CityBlogz Design Studio / Blog

At Google Developer Day, Google announced the ability for web apps to be available both offline and online. At their Google Gears website, they describe it as: an open source browser extension that enables web applications to provide offline functionality using following JavaScript APIs:

• Store and serve application resources locally
• Store data locally in a fully-searchable relational database
• Run asynchronous Javascript to improve application responsiveness

At TechCrunch, they give a pretty good review of Google Gears. Now, this idea is not new in the desktop world. Lotus Notes pioneered the idea of “replication” for both online and offline use. This is Lotus Notes forte and cause of endless frustration at the same time. We’ll soon see how well Google will be able to work out the kinks. So far, the only web app that is Gears enabled is Google Reader. Other notable projects that propose to do similar thing are: Dojo Offline Toolkit and the Apache Derby embedded database.

Zec from Zec Online Journal wrote about a new concept from Nokia demonstrated at MobileCamp event in New York for the first time – Nokia Mobile Web Server:

It’s the concept of serving web pages directly from a mobile phone connected to the network.

The plan is that every mobile web server will be provided with global URL.

If every mobile phone or even every smartphone initially, is equipped with a webserver then very quickly many websites will reside on mobile phones. That is bound to have some impact not only on how mobile phones are perceived but also on how the web evolves.

Further reading at the Nokia OpenSource Wiki – Mobile Web Server describes some very interesting scenarios for possible use cases. In particular, one such scenario:

When every phone has a URL and there is a web service interface to calendar, it becomes straightforward to create a peer-2-peer based distributed calendar application without any centralized server.

This is really really cool stuff coming up. Can’t wait to see how this pans out.

Amusing and instructional film about the advantages of being a smartphone user if you live in Japan!

This is why mobile phones in N. America still suck compared to those in Japan. Let’s see how the Apple iPhone starts to promote changes needed to catch up.

It is really hard for non-qwerty keypad mobile phone users to input text into their mobile web browsers. This fact alone hinders the adoption of using the mobile web to do many of the things we normally do on the desktop web browser.

If only there was a way to save common canned responses to some datastore on your mobile phone, and simply paste them into form fields that you need to enter. I have a Windows Mobile smartphone device, and that is a feature that I most wished for. Sure… the platform supports copy and paste, but only for phones that have pen-based input. Surely, there must be a copy-paste mechanism for those smartphones that only have the joystick/keypad-based input. I have tried several mobile web browsers for my Cingular 2125 Windows Mobile smartphone device, and they all fail on providing this key feature. I tried Opera Mini (J2ME), Pocket IE, and the Opera Browser beta for Windows Smartphones, and it is an incredible chore to input text. A simple copy to datastore and paste mechanism would help alleviate this annoyance.

Last weekend, I found myself at this mall, and there was this really catchy tune on the speaker system. I just couldn’t get it out of my head. When I got home, I wanted to buy this song on iTunes. I couldn’t recall the name of the song. I didn’t remember any of the lyrics. I only remembered the melody. There’s got to be a melody-based search engine out there, right? Nope. Nada. If anyone out there with the resources to pull it off, it is Apple. Here’s how I think something like that would work.

• User has a computer with mic or maybe a mobile phone as an input mechanism.
• User goes to a screen that prompts the user for the melody that they want to search. They hum the parts of the song to the mic and it is uploaded to the search engine backend for processing.
• The backend processing engine would need to recognize the melody and automatically transcribe it into musical notes. Then, it applys that pattern as a search term. It would also need to take into account that many people may hum the tune in different tones from the original song.
• Setting up the datastore on the server would obviously be no easy task. The data entry required to seed the database to make it useful would be enormous.
• If any matches are found, the results page should allow the user to preview clips of that song starting from the part of the melody that it thinks you hummed in.

Is this concept doable? Yes. Is this a simple task? No. Is there a wow factor for something like this? You bet.