EddieOffermann dot com

photo credit: Capture Queen ™I have a side project for iPhone that I'm working on. There's a patent filing in process, incorporation paperwork to do, all that good stuff - so I won't be doing a lot of specifics about the project until it's ready to go. It's basically a location-based-services thing but when we've looked over what everyone seems to be doing with LBS and social networking and the like, it all seems to be thinking very inside the box. Just like a few years ago there was a rash of "... on the internet!" patents where things we'd done forever in the wetworld were being done online and called "visionary", now there's a rash of similar "... on a mobile phone!" patents and websites that are no more groundbreaking than when we did them online or on our feet. It's like patenting driving in nails with the side of a hammer. It works, but it's not especially groundbreaking nor is it even ideal.

We really feel that this project is going to move mountains though, and change the way people view the real world around them, not just when they're in front of a computer.

The tendency towards developing for the iPhone is that the iPhone has arguably the best SDK there is: and a substantial and rapidly growing marketshare. Still, though, that limits our deployment: it's the largest selling smartphone-style device, but it doesn't represent the majority of the market. No-one does.

Today I've been evaluating Mojax, a cross-platform mobile development environment. It looks promising. It promises cross-platform compatibility, including access to a number of necessary core services like GPS, and currently runs on all phones supporting J2ME (Java on Mobile), all color Blackberry phones, and shortly Windows Mobile devices from WinMo 2003 onward, any mobile running Brew V2 or later, and Helio devices. Just the J2ME support gets me onto most smartphones - so this effectively would get the product onto every mobile device there is with gps capability.

This excites me because I like the prospect of running the application on every feature-capable mobile phone without having to separately develop for Blackberry, HTC, Samsung, and Nokia. Getting the product out simultaneously for iPhone, Windows Mobile, PalmOS and Blackberry would be fantastic. There are some annoyances with using J2ME midlets, but I'll take the slight user experience tradeoff for being able to deliver an application at all without breaking the bank

So I'm working on a side project that's mainly just for me, but it's so damn handy I might just make it publicly available when it's done (probably for a small monthly fee). It's basically a super quick way to run certain types of scan for stocks during the day, picking out data that's usually hard to get until the end of the day. I'm tying it into the OptionsXpress API so that when I identify a good entry or exit point on a stock, I can change my position with the click of a button.

I've been designing the site to automatically rescale for my mobile phone, but I need a way to determine if I'm looking at it on the phone or on a desktop - and since my mobile browser is generally configured to identify as a desktop browser (so that I don't get sent to the "mobile version" of the sites I visit) it's harder to do. My browser does a great job of rendering full-screen pages and scaling them - if you've seen the iPhone browser, both Opera Mini and Pixsel do something similar though without 'multi-touch'.

That said, there's something to be said for designing a website that will gracefully scale when it's on a phone.

But when the browser identifies itself as a desktop browser, what's left? Javascript can pick up the screen size, but what about PHP? All my pages are created in PHP...

More »