I’ve had a quick chance to check out Google’s new location tracking API in Google Gears for Windows Mobile phones. At first glance I say this is an absolutely awesome new feature.
My first point of call is to find out if any social networking sites (e.g. Brightkite) are interested in using this to create a great mobile web interface for Windows Mobile devices.
Andy Smith (a key developer at Jaiku) confirmed recently that the Jaiku Mobile Nokia client uses XMPP (Jabber) to communicate with Jaiku. Although the full API used for this interface hasn’t yet been revealed, I thought I best make sure first thatI could create a suitable Jabber connection over GPRS from my phone.
A little Google searching at lunch led me to the agsXMPP SDK, a dual licensed XMPP library which definitely has the potential to do what I want. The project is very well structured, with versions not only for Visual Studio 2003 and 2005, but also Mono for any Linux users.
The screenshot on the right is the sample MiniClient PPC project provided with the SDK. It took me a few attempts to connect, and then after that I had a pretty stable and responsive chat with myself over a GPRS connection.
I look forward to integrating this with my Jaiku application.
A new addition to my website: the sidebar will now show the current location of my mobile phone.
How?
Well, I recently discovered the wonders of programming for Windows Mobile devices with Visual Studio. During my lunch today I wrote an application that uses the built-in phone to find the nearest mobile / cell tower. Sending a text message to my website detailing my current CellID and the Location Area Code, I can send do a quick lookup to display a friendly text string of where I am.
Et voila, on the right is my phone’s current location.
I don’t pay the extra £1.50 for itemised billing, but I can still get a full itemised 18-page bill online in PDF format. Here’s a few key things that I noticed on my first phone bill from Orange:
So I’m only paying £28 for a £35 contract (Dolphin 35). What the guys at the store also forgot to mention was that the Love Your Number discount slowly increases by 5% each year up to 25%.
Orange seem to have endless ways to make me happy!
Update: Here’s a couple of quotes regarding the Orange employee discount which I noticed while scanning their terms & conditions: