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Stumble itA Twitter tab will now automatically show up for contacts who have a Twitter user name set. This allows you to browse quickly through the contact’s tweets (retweets are not included) within picoBeat interface.
Comments (0)Contacts manager updated
November 21, 2009
The interface for the contacts manager has been updated. It used to only be simple list with minimal informations, but now the interface is split in two: the previous list and a new pane that shows the complete informations related to the selected contact. This should be a lot more usable and convenient. This will also make it easier to integrate social networks and messaging in a future update to picoBeat.
As usual, comments and suggestions are welcome!
Why doesn’t SyncML synchronization works?
October 29, 2009
The short answer
This is most often because:
- You haven’t supplied the proper database names (spelling mistake or just didn’t change the default ones)
- You haven’t supplied the proper user name and passwords (the later is case sensitive)
- There is a bug in your device/program or in picoBeat SyncML module. Or possibly both (ugh!).
The long answer
There’s a lot to say about the standards developed by the telecom industry. Somehow, while a cell-phone is just a tiny computer, the telecom guys seem to live on a different planet than the computer guys, and they seem to insist on doing things “their way”.
When it was decided to bring the Internet to cell-phones, HTML would have been an obvious choice. But no, a different standard was built from scratch: WML. WML 1.0 wasn’t really a big success, for many reasons including the fact that Web developers do not like having to learn a whole new markup language, so WML 2.0 tried to correct this by being some limited form of HTML. Similarly, pictures were expected to be stored in a new WBMP format, rather than one of the many existing image format that already exists and are widely supported.
This bring us to SyncML: it’s a synchronization standard by the telecom industry. Two good things about it: it’s built with XML and it’s pretty flexible. Two bad things about it: XML is encoded in a new custom format called WBXML, somewhat negating the advantage of using XML, and it’s way too flexible. This comes from contradicting constrains: making the standard as flexible and open-ended as possible, but making it work on underpowered devices such as entry-level cell phones. As such the standard requires devices to accept informations in many different ways and to be very flexible in exchanging data, which requires complicated programming and a lot of processing power. But at the same time it allows the phone to signal that it has little memory capacity and bandwith. Why would a device capable of processing a complex XML-based protocol be only capable of storing a handful of appointments or processing more than 2,5 Kb at a time is beyond my understanding.
This flexibility is also the reason there’s no standard name for databases (tasks, appointments, contacts, etc.) in SyncML and why users have to type them in when configuring their cell-phone. This complexity also means a lot of cell-phones have bugs – some of them so bad as to reboot when receiving certain standard-compliant SyncML data. Sadly there are dozens of phone manufacturers and thousands of models out there and it’s impossible to properly test every one of them with picoBeat, so I know for a fact that some phones just won’t work. Things will improve over time and hopefully most devices will work.
Comments (19)Improvements to calendaring
October 12, 2009
First some upgrades has been done to the SyncML interface:
- It is now possible to synchronize the calendar! This wasn’t difficult to implement but as many phones have very limited capabilities for managing events, it had been put aside for a while.
- There are aliases for databases (i.e: card can be used instead of contacts), this should reduce the chances of wrongly configuring a device and improve compatibility with Funambol clients who assume different database names by default.
Following this, small improvements have been done on the Web interface. It is now possible to import recurrent events will with older vCalendar 1.0 files (previously only iCalendar 2.0 was supported). A bunch of minor bugs have been corrected as well.
Drag’n drop update
October 5, 2009
A new version is online :
- Drag’n drop of events on the calendar is much improved (faster, leaner, more flexible and fixes a small bug)
- It is now possible to drag’n drop tasks from one list to another, by selecting some tasks and dropping the selection on the tab of the target list. Tasks will be moved or copied (for feeds or read-only shared lists)
- A few small bugs fixed here and there
picoBeat launched!
September 30, 2009
Somebody said that software is never finished, it just stops being developed. There’s still much to do to make picoBeat better and most likely still bugs lurking here and there, but after a year of hard work it has reached a point where it is ready for a public release.
It is sort of a cliché by now, but picoBeat started as an experiment: an attempt to learn C# programming on Windows Mobile devices. The original plan was to build a software for one-click PIM backups to a remote server. Then came the idea of accessing those data directly on the server, and the ExtJS library was used to build a rich web client, which turned out to be a much bigger piece of software and the core of what is picoBeat now. This in turn led to writing a SyncML interface – broadening the synchronization possibilities from just Windows Mobile device to most cell phones on the market.
I am very much looking forward to receiving feedback so all comments are welcome. There’s already a long list of features and enhancements planned (including an email client, SMS integration, a journal) but the most important is that picoBeat can fulfill real-world needs rather than piling on features.