Antony’s Mobile Blog

Finally…. I have to write this “Five Things” because E-Series.org has tagged me. Btw, who started this “Five Things”? Anyone knows??? It’s interesting to know because Sun Microsystems’ CEO, Jonathan Schwartz, has even written his “Five Things” too.

Anyway, here is the list of five things that you might or might not know about me.

1. I am originally from Indonesia. My home town is Magelang, a very small town in the center of Java island. I don’t think anybody here has ever heard of Magelang before… The picture below shows a field near my parent’s house.
   
   
   
   
2. I decided to move out from Indonesia because of big riots in 1998. Although the riots didn’t happen in my home town, it was targeting ethnic Chinese. That’s why many Chinese-Indonesians left the country after the riots. Btw, I am a Chinese Indonesian….
   Interestingly, my grandfather is originally from Fujian province in China. He moved from China to Indonesia because of economic crisis in the 1930s.
3. The first programming language that I learnt was BASIC back in 1990. My uncle, William Suryawijaya, taught me how to program in GW-BASIC. His first assignment was displaying a simple mathematic table like the screenshot below.
   
   
4. I speak a little bit German. Ja genau… ich spreche ein bisschen Deutsch… :).
5. My first mobile phone was… surprise… Siemens C25. I bought it in August 1999 and sold it one year later. After that, I have been using Nokia phones until today. Here is the list of Nokia phones that I have used so far: Nokia 3330, Nokia 7650, Nokia 6600, Nokia 7710, Nokia N-Gage QD, Nokia 6680, Nokia N80, Nokia N91 and Nokia N73.

Now, the most interesting part. I would like to tag the following bloggers to continue this “Five Things” effect.

• Phil Schwarzmann from S60 blogs
• Darla Mack - the mobile diva
• Jo Stichbury - the author of “Symbian OS Explained” and “Accredited Symbian OS Developer Primer”
• Martin Sauter
• agwe23 from Techmundo 2.0.

Actually, I would like to tag some other bloggers, e.g. Tommi Vilkamo, Steve Lichtfield and Stefan Constantinescu. Unfortunately, they have been tagged by other bloggers.

Have you wondered how Flickr publishes the most popular cameras in their community? How does Flickr get the information about camera model, such as Nokia Sony Ericsson W810i or Nokia N73?

The answer to the questions above is Exif. According to Wikipedia:

Exchangeable image file format (official abbreviation Exif, not EXIF) is a specification for the image file format used by digital cameras…. The specification uses the existing JPEG, TIFF Rev. 6.0, and RIFF WAVE file formats, with the addition of specific metadata tags. It is not supported in JPEG 2000 or PNG.

Basically, Exif is metadata embedded into images captured with digital cameras, including camera phones. Not only camera model, Exif stores many other parameters, such as focal length, exposure time, aperture value and many more.

How can we view Exif information? Many photo management software, such as Google’s Picasa, and image viewer software, such as IrfanView (with additional plug-in), are able to display Exif information. The following screenshot shows Exif information from a picture taken with Nokia N73. Just for your information, I use IrfanView to display Exif information.

Today I had a surgery on my leg at the same time as Steve Jobs announced Apple’s iPhone. I heard the news after I came back from the hospital…. then checking Apple’s stock (APPL) that has jumped over 8%.

After having lunch, I watched Steve’s keynote at MacWorld 2007 immediately. I always enjoy watching Steve’s speech. As you may know, Steve is one of the best presenters in the world.

What is my opinion about iPhone? Short answer, it is amazing…. Most of the technologies inside iPhone are actually already available on many smart phones today. We have full XHTML browser on latest S60 phones. In fact S60’s OSS browser and iPhone’s browser use the same engine, i.e. Safari. We have POP3 and IMAP4 suport on many Symbian OS phones. Most of us have been using Google Maps on smart phones supporting Java too.

So what is new about iPhone? As usual, just like any other Apple’s products, user interface. Apple has done a great job integrating those technologies seamlessly into a single product that is very easy to use. I don’t want to discuss Apple’s iPhone in more detail. There are a lot of reviews about iPhone on the Internet already….

As a mobile developer, I am just thinking about one more platform to suppport. Currently, we have Symbian OS, Windows Mobile and Mobile Linux. Now… it comes iPhone with Mac OS X. I am not sure whether Apple will allow third party developers to develop applications for iPhone. If yes, then third-party developers have more works to support this new platform.

Developing an application that supports as many devices as possible is not an easy task. Every device has its own specification. One device is usually not compatible with another device. Furthermore, devices from the same platform, such as Symbian OS, are not always compatible each other.

Of course, we have Java, where we can develop an application once and run it everywhere. Unfortunately, this is still a dream. We have to tweak and test our applications each time a new device is coming out. We also have XHTML/Ajax, but the situation is not better either. Each platform has its own web browser.

Any thought?

Update (10-Jan-2007): I just read a blog from Jupiter, What’s Missing from the iPhone?, it looks like Apple will not open iPhone for third party developers.

Update (10-Jan-2007): There is a very interesting review about iPhone from Michael Mace, Impact of the Apple’s iPhone.