With different backgrounds, we all aim at providing useful information about the mobile environment, in all its aspects. From its manifesto:

The aim of this community is to share as much as possible information related to the mobile development using all the social networks and the new capabilities of the NET to make easier find updated contents and to create a deep feeling of connection between developers.

The journey is at the beginning, hope you’ll join in!

Anyway, as reported by Mark Doherty, this has been the experience that iPhone users had approximately 7 millions times by  December 2009.

Numbers that should make Apple think about the metaphysic scenario where the users expect to have Flash on their smartphones, mostly because they totally ignore Apple policies and just want to browse the web, stop. Or do you pretend your millions of tech-agnostic users to understand your really ahead vision of Flash, and why it should be banned from the Web?

The funny thing is that iPad is arriving, promising to be the best Webby-thing in history.

In this first version, the online simulator allows you to pick one of 4 devices (Nokia 5800 XpressMusic, Nokia N95 8GB, Apple iPhone and HTC Dream), and see how the MobileJoomla! website looks on that.

MobileJoomla! allows you to turn your Joomla web site into a mobile one, compatible with all the existing mobile phones. For more information, you can take a look at MobileJoomla! Wiki.

Why I think it’s great? Because you have to perform 2 mouse clicks and wait a couple of seconds, and you can continue working on your WordPress (upgraded) blog without any other hassles.

Looking at that made me think about the update process of mobile applications.

In many cases, applications are simply not aware of the availability of updated versions, and so users are supposed to manually check (e.g.: going on the publisher website) for updates. What does this mean? Simple: terrible User Experience (if even we can say that), and in most cases old (and possibly bugged) versions of your applications running everywhere.

For this reasons, developers started to implement their own “updates-availability-check” systems, letting their applications check for updates and prompt the user about the availability of those. Anyway, this approach has 2 important drawbacks:

• users must open the application in order to have it check for updates
• the very same logic (checking for updates, downloading and installing the updated application) is replicated in each application

Luckily enough, mobile platforms are fast moving toward an integrated approach, based on the concept that updates have to be pushed to the user. Examples of this are iPhone and Maemo, both notifying the user in case of available updates.

While this is currently the best approach from a UX point of view, the same makes me wonder if a better approach (maybe totally transparent to the user?) could ever be possible, considering all the technology and security concerns of such an approach when talking about mobile devices.

Mobile Joomla allows to turn an existing Joomla website into a mobile website, compatible with all phones in the world!

Its features include:

• Advaced User Agent detection (multiple methods i.e WURFL, Compact WURFL, fixed or none)
• Multi site support
• Advanced image adaptation
• Flexible layout settings
• Sub-domain redirection
• Advanced device categorization: XHTML, iPhone, iMode and WAP
• Custom templates per device category
• Menu exclusion per device category
• Fully customizable with different modules and templates
• Compatibility with 3rd party extensions, modules and components

Mobile Joomla really seems to address all the major hurdles of mobile web development, and I really can’t expect to try it out

Kudos to Ugur and his great team!!

My idea is to post less news and announcements but more resources, events, tutorials, articles, examples and experiments about mobile design and development. In a few words more valuable content.

Check it out, and update your bookmarks!

Its features include:

• Live sport news for each sport category
• Photogalleries for all the latest sport events
• Live weather with geo-localization support
• Real-time information for Italian Serie A and Serie B soccer competitions
• Results and infos for all the latest soccer matches worldwide
• Videonews
• Ability to save news to read them even when offline

You can download it from iTunes, and read all the details here: http://www.gazzetta.it/mobile/iphone.shtml

Forum Nokia Code Champ Winners!

This competition, launched by Nokia to promote the development of WebRuntime and Flash-based applications has finally announced his winners, and there are really cool applications!

CityLite of IdeasLite is a guide to night life in Latin American capitals, with informations about events, theaters, and a lot more. Really cool interface!

KuneriLite team also won the award for Europe/Middle East/Africa with their one-button voting system: Kuneri Easy Vote! Congratulations for their good work!

For the full list of winners, you can look here.

iPhone 3G is finally here!

After months of guessing and posting, Apple will finally announce, during San Francisco Apple WorldWide Developers Conference of June 9th, the 3G version of its iPhone. And it seems that it’ll arrive in Italy before the end of June branded by the two Carriers Tim and Vofafone.

While it’s definitely a good news that it’ll support HSDPA, it seems that we’ll not have a builtin GPS… too bad for all location-fanatics!

Jarpa, source code is out!

Jarpa is an absolutely interesting project aiming to extend FlashLite and Java ME feature by allowing them to intercommunicate, and so allowing developers to create hybrid applications that can take the best of both worlds.

Some days ago, Felipe Andrade has finally released Jarpa sourcecode, so developers can finally start to benefit of this framework, and for J2ME and FL-addicted like me, this is a GREAT news!

And, if you need one more reason to congratulate with Felipe for its great and extensive work, here is its Nokia Championship award!

You can try a first (very beta, as always ) version here.