Mobile Technology Archives - Page 11 of 12

Let me swap my phone OS!

Going back the computer memory lane, I can state categorically that the success that the PC had in changing the world (the PC really changed the world) is mostly due to the flexibility and interchangeability of its different components. That kudos belongs to the IBM guys who, surmounting all obstacles, brought out the IBM PC and its standards all within 1 calendar year.

I love Apple products, and they definitely started before the PC but their closed approach to the PC thingy is frustrating and stifles progress including theirs.

Where is my rambling taking me to? Not too far. The mobile phones of these days are much more powerful than PCs of not too far ago. In fact, I believe that sometimes in the near future, there would be a convergence where mobiles would be the PCs. Don’t laugh at me; computers before the PCs were as big as trucks!

However, the mobile guys are following the same route of Apple. They are semi-open and have APIs for guys like me (did I say me?) can write our applications on them. These phones run OSes from Microsoft, Symbian, etc but these OSes are so coupled/glued to the hardware that is it almost impossible to replace it with something else. In the PC world, I can have Linux, UNIX, Windows (and its flavors) running on just any PC happily as long as I can get the drivers. I can even get them to dual-boot! Why can’t I have same on my phones?

I had a Nokia E70. A beautiful phone albeit so slow you would end up smashing it up. I just thought why can’t I dump the Nokia idiotic OS and put in say a Linux?

Google is doing Android, an open platform which would solve some bits of these madness but what I dream about is when there can be 100% interchangeability of phones and the OS running them.

Firefox 3 Features

Firefox 2 is hardly sitting tight before the pretty boys at Mozilla started building the third iteration of the best browser in the world (sulk if you like!). You can read about some of the interesting features here.

Dreamweaver 8 Rocks

Or may be the code view. At last, Macromedia has given us what Homesite used to have then; proper code management. Now, you could collapse portions of code, highlight tag parents recursively, highlight invalid syntax, etc.

Studio 8 is finally out

After waiting for what seems like a century, Macromedia finally pushed Studio 8 out of the garage door. Visit Macromedia to download a trial, hope it would be worth the $399 upgrade.

Flash forms and how not to upgrade CFMX7

When the honchos at work decided to put some business processes on the intranet, I felt it was the best time to start putting flash forms to its paces. Process automation could be fiendishly difficult with so many validations. I hardly use JavaScript because some dude could have its browser saying capital NO. And server side is not the easiest stuff to do, and the roundabout trip could make the sanest man go schizo! With AS2, and some codes stolen from Flex, client-side validation in flash forms is so lovely. Work gets done fast, server-side codes are more compact and reusable.

I did some work at home over the weekend, and it worked beautifully. I was impressed and couldn’t wait to wow my colleagues. Now, time for the production server to play host, and duh! The application fell flat on its face. One, the <cfformitem type=”text” and type=”htm” refused to show. Two, clock icon continues ticking forever and three, worst of all, data wouldn’t load into the forms.

The honchos didn’t waste much time asking for my head on a platter. I started looking for answers. Didn’t get much except for a clue from Ray Camden about bad CFIDE mapping. I compared my settings with the dev servers but it was fine. Along the line, I discovered that only servers that were upgraded from CFMX6.1 have same problem (oh, my app was tested on all the servers in the world!). I did a double take; sent out an outtage report and downed the production server. Copied my settings, uninstall the CFMX7, deleted every trace, and reinstalled and presto, life came back to me. The app worked, the honchos smiled and I had a pizza.

The trouble came from a ‘wonderful‘ trick of replacing your CFIDE in wwwroot (default settings for Windows/IIS6 install) with the old one from CFMX6.1 when you upgrade to CFMX7. Because we are one of the early adopters of CFMX7 around my end, I just looked for what seemed to be the smartest upgrade method on fullasagoog. Only God knows who thought it was smart, but I did it.