1993:

Apple Computer, Inc invent the stylus.

2007:

Apple, Inc kills the stylus.

Will anyone miss it?

Here’s a tip for a good article on understanding and how to use the Windows Phone 7 execution model.

The Windows Phone Developer Blog has a great 3 part article on how to understand the execution model amongst other ting that is a good read if you want to understand more about what happens “under the hood” in your application. This knowledge helps you as a developer to optimize your code for better performance.

The first post walks you through the basics of the Windows Phone execution model. You saw three out of four events. We covered Application Launching, Application Closing, and Application Deactivated. Read the complete post here: http://windowsteamblog.com/windows_phone/b/wpdev/archive/2010/07/15/understanding-the-windows-phone-application-execution-model-tombstoning-launcher-and-choosers-and-few-more-things-that-are-on-the-way-part-1.aspx

The second post covers the fourth event Application Activated and can be found here: http://windowsteamblog.com/windows_phone/b/wpdev/archive/2010/07/16/understanding-the-windows-phone-application-execution-model-tombstoning-launcher-and-choosers-and-few-more-things-that-are-on-the-way-part-2.aspx

The third sums it up and teach you how to handle these events in your applications. Read the post here: http://windowsteamblog.com/windows_phone/b/wpdev/archive/2010/07/20/understanding-the-windows-phone-application-execution-model-tombstoning-launcher-and-more-part-3.aspx

Samsung Galaxy Tab was presented at the IFA show in Berlin today. This is the first real competitor to the Apple iPad and it’ll be fun to see how it will be received.  The Galaxy is running Android 2.2 and has the size of 7″. It also has both front (1,3MP) and back (3MV) cameras, something I’ll envy as long as I have my iPad…. You can also use it for phone calls, with headset/mic or as conference phone placed on the table. Screen resolution is 1024×600 and it comes with 16GB internal storage and is expandable with another 32.

One thing I’m not quite sure about is the recommended retail price of  kr. 7 400 NOK  (about $1 200 USD and €940 EUR) . A bit expensive.

The press coverage in Norway has been very positive,  and we’re back to the iWhatever-killer terms of devices. Read more in Digi.no (Norwegian article), appraisal in Dagbladet (Norwegian) or VG (Norwegian).

I’m looking forward to get a test run with this device and compare it to the iPad.

Building native apps in HTML/Javascript and CSS. The idea is good, and it just might some day rid us of the programming language fragmentation…. Some day…

But not quite yet. Not in my opinion anyhow, after giving WebOS from Palm a try.  My previous experience with HTML/Javascript/CSS based native apps was by using PhoneGap in an iPhone application, that actually works the way I expected, with the “look and feel” of how i would create any other ordinary web/html application.  With WebOS and the Palm WebOS SDK there’s a different way to do it….

Firstly, you download and install the SDK and the VirtualBox WebOS emulator. To start a new project you fire up a command prompt or terminal window and type the generate command:

> palm-generate -p “{title:’Hello World’, id:com.mystuff.hello, version:’1.0.0′}” HelloWorld

This generates the basic application folder structure for you with the first “ViewController” called index.html. Then you need to create a View, or a Scene as they call it. (which actually is saved in a folder called views…..) The view is created yet again with the magic palm-generate command at command line.

> palm-generate -t new_scene -p “name:first” HelloWorld

The application run from the emulator should look like this.

You now have a html file called “/app/views/first/first-scene.html”. This is where you place the content of that view/scene.  The content could look like this…

<div id="main">
     <div>Header</div>
     <div id="count">0</div>
     <div id="MyButton"
          name="MyButton1"
          x-mojo-element="Button"></div>
</div>

The ViewController (index.html) is controlled from ‘/app/assistants/stage-assistant.js’ (someone has been fond of the theatre here) and the View/Scene is controlled by ‘/app/assistants/first-assistant.js’

You get your mojo going by hooking the button click event inside ‘first-assistant.js’ and you configure the View/Scene in the setup method.

Ahh.. I phased out… too much code to many places to get a simple button push count app….. If i’d been using Eclipse i could have avoided the trips out to the command line, but I’m not much of a Eclipse fan, and as web/html development it’s too bound to the WebOS platform for me.

Want to try for yourself you can find the complete guide here at Palm Developer Center.

Here’s a nice post from pocketnow.com explaining the debated layout of the Windows Phone 7 home screen and why it has blank spots on the right side of the screen.

Read the full article here: http://pocketnow.com/windows-phone/divine-proportions-why-the-start-page-has-a-big-blank-space-on-the-side

When i got the iPad I didn’t have a microSIM card and the first thing i tried to do was to try and pair the iPhone and the iPad through bluetooth… guess what; it doesn’t work.. the iPad or iPhone does not see each other as bluetooth devices.

I guess this is the strategy Apple has chosen to sell more of the 3G iPad’s. Would you need a 3G iPad if you could pair? nope….

It looks like the iPad is not able to see any phone or modem capable devices at all by the looks of it, but it can be paired with laptops (at least it can be paired with my MacBook Pro at work)

The iPad shows up with services as  AVRPC Device, Audio Source, PnP Information, Service Discovery and Wireless iAP, that is an Apple proprietary Bluetooth profile for a Wireless Internet Access Point.

You can also set up the iPad to sync through Bluetooth-PDA-Sync serial ports.

On friday i got my new iPad device and it’s been a fun weekend.

At home i also have Asus EEE and a MacBook Air laptops, small computers that is light and easy to use while surfing from the couch.  The EEE is running Windows XP, and I must say that for my liking its too small. With a screen resolution of 1024 x 600 i just find it sad to browse most sites. It get marginally better when you run either Firefox or IE in fullscreen mode and set zoom level to 80% but using it has never been something I’ve considered fun. Up until now, my choice has been to use the Air. It’s thin, quite small (13,3″) and works like a charm. But it’s damn hot… For some reason the fan keeps spinning at full speed.

I’ve read a lot about iPad’s and one of the key issues seems to be that it’s got no apparent use.. What’s it for and how useful can an iPad be in your digital life.

I mostly read news sources from around the world, use Facebook and Twitter mostly, and for this the iPad just makes it easy.

The first application I installed on it was Flipboard for iPad. This is the BEST news aggregation software I’ve ever used. Flipboard makes my Facebook wall fun to read, It makes my Twitter timeline fun to read and it makes news RSS feeds fun to read. What it does is that it transforms everything  to  look like a digital magazine. Flipboard reads the content of your twitter timeline, or facebook wall and then lay it out in a design with headlines of status updates, it fetches content of links shared and display photos shared and you flip through the pages backward in twitter/facebook time.

Flipboard also has a predefined sett of news sources besides facebook and twitter. My favorites here is Engadget, Wired, ReadWriteWeb, TechCrunch and you get the same redesign and nice UI on all news sources.

Flipboard is out in version 1.0.1 and it’s quite a new release so here is some bugs and features that could be added that would have made this the only news aggregator you’ll ever need. The most annoying bug i’ve found is that you cannot play shared youtube videos. The just don’t play. Not in “magazine” mode or when you choose “view on web” and use a web controller inside the application… it works when you (in the  web controller) choose to open the url in Safari.

A feature I am hoping they’ll add later is the possibility to add my own custom RSS feeds, but all in all, this is well worth a download and hopefully they’ll update and fix the Youtube bug pretty soon.

This was fun :)

Came across a post by @cesarfong through twitter today, linking to his latest blog post about PhoneGap support for Windows Phone 7.

This is good news!  In addition to Matt Lacey’s implementation there’s also a GitHub project that aims to do the same thing. Hopefully they’ll merge at some point :) The GitHub repository seems to be “on hold” waiting for device functionality.

PhoneGap is an open source development framework for building cross-platform mobile apps. Build apps in HTML and JavaScript and still take advantage of core features in iPhone/iTouch, iPad, Google Android, Palm, Symbian and Blackberry SDKs.

Nice promo video showing off Xbox live on the upcoming Windows Phone 7