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Why having a web server on the n95 is a lot of fun

Byrichard

Yestereday night when I should have been sleeping I downloaded a web server for the Nokia N95 8GB and so far it’s been a lot of fun (albeit a little slow). It has blogging, messaging, photo galleries and more and here’s a little run down of what the interesting features are.

if you’re logged in then you see a number of features:

Blogging:
This feature allows you to write blog posts and post them. Commenting is possible.

Camera:
There are two options, the first one allows you to take pictures remotely. I can take pictures from my laptop when I want to.

The second is photo requesting. this feature allows for those visiting your website to ask for a picture of something, for example “I want a picture of the restaurant”. Take the phone, take a picture of the restaurant and send it to the person that may be coming soon.

The Gallery:
The gallery has three options. The first of these options is that you select which pictures you want to share. The second option is to share all phone memory pictures whilst the third is to share all memory card pictures.

Guestbook
I haven’t played with this feature yet but it’s pretty self explanatory.

Contact me.
There are two ways by which for someone to contact you from the mobile site. the first is by short IM and the second is by SMS. Both of these work quite well even with slow connection speeds.

Presence
The presence Availability information consists of “Active profile – Silent”, in other words that the phone is silent. That would mean there’s little chance I’ll hear the phone if you call. “Calendar availability – Available lets you know that I’m available. “Call state – Call inactive” means that you can call me since I am not currently using the phone.

Webchat
allows those on the site to chat with the web server user.

Calendar
The calendar is a quick way to see what events are planned and for when

Messaging:
It’s a nice way of seeing the messages people have sent you and when, in other words you can see all the sms you’ve received on your phone remotely. It’s not something you’d share with the world. Unread messages appear in bold.

Phone Log.
Allows you to see all phone traffic on your phone with the usual three distinctions

Contacts, allows you to see all your contacts.

Conclusion

With more ubiquitous wifi and more forgiving data plans we can expect more and more people to carry the webserver with them. If I take pictures of an event you can connect to my phone and look at the pictures I’ve taken. It’s also an easy way of sharing those embarrasing photos with friends. There’s no video support yet but that’s sure to come and there are other options ready already.

Editing from the phone is fast so blogging from the phone makes more sense than via a laptop, in relation that part of your site. There is also an RSS feed which means that those following you can automatically download any content you generate for viewing when your phone is out of range of free wifi or you select not to use the data plan.

The downside is that it uses battery and the connection drops fairly frequently. Data plans that are only a few megabytes large would soon end up costing you more than it’s worth. The connection speeds are slow so doing anything is laborious.

For more information

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Seesmic from the mountains (via QIK)

Byrichard

Whilst the connection is unstable and slow I decided to take the phone and Qik some landscapes from La Dole in Switzerland. Here are a few streams. As more people enjoy streaming live video from interesting locations so this will become a more common site.




What I hope to do next is go to some of the higher peaks and stream from there too. Overtime we could have a nice collection of footage.

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Seesmicing from anywhere

Byrichard

I like to seesmic but there’s no way I want to be stuck in one place without moving around. It’s more fun when you see people aren’t in a desk situation. Here are four places from which to seesmic and make things more interesting.

Seesmic from here.

The Lake Side

Yet another nice view

The Mountains

Nice view

And where to have lunch 🙂

I took hundreds of pictures today so that I could play with photosynth.

Byrichard

Whilst it has been over two years since I last had a windows laptop today I took hundreds of pictures to play with Photosynth, a photo combining piece of software that runs on your machine before being uploaded to the web.

The idea is a simple one. Take as many pictures as you can be bothered and have at least three pictures overlap the same detail. I tried this in three different locations. The first one was a shopping center. I set the n95 to photograph every ten seconds as I walked but soon realised that this was too slow. That’s when I went to burst mode and photographed the main hall where the elevators were, then the view from the parking lot, and finally in a field where the hay was ready for storage.

In each case I took a sequence of 30-150 images at once. I then sorted the pictures out by sequence before letting photosynth do all the crunching. After a while th result came out and I had a 3D environment in which to click from picture to picture to picture.

The link from image to image is usually quite good although make sure not to leave too big a gap between two images as they will be isolated. Time for you to try it out, to have some fun.

Hay

Architecture

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Excitement for live streaming from mobile phones

Byrichard

Live video streaming from the mobile phone is normal for me. Yesterday for example I was streaming from the boat as the Croisière de l’espoir came back into port.

Jose Castillo and Tim Siglin talk about highlights from Streaming Media East in New York, including AT&T’s re-emergence as a CDN, a jaw-dropping mobile video webcasting demo by Steve Garfield, and interviews with show attendees.

mp3
source

Interesting to listen to other people discuss this topic.

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Blueapple.Mobi – Video to mobile devices

Byrichard

As Yael Naim’s live performance of Toxic plays from my phone so I’m playing with Blueapple.mobi which “brings internet video and pictures directly to mobile users”. It’s an interesting service that allows you to view videos from a number of sources. You can see some of the recommended videos which are already converted from sources such as CBS or you can search for others. When you find a video that is not converted yet the site will convert the video on the fly and within a very short amount of time you will be able to download it straight to the phone.

This is more interesting than other services where you need to download applications in order for the files to be available. Of particular interest is the feature that you don’t need anything extra on the phone. Just download the video, watch it and then discard it. No waste, no clutter.

Take a look, it could be of interest as mobile broadband prices go down and free wifi become ubiquitous.

Zyb – quick contact syncing for mobile phones

Byrichard

Over the years I’ve jumped from one phone to another and each time I’ve had a backup of all my contacts on at least three other devices at all time. The latest service I’ve played with is Zyb. Whilst still in Beta it’s a simple to use interface for s60 phones like the N95 that allows you to synchronise all your contacts with one simple action.

Among the features I like are the ability to see which of your other contacts are using the service as well as the easy merging of duplicate entries. That’s particularly interesting when, like me, you’ve had to synchronize across a number of platforms over the years and ended up with a few duplicates. It’s also online which means your contacts are always accessible as long as you’re online should you lose your phone or the batteries die.

In so far as I can tell there is no automatic syncing so the updates are as frequent as you remember to do them unlike with paying services like missingsync where updates are as regular as you are close to the machine you synchronise with.