Quick Brain Dump of Great Resources for the Mobile Developer … that I had previously left out
The most visited post on this site has been the “quick brain dump of great resources for the mobile developer” - In that post I mentioned a number of other interesting technologies that I did not have time to cover. So here is quick brain dump of great resources for the mobile developer that I had left out.
RSS is a great match for mobile since it strips down articles to the headlines plus a bit extra. RSS comes in various flavours but there are also many code classes for dealing with them.
For reading RSS feeds there are a couple of good open source php projects - Simplepie (http://simplepie.org) which is licensed under BSD and MagpieRSS licensed under GPL. Community Mobile Channels uses MagpieRSS for its RSS channels. There is also open source J2me reader - mobileRSSreader
Writing RSS feeds is also easy - you can use something like RSSwriter or you can build it yourself. For Community Mobile Channels the file chanrss.php is where the RSS 1.0 feed is built conforming to RSS version 1.0 (Dublin Core). RSS doesn’t like certain characters e.g “<” , “>” , “&”, “‘” (apostrophe) , “”" (Quote) so they should be replaced like ‘<’, ‘>’ , ‘&’, ‘'’, ”"’;
Many web 2.0 applications (and other resources) have APIs which allow you to easily interface with them - this means that your applications can have integration with applications people are already using. A few great APIs to start off with are given below: -
- Twitter - http://apiwiki.twitter.com/
- Facebook - http://developers.facebook.com/
- Myspace - http://developer.myspace.com/community/
- Digg - http://apidoc.digg.com/
- Opensocial - http://code.google.com/apis/opensocial/ (supported by hi5, LinkedIn, MySpace, Netlog, Ning, orkut and more)
- Flickr - http://www.flickr.com/services/api/ (Note the non-commercial restrictions)
- Google-Maps - http://code.google.com/apis/maps/
- You-Tube - http://code.google.com/apis/youtube/overview.html
- Social Actions - http://www.socialactions.com/developers/api
- World Bank Data Sources - http://developer.worldbank.org/
Sim Cards / Smart Cards - Java Card technology enables smart cards and other devices with very limited memory to run small applications that employ Java technology. For more information visit http://java.sun.com/javacard/3.0/
Instant Messaging - Pidgin is a great open source project to look at regarding connecting with a large number of different instant messengers - The developer area is at http://developer.pidgin.im/ . Google has opened its IM service (Gtalk) so that you can hook your own client applications into the Google Talk service http://code.google.com/apis/talk/ . You can also tie in applications with Mxit through their Developer Zone.
File Types and Conversion - Mobile devices are often constrained by the file types they allow. The most common file formats are given below: -
- jpg/jpeg - Commonly supported for images
- gif / png - Images (older phones generally don’t support png)
- amr - Mono audio for GSM, common but not all phones support this.
- mp3 - increasingly common for audio on newer phones.
- 3gp/3g2 - Compressed video specifically designed for mobile phones.
- mp4 - video often used by higher end phones
Since files (Especially audio and video) come in all sorts of different formats there is the need to convert files for mobile use. FFMPEG is the main open source project which includes converting audio/video files to different types.
File types that devices support can also be determined in many cases using WURFL (Open Source) and DeviceAtlas (Pay Per Server). These can help you to serve the right content to the right device.
That’s all for now - hopefully this has given you enough info to get busy with.