mobrec

So
If you have been even remotely interested in trying out JavaServer Faces, you might want to pick up a (now) free copy of Sun's Java Creator IDE (was $99USD). Versions available for Mac OS X, Linux, Solaris and Windows.

If that version of Creator floats your boat, you may want to sign up for the Early Access program for the Creator 2 over at java.sun.com to see what the next generation of tool might be able to do for you.

So
I tend to agree with Mr Bray's WS-Interop posting. Much of what is being created under the guise of standards feels like it is just making real interoperability more and more elusive. From a pure interoperability standpoint, introducing SOAP into an interaction just tags on non-value-added bloat with the 'benefit' of having the interaction be more toolable (and you more dependent on the tools).

WS-* isnÂ’t about standards. ItÂ’s about what Microsoft (there are partners, but itÂ’s mostly Microsoft) chooses to implement while waving the WS-banner and retroactively shaking Standards Fairy Dust over the process. Which is OK, as far as it goes; I get the impression that Indigo WCF is actually some pretty neat software that will be useful to a lot of Microsoft customers, and Sun has a stake in the ground saying weÂ’re going to interoperate with the Microsoft WS-stack. Do I think this stuff is going to Change The World? No. Do I think that this is the real future of Web Services? No.

Standards have their place and certainly serve large corporations to help cut through the sometimes dense forests of (ad hoc) internally adopted technologies. However, on the wild, wild Internet, simple is better. This is not to say that standards have no place; afterall, there wouldn't be a Internet without TCP/IP, HTTP, SSL, HTML, etc. In the end, the simplest, most open solution tends to win.

So
Earlier today Google released a version of Google Maps called local for mobile that runs on most Java-enabled mobile phones . I was able to easily download the app onto my Nokia 6620 and start making use of it. The experience was much more seamless when I finally found the setting in Nokia's AppManager to not prompt me every time the app wanted to connect to the web (which was a lot).

One downside that I found is that there is no apparent way to 'bookmark' locations (say, your home, or place of business) to make it easier to zoom to places where you commonly find yourself. For that matter, bookmarking would make it easier to get directions though the service because you would commonly want directions to/from your home or place of work. Bookmarking would be a great addition, as I find that anything that keeps keying and mousing to a minimum on a mobile device makes that app/service all the more valuable.

I found the Google offering much snappier (speed-wise) than the previous app that I was using on my 6620 called MGMaps. MGMaps basically served the same function in delivering Google Maps to mobile devices. It may be that MGMaps may go away altogether now that Google has introduced its own mobile application.

So
Use a Mac and tired of your current browser? (or maybe just have too much time on your hands)? Apparently there are 83 or so browsers to choose from. Some of these are a bit of a stretch calling them browsers (realplayer, netNewsWire) just because they have some rudimentary HTML display capability.

Of course, all of the usual suspects are represented in the form of Netscape, Mozilla, Firefox, Camino, and Opera. There are also some interesting variants like the 'Eric Shore Baur' browser that in instrumented to measure page load times and allows for playback of web actions.

So
Not sure what the big hubbub is over the the Tivo/Yahoo announcement. Apparently, you can now schedule TiVo recording from the tv.yahoo.com site. When TiVo introduced the Home Media Option a few years back, online scheduling was always something you could do directly from the tivo.com web site. Having to traverse the flash advert laden Yahoo gauntlet for anything is torturous at best (and for me, simply to be avoided).

I was curious to see if there was more to this, so I followed the registration link. I stopped cold at the prompt that wanted me to enter my TiVo credentials into a field that read:

This one-time step links your TiVo® box(es) to your Yahoo! ID, so you can schedule recordings from Yahoo! TV any time.

So, if I proceed, then it would appear that Yahoo would now have access to my Tivo viewing habits (and giving nothing of value in return). Of course, I am making an assumption here about what the nature of this 'linking' is.

Additionally, Yahoo continues to show it's disdain for Mac users by creating a registration page that causes Safari to crash unnecessarily.

No thanks, Yahoo.

So
Amazon's new mturk. If you click the link and actually get the welcome page in something less than 8 minutes, you are doing better than me.

Poor planning or overwealming response? You decide:

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So
Visit the World Usability Day site and take in the world-wide activities that are happening today. This one sounded entertaining (in Auckland, New Zealand)

A hiliarious remote control shootout! Eight attendees vied for the title of “Owner of the most unusable remote control”.

The winner wasn't actually the most number of buttons, or the least amount of buttons actually used – but the one that managed to switch off all the electrical equipment in the room through the accidental push of a random button!

Another good resource is Jakob Nielson's site useit that focuses primarily on web usability. The remarkable thing about this site is that inspite of the fact that web development has been going on for around 10 years, the same mistakes keep getting made over and over again.

If today's activities inspire you, you might consider joining the Usability Professionals Association.

So
Ambient Findability by Peter Morville is an interesting sounding new book dealing with filtering and ultimately finding the data that you need in the current environment of 'information overload'. Thus far, the book has received great reviews. Here is a snippit of book description from Amazon:

Morville discusses the Internet, GIS, and other network technologies that are coming together to make unlimited findability possible. He explores how the melding of these innovations impacts society, since Web access is now a standard requirement for successful people and businesses. But before he does that, Morville looks back at the history of wayfinding and human evolution, suggesting that our fear of being lost has driven us to create maps, charts, and now, the mobile Internet.

The book's central thesis is that information literacy, information architecture, and usability are all critical components of this new world order. Hand in hand with that is the contention that only by planning and designing the best possible software, devices, and Internet, will we be able to maintain this connectivity in the future. Morville's book is highlighted with full color illustrations and rich examples that bring his prose to life.

This definately a topic of interest to me and I have added this book to my to-be-read queue and Amazon wishlist.

So
“A Snapshot of Public Web Services” (warning PDF) appeared in the March 2005 issue of the SIGMOD Record. It discusses how many of the publicly available 'web services' are really just data retrieval services or search services. Available services also tend to be fairly poorly documented (fewer than 10 words) and in more cases than not, contain malformed WSDL. In fact, many of the services reported on tend to be more at the 'Hello, World' end of the spectrum — their existence in the directory more out of experimentation than utility.

It should be noted that the services in question were trawled out of xmethods.com and the like, so they don't represent the services or APIs that sites like Flickr, Google, Amazon or others expose.

I believe that it would be very valuable to have an inventory/registry of proper/richer services that are available on the Internet. This would certainly facilitate the growing trend of people wiring up one sites functionality with another sites services to create something altogether different. Such a site could enforce some level of validation and even provide semantic web capabilities such as OWL-S description and composition facitlities to aid the systematic discovery and usage of said services.

So
bbspot.com has a hilarious take off on the Apple Nano.

“It seems like every time we release a new version of iPod, these stories about people being mugged for them come out of the woodwork,” Apple CEO Steve Jobs said onstage at a special event Tuesday. “We're out to change that.” Jobs then held up an iPod nano with brass knuckles attached.”