VT’s Tech Blog

Google has brought out their Google Mobile App for Nokia S60 Phones. You can get the application by visiting m.google.com on your mobile browser. This application provides a shell for Google applications and services. When you start the app, you get a search screen, and the app detects your location to give you area specific suggestions.

As you start typing in a search term, you get search suggestions. Performing  a search opens up the mobile browser to continue browsing. The app provides a shortcut key to quickly jump to Google search from the Home screen on your mobile. This cuts down the number of keystrokes required to startup a Google search.

Apart from the quick access to Google Search and mobile apps, this app provides little else for Indian users, as the suggestions I saw while using the search were hardly relevant to my location.

Link : http://www.google.com/mobile/nokia_smart/app.html

If you’re looking for a free native Twitter client for your S60 device, you’ve got to check out Tweets60. It’s works on S60 3rd and 5th Edition phones. As with most Twitter clients you can view your Timeline, Replies, DMs and Favorites and follow/unfollow Tweeple.  The interface is good and simple with the actions to post, reply or retweet in the Option menu.

One cool functionality in Tweets60 is that you can configure multiple access points and prioritize them. Useful when you’ve got Wifi access and then default to GPRS/3G connection when you’re not in Wifi range. If you’re on a tight data plan, this application also comes with an option to save your bandwidth by allowing you to set the refresh frequency to manual or set it to 5, 10 or 30 minutes.

For a basic twitter client – Tweets60 does it’s job pretty well. According to Ravensoft’s tweets, it looks like a pro version is in the making. I just hope the free version doesn’t get too crippled to promote the sales of the pro version.

A few missing functionalities in the current version of Tweets60 are (in my order of my preference):

• Delete & Mark Tweets as Favorites
• Custom Twitter Search Timelines
• Post images from phone to twitpic ( hopefully will be out in a future version)
• Multiple Twitter Accounts
• Theme support – A darker theme ( like Gravity? )

Get Tweet60 from : http://www.tweets60.com/

Task Manager's Interface

If you’re looking for an advanced task manager for your Symbian phone, you can check out this free and powerful utility called Jbak TaskMan. When you install this utility on your phone, it replaces the default Symbian Task-switcher with it’s own interface which you can configure. You can switch tasks and even kill tasks from this interface, useful when an app hangs and you don’t want to restart the phone to kill it. The screenshot (click to enlarge)  shows the new Task Manager which comes up on the E71 when I installed Jbak TaskMan.

The site for this utility also mentions the other functionality that this utility provides:

• Ultimate replacement of standard task list, which called by menu-key long press.
• Customizable quick launch, where you can add program, document, phone number, SMS and e-mail.
• List of all programs in your phone with quick search by name or UID.
• List of processes, threads, chunks with quick search.
• Quick and stable termination of busy tasks.
• Setup Autorun  programs.
• Phone reboot.
• Uninstalling  sis-applications.
• Info about free memory.
• Detailed information about runned task, which you can copy to clipboard.
• Quick task switch by pressing and holding menu-key (Smooth task switch)
• Remember last-visited position in system phone menu.
• Detailed setting of menu-key
• Powerfull possibilities for power and memory saving

Link: http://jbak.ru/jbaktaskman_en.php

TaskMan Menu

I just came across this S60 freeware today which allows me to manage my wordpress blog on my E71. Wordmobi is a Python app which can be used to perform the following tasks on the blog:

• Create and publish new posts (with basic HTML formatting)
• Include  images from the phone or a remote URL into the posts
• View and approve comments on the posts
• Delete Posts

Before going and installting WordMobi, you’ll have to install Python for S60 from http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=154155

After you install Python, you can go ahead download the latest version and install WordMobi. Before you can start  managing your blog, you’ll have to setup the app with your wordpress details. Here’s how to do that:

Open WordMobi, select your access point then click on Options > Settings > Blog Access

Once in the blog access screen, you’ll have to enter the following information:

• URL to your Wordpress blog. For my blog, I entered: http://blogs.vinuthomas.com
• Username – the administration username you use to login to your blog
• Password
• The number of recent posts you would like to download
• The number of recent comments to download

Once your settings are in, all you need to do is to update the posts, and you’ll get the recent posts down into your phone for you to edit.To update the posts, select Options>Posts>Update

This app should work on any S60 3rd Edition phones like the E71 orN95 (according to the WordMobi Site). If you get this working on other phones, do let me know. Also if you can’t seem to connect using this, see if your xmlrpc.php file is accessible on your blog url (http://yourdomain.com/xmlrpc.php). For me this file was disallowed on the server because the server I’m on had some wierd restriction placed on the xmlrpc file.

Links: WordMobi Project Site, WordMobi download, Python for S60 download

Here’s the latest product from Psiloc called Connect, which allows your S60 application to smoothly transition between 3G/Edge connections to Wifi connections saving costs on the data plans.

Key features of Psiloc Connect:

• Psiloc Connect always makes sure you use the fastest possible connection
• Psiloc Connect allows you to save some money, by not using 3G data connectivity when WLAN is available
• Psiloc Connect handles access point switching in the background for you, no more of that tedious tasks

Psiloc Connect allows you to connect to the Internet in a smart and convenient way. By defining the Psiloc Connect access point in any application you prioritize the way that application connects to the Internet. Psiloc Connect will choose the best available WLAN connection, if no WLAN is available, it will connect though the 3G/GSM access point defined in the application, or if you please it will only use WLAN connections to keep you connected.

Link: Psiloc Connect

If you’d like to work on your favorite PHP apps on your S60 phones, here’s PAMP – Personal Apache, MySQL and PHP. This is implemented on the Symbian OS using Open C, which is a set of industry-standard POSIX and middleware C libraries for S60.

To install PAMP on your S60 mobile, you’ll have to make sure that your’s is a S60 3rd Edition device with 128MB RAM. Running MySQL itself requires 64MB. The Documentation over at Nokia’s opensource wiki states that this has officially been tested only on the N95 and E61i devices, but should work on any S60 3rd Edition device with 128MB RAM.

For instructions on how to install and setup PAMP on your mobile, head over to dev.mobi’s article which shows you how to install and get PAMP running on your Mobile and also how to make your mobile server accessible over wifi and the internet using Raccoon Gateway.

PAMP Howtos: http://dev.mobi/node/817
Project Wiki : http://wiki.opensource.nokia.com/projects/PAMP
Download Link : Sourceforge Download Page