...here.

Where "here" is an airport hotel in Zurich for some briefings. I've got a good view of the runways from up here - and I can even see a mountain.

Back home tonight.

It also gives me the opportunity to try out the new iPhone LJ client that arrived on the AppStore overnight...

Posted via LiveJournal.app.

Part instrument, part composition and part artwork, Bloom's innovative controls allow anyone to create elaborate patterns and unique melodies by simply tapping the screen. A generative music player takes over when Bloom is left idle, creating an infinite selection of compositions and their accompanying visualisations.

I've been spending some time with the iPhone 2.0 software, and I have to say I'm pleasantly surprised with many of the new enterprise features.

Setting up an iPhone to connect to an Exchange server was quick, and relatively painless. Apple's implementation of ActiveSync supports self-issued server certificates directly, and so smaller businesses can work the CEO's iPhone without having to set up an expensive third-part certificate. Each phone will have to be set up by hand, so you may prefer to stick with Blackberry or Windows Mobile for ease of management.

Sure the iPhone is cool, but how many people are buying a smartphone just to get Web access at work?

A lot of our friends who blog using LiveJournal (probably the most community-oriented blogging platform) have commented recently that they’re losing access to LiveJournal and other sites at work - so they’re buying a smartphone so they can carry on accessing them.

I keep wondering how much of the recent jump in smartphone Web browsing is down to phones being almost good enough, networks being almost fast enough and data plans being almost cheap enough - and how much of it is annoyed or paranoid people being forced to put their social network in their pocket to stay in touch during the working day.

The Consumer Electronics Show's (CES) myriad strands of conference sessions sometimes throw up the most unusual panels. One such event brought together a journalist, a science fiction writer, an inventor and an actress to talk about the influence of science fiction on the world of technology. The conversation ranged from the optimistic to the dystopian, and from the flying car to the handheld communicator.

Dean Kamen, the inventor of the Segway, was sceptical about the role of science fiction. "The subtlety of the real world and nature and the surprising things in real science generally are even more exciting than the other stuff." But he also saw it "as a very valuable tool that will bring people to the table."

One influence kept coming back - Robert A. Heinlein's novels. Science fiction writer Neal Stephenson reminisced: "When I was a kid I read all of the usual suspects - the golden age writers - the one who stuck with me was Heinlein. I don't know why that is, but he stuck with me more than the others did."

You might not be able to tell from the advertisements, but the Apple iPhone isn't the first smartphone with a touch screen. HTC has been making Windows Mobile phones since they were PDAs with add-on GSM cards, under a variety of brands, and many of them have been touch screen phones. But the new HTC Touch is the closest thing to an iPhone running Windows Mobile, which means a huge range of applications are already available for it, and there's a CDMA version on the way this year. Has the little Taiwanese smartphone development house managed to beat Apple to the punch, or has it lost its touch?

HTC's new TouchFlo user interface is what prompts most of the comparisons with the iPhone. Certainly there are similarities, in that both are designed to work with your finger rather than a stylus. However that's where the similarities end. The iPhone uses a multi-touch screen that lets you use two fingers to zoom and detects when it's against your face or in your pocket. The Touch is still using the more common (and much cheaper) single-touch screens that have been a standard feature on PDA phones for a while.

Trolltech's Qtopia is a commonly used mobile Linux. It's used in a large number of different devices – from Sony's mylo communicator, to Motorola and Panasonic's Linux phones. While you might not have come across it in the Carphone Warehouse, it's a common platform in one of the biggest mobile markets going – China.

But how do you develop for a phone platform that's not widely available over here? And how do you develop applications that link deep into a phone's operating system – and even change the behaviour of that OS? You could work with a phone virtual machine (after all, Microsoft's phone simulators are actually custom versions of Virtual PC). Trolltech is offering another approach – the Greenphone, a phone designed for developers along with a development platform that makes it easy to work with all aspects of the hardware.

The Onyx concept acts as a remote for your life. And because life is activity based, not application based, the concept illustrates how applications such as phone, GPS, music, teleconference and calendar events can work simultaneously. The Onyx concept does not base its experience on treating applications as separate windows or entities that work in isolation. Rather, the Onyx concept seamlessly integrates functions into activity based experiences.

More intelligent than conventional touch screens, the ClearPad accurately recognizes not only points and taps, but also shapes, complex gestures, and proximity to the user’s finger or cheek. This creates new possibilities such as assigning functions to two-finger taps, closing tasks by swiping an “X” over them, sending messages by swiping them off the screen, or answering a phone by holding it up to your cheek. The prototype phone uses a dynamic UI, where applications are layered and opened simultaneously, allowing a seamless flow of information between applications.

Thanks to marypcb for the link.

While all eyes may have been on San Francisco and the launch of the developer-unfriendly Apple iPhone, the real game changers were demonstrating their strategy at CES 2007, in Las Vegas.

While the hardware may be similar, the strategy is a complete reversal of Apple's closed platform and proprietary hardware. OpenMokois an open Linux-based mobile application development platform that's designed to help operators and developers build innovative applications on top of a basic phone platform.

Using time and location recordings from Sony’s GPS-CS1 GPS device and the time stamp from a Sony digital still camera or camcorder, photo buffs can plot their digital images to a map and pinpoint exactly where they’ve been.

The 12-channel GPS unit is 3-½ inches long, weighs two ounces, and is sold with a carabineer to easily attach to a backpack or a belt loop.

[...]

To arrange your pictures geographically, import the logged data from the GPS device, using the supplied USB cable, and then download the digital images to a computer. The supplied GPS Image Tracker software synchronizes the images on your digital camera with the latitude, longitude and time readings from the GPS-CS1 device.

Lockheed Martin’s Skunk Works, famed for the U-2 and Blackbird spy planes that flew higher than anything else in the world in their day, is trying for a different altitude record: an airplane that starts and ends its mission 150 feet underwater. The Cormorant, a stealthy, jet-powered, autonomous aircraft that could be outfitted with either short-range weapons or surveillance equipment, is designed to launch out of the Trident missile tubes in some of the U.S. Navy’s gigantic Cold War–era Ohio-class submarines. These formerly nuke-toting subs have become less useful in a military climate evolved to favor surgical strikes over nuclear stalemates, but the Cormorant could use their now-vacant tubes to provide another unmanned option for spying on or destroying targets near the coast.