Guest post: Location-Based Services – it’s game on! This ia a guest post by Justin Davies, founder of NinetyTen, a UK-based consultancy providing mobile community and location aware solutions to companies. Davies also founded the now defunct BuddyPing, an early mobile social networking community based on the realtime location of users. Not to sound too much like my grandad talking about the War, but when I was doing this, it was all about sending a text message to a person walking past Starbucks with a half price voucher. Back in my day, we had to pay for location information, none of this “SimpleGeo” or “Google Latitude” malarkey you youngsters have these days. The only phones that had a GPS chip was a prototype N95 I had to beg Nokia for, and some Blackberry phones. Yes dear Location Based enthusiast, these are bright times, and this does finally seem to be the year of location (though, admittedly, this has been the case for the past 3 years).
I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but location is big news at the moment. (Source: The Next Web) Technology Review: Now Your App Knows Where You Are. A new platform for analyzing when, where, and how smart-phone apps are used will soon be available to thousands of mobile developers. Appcelerator–a software development platform that lets Web programmers create apps that run natively on both iPhone and Android devices–will release the new mobile analytics platform within the next three months. The platform was developed by Appcelerator and FortiusOne, a company that specializes in visualizing location information. Accurate geolocation analytics data will help companies improve their software and make money from location-targeted advertising.
Appcelerator has around 72,000 users, including developers from large businesses such as NBC and Budweiser. The new platform, called Titanium+Geo, lets Appcelerator developers see what users are doing, and where they’re doing it, as long as geolocation functionality has been built into an app. Titanium+Geo collects data every time a user opens an app.
SNAP Interactive.
What jQuery Mobile Means for Developers. This weekend, at the Boston jQuery conference, the alpha release of jQuery Mobile went live. As the name implies, the project is a user interface framework for mobile devices built on top of jQuery, the most popular JavaScript library used today. With jQuery Mobile, developers can write applications for a number of mobile devices, including smartphones and tablets. Although still very experimental in its current state, the new technology may have a major impact on mobile Web development going forward.
The current alpha version of jQuery Mobile supports iOS (iPhone, iPad, iPod Touch), Android, Blackberry OS6, HP's webOS, Mozilla's Fennec and Opera Mobile. In the future, other platforms will be added including Windows Mobile, Symbian, MeeGo and more. One of the goals of the project is to extend the reach of jQuery to aid in building sites for the mobile Web, in addition to the so-called "desktop" Web, where it's already heavily-used. Potential for Mobile Web Dev is Huge. Lightweight Device-Detection in ASP. Device detection is the first step in performing content adaptation. Here we cover lightweight device detection using classic ASP (VBScript). This is based on the PHP version found here. It is a simple script which will detect most mobile browsers. However, if you need more information about the properties of the device such as screen width and height, image format support etc. so that you can tailor your content to specific devices, then you need something more than this.
In this case you should consider using a full device properties database such as DeviceAtlas. This script attempts to match the requesting UA string against about 90 well-known mobile browser UA string snippets, and a couple of special cases. If you simply need to decide if the client is a mobile or desktop browser, then this script is for you!
To use this script, simply include it in any page for which you wish to determine whether the client is mobile or desktop. Note that this script uses Option Explicit.