East Agile one of Palm's recommended webOS developers in 2009. During their validation process, we created an photograph album application that lets users drill down into the EXIF tag information that describes the characteristics of their photos. Palm offered to place this application on their store, but instead we opted to make it open source in order to help the developer community. The code has been available on github since January 2010. 

The following cards define the specification for a simple taxi cab trip tracking application for a mobile phone platform. This is the sort of thing we could implement easily across multiple platforms (iPhone, Android, Blackberry, Symbian, and Palm WebOS) using custom code and tools like Rhomobile's Rhodes framework.

Look at these cards from two perspectives. First, what do you think of the idea? If a lot of people like it, we might make it. Second, consider that this is typical of the detail we need before we start working with a client to begin an engagement. We would take diagrams like these, break them into small, prioritized user stories and features, then start development that same afternoon.

This is the main screen for the application.

There was a step before this next one, but it got scrapped (horray!). The user jumps right into the taxi trip tracking process. By now the GPS will know where you are, but you can also get an idea if it is having trouble by seeing if the signal is weak (reposition the phone if it looks bad). Starting the trip records the start location. The GPS gets turned off to save batteries. Towards the end of the trip the user can (optionally) turn the GPS back on to get a good fix on the location as soon as the cab has stopped. Ending the trip will record the next reliable GPS location and the time.

During the taxi trip, the user can record the taxi cab company name and the cab number. This can be augmented by one or more photographs of the taxi license information, the meter, and even the driver. They form part of the trips audit/safety file.

At the conclusion of a trip, the use can enter the start and end location names/addresses. The GPS entries can be deleted if the distance looks unreasonable (GPS does not always work).  The trip distance can be populated by the GPS data, or the use can enter the value manually.

After a trip, a user might want to go to the Trip History from the home page. This appears below. It lets the user get a quick sense of how this trip compares to other similar trips. Or it can help with trip planning in terms of time and cost.

At any time, an expense report can be emailed to a user, or an accounting person, documenting all of the trips and their cost.

This shows a number of expected features, including the standard Facebook and Twitter status updates/integration, and SMS updates. These can be used to support record keeping, keep other staff aware of plans, keep the people you are visiting up to date on your schedule, or keep a record (including photographs) of your taxi trip as a safety precaution.

This next design is all scratched out. That is important. One of the best things you can do when designing an application, or working with us to refine it, is to discover you can live with less and still achieve your objective.

Google's Nexus One Android smartphone may be the turning point for Android in its battle for respect from the otherwise iPhone-carrying set of consumers. Or maybe not (see this New York Times article). Released to Google employees about a week ago, the Nexus One was released to the general public on Tuesday January 5th, 2010. We took this opportunity to take some photos.

I was particularly impressed by the camera on the Nexus One and its vivid colour. The image of red lips below is completely unenhanced (colour was removed from the rest of the image to ensure our attention was not distracted).

Smartphone Applications

Do you have any experience of developing smartphone apps? 

Adam Blum CEO, Rhomobile

We have a mobile platform development team. We develop for iPhone, Android, Blackberry, Symbian, and Palm WebOS. Our iPhone team has particular strength in geo-location and mapping applications. We have also been selected by Palm, Inc. as a recommended phone application developer.  Our ability to develop for a wide range of mobile platforms is substantially enhanced by the use of Rhodes, a Ruby based framework from Rhomobile for developing cross platform smartphone applications. Rhodes focuses primarily on creating scalable data synchronized applications for the enterprise market.

Recently, we've been doing a lot of analytics work for clients with social networks and games on mobile platforms ranging from basic phones using SMS to iPhones. The focus in these cases involves discovering the drivers behind customer behavior and developing viable business models against a rapidly changing competitive landscape.  Our onsite PhD analytics guru, Tim, has been really key in making this part of our business work, supported by the rest of the offsite team at East Agile. Tim carries some pretty powerful tools in his belt, which includes Hadoop on EC2, SAS, and some special joint-entropy optimization tools.

The following links to a live example of code running in our Palm Pre Mojo Simulator.  It is an extension of the simple RSS application in the O'Reily webOS book. 

http://www.eastagile.com/uploads/news/

Please note that the simulator is only fully functional in Apple Safari version 4 beta since this is the only browser that supports the HTML5 which is used in Palm Pre applications.

As part of our Pre development preparations, we've created a simulator of the Palm Pre Mojo framework. It allows working Mojo/javascript code to be written and executed just as it would on an actual Palm Pre.

    * Provides exactly the same API as the real Mojo framework so that the application-level code will work correctly on Palm WebOS
    * Based on the API specification written in the Palm WebOS book
    * Can support
          o application with multiple stages
          o background process
          o notification system
          o widgets
          o database transaction
    * Cannot support
          o device services request

We have a presentation on Palm Pre webOS development and our simulator.

And another presentation on Palm Pre webOS in general: google doc.

The iPhone app business has already become quite saturated. The maker of the Dapple app (by all accounts creative and well implemented) reveals how disappointing his sales have been: a little more than $500 in a month. The experience looks a lot like that of Facebook developers. This confirms the need to get to market fast and early, or perhaps not at all in secondary application markets. This is likely remain true with upcoming platforms such as the Palm Pre.