried, which was probably the most important factor in picking this one.
  
  There are several other nice features, though, including using either mysql or the filesystem, private rooms, themes, smileys, intuitive interface, and more. There's also a very good forum for support or customization questions.
  
  
• AjaxChat
  This chatroom was very close to what we were looking for, and we're still using it as a backup chatroom. It seems to have a little more lag than phpFreeChat, though.
  
  One interesting feature is the use of avatars, which is very fun, but once we had 5-6 people in a chat session, the avatars became annoying as they took up too much space, and the messages scrolled by way too quickly. It also is mysql based, which is a plus.
  
  
• Ajax Sunset Chat
  This chat app is very cool because it doesn't look like any other chatroom. It's basically a bunch of avatars sitting at a bar with "talk bubbles" appearing above them as you type. It was very fun at first, but kind of hard to follow a conversation with more than one person.
  
  
• Chatr
  
  
• Chategory

Also, here's a couple of Flash IRC clients:
Net-Bits.Net
WFIC

And here's a list of java applet chat clients.

Wow, people are really into making Miis.

There's an impressive site over at http://miiplaza.net/ where people are showing off their celebrity Mii creations as well as providing a place for Mii addicts to share their Miis with each other.

And for folks that feel inspired to create a new Mii while at work, here's a cool flash Mii Creator.

These USB humping dogs are great!

And they have a beagle version. :)

They're available at digitalworldtokyo.com

This has been out for a while, but it was new to me. There's a great youtube clip of playing a wii on a movie theater screen.

One of my friends is a manager at a local movie theater, which uses a digital projector to show advertisements between features. After seeing the It Burns When I Wii video, we figured we could one-up it with the equivalent of a 344" television screen. We wanted to use my friend's Nintendo Wii in the theater, but we didn't want to have to deal with yards of cabling. Inspired by doctabu's design, I built my own wireless sensor bar for less than $20.

http://jonpeck.blogspot.com/2006/12/wii-diculous.html