Safdar’s Blog

The cartoons are self explanatory.

I decided to post them because I know this is going to be a crazy week in work so i’m just winding down before i get wound up.

Al Jazeera labs will showcase some of the projects that we in the New Media team have been working on. Some of the projects will be up and running and others still in Beta, so yout feedback is always valued.

Just head over to labs.aljazeera.net and bookmark the page. This will be the place to visit for new and cool services that Al Jazeera New Media are developing.

One of the projects that is being featured with the launch of labs is the Journey through Sahara whereby Al Jazeera reporter, May Welsh, records parts of her journey with a Nokia N95 with a google map illustration showing sections of her trail and snippets of reports to go with it. The Al Jazeera English website also has more in-depth coverage of the report.

I was also asked to do some sound bites for the series of videos about the Tuareg rebels in the Sahara. In this video, which is the first in a series of reports to be aired during the course of the week, I can be heard doing the voiceover for Aghali Alambo (President, Niger Movement for Justice), this is about 2 mins or so into the video. The last time I read from a script was back in primary school where I was made to dress as a Christmans tree in the annual play. At least then the audience was only around 100 parents and not the world.

One of the mobile projects i’ve recently been working on has been to test the capabilities of the GPS function of Nokia handsets such as the N95. Nokia Sportstracker application which is available free from Nokia works a treat and allows you to directly upload your GPS tracked route to a google map on the Sportstracker website. So the basic idea is to install Sportstracker on your N95, it then activates the GPS and can just run in the background freeing up the phone to make calls/texts etc. Then later you can stop GPS (or ‘workout’ as its called) and upload the data to your nokia account. Images taken while application is running will automatically be placed in the location on the map where they were taken. Although we later discovered they are not exactly ‘geo-tagged’ as such but the Sportstracker application just cleverly maps the image/video’s time stamp to the time stamp and location of the GPS data stored.

So after testing at length in Doha, Dubai and Sharjah with great results, i decided to take it with me to Umraa (the lesser pilgrimage to Makkah) which i travelled by car from Doha to Makkah via Ta’if. Then from Makkah to Madinah, and back to Doha via Riyadh.

The intention was to let the application run the whole length of the journey, a full 14 hours or so. I invested in a Nokia car charger and left the handset plugged in on the dashboard. The dashboard board because the GPS works better if it obviously has line of sight with the satellite. This however did pose some issues in the desert heat of the sun exceeding 48C. Although the car had good AC, i found the handset still heated up quite a lot. The phone also crashed a few times so i didn’t get the full length of the journey mapped as a whole but rather as bits (different ‘workouts’). Visit my Flickr, where i have uploaded some screenshots to see what i mean. In fact, i accidentally left the tracker running on reaching Makkah and even performing the tawaf around the Kabaah. Unintentional but produced some interesting results. The intervals for the triangulation were not that great (see above image) but it was still a fascinating way to capture one the most important experiences of your life.

AlJazeera have launched a beta release of their iPhone app. Recent AlJazeera English youtube videos can also be accessed for selected programmes.

Tap in i.aljazeera.net in Safari directly on your iPhone and enjoy. Check it out and send us your feedback/comments by clicking on the BETA link in the app.

It’s been just over a year now since I bought my first ever Mac, a cute little white MacBook from the US (Thanks Morad). I actually used Macs briefly when I was in Uni but they were nowhere near as cool or appealing as when i joined the New Media Team recently and got bombarded with Mac Vs PC conversations in the office. It was mainly Morad and Naz Khan (aka superhairymoose from Brum) who finally ‘gently’ persuaded me to get a Mac and change my life!

I found that being a Mac owner is not just deciding on using a different OS but actually a lifestyle choice. Not so different to when i became a Biker back in the days and got myself a Kawasaki Ninja ZX600R as a first bike. In both situations, when you finally make the jump, you find that you can talk for hours to every other Mac user or Biker you happen to cross paths with. Although, with other Bikers the talk is usually around how long it took to reach from 0-100MPH on the Ninja whereas with fellow Mac owners it’s about which hot corner of the screen is set to expose or whether Safari is better than Firefox etc.

It might be the case that some people buy a Mac because others tell them how cool it is at first, but i’ve never heard of anyone regretting getting one. I can proudly claim converting at least one person entirely by myself (and that was a on a short visit to his home in the UK) although i’m sure i’ve influenced others too along the way.

Well, what is so good about the Mac that everyone keeps harping on about?

Here’s what i found from my experience. It’s true what they say, it just works from right out of the box. Everything is simplified as much as one can imagine. I remember configuring the office HP printer one time, i simply entered the IP address of the printer and hey… done! No selecting the Model, installing drivers and so on like what you would have to do on Windows. This goes for most devices you attempt to plug into your Mac. They just work. In fact, more and more devices that were not supported directly by Apple (which required 3rd party software) are constantly been added in. A good example is using iSync with Nokia handsets.

I also like the standard features like the Spotlight for very quickly finding any file, application, email and so on. I find its been improved a lot in Leopard so there’s no need to use QuickSilver anymore. Although I have to say, Google Desktop for Windows worked just as well for this. The finder with it’s different views is a lot nicer to use than File Explorer in Windows. The most useful features i found so far that was introduced with Leopard have to be the Preview and Cover Flow. Just by selecting any file (well. most files), by pressing the space bar you can preview the file without having to wait for Acrobat, word, itunes, blah to open. This saves a lot of time when you are wanting to quickly check the contents of files to find the right one.

Some of the features i don’t really use much are the Dashboard widgets, FrontRow and .Mac. The Time Machine feature which is the best attempt i’ve seen to make the boring job of backups as interesting as it gets was something i used to use after upgrading to Leopard. However, i managed to somehow corrupt my 250Gb external drive and so had to reformat it losing all my backups. Never had the patience to use Time Machine ever since.

Now, if you want to switch to Mac but think that you will still need Windows XP or Vista for some of your work (MS Visio, Project etc.), then you have 2 options. MacOS Leopard comes with Boot Camp that allows you to dual boot and run Windows XP or Vista at native speeds. Alternatively you could install VMWare and run Windows as virtual machine. I personally have the VMware setup with XP but must admit i’ve not had to use it at all so far - anyway reverting back to Windows after using MacOS is like going back to an old banger of a car after driving a Ferrari.

Are there any negatives about Macs? Of course. Ok Macs are great but there’s always room for improvement. The only issues i have are to do with not being able to maximise windows to full screen like Windows and other small issues like this. But there’s always 3rd party software available to do most of these things.

Besides all of the above, Macs are much cooler to use at Airports, Conferences, on the street and in the office. It’s done wonders for my street cred. I remember in Nov 07 when i attended the Mobile Middle East Conference in Dubai, on a number of occasions it was my Mac that became the ice-breaker when people walked passed, commenting “..so your a Mac user heh..?”

My next mission is to decide on whether to buy a MacBook Pro or a MacBook Air. I work closely and debate frequently with colleagues from both schools of thought. I’m undecided as yet, which is not such a bad thing since i have no budget right now anyway Anyway, by the time i can afford it, Apple will jointly announce with the 3G iPhone in June a new MacBook Air with the specs of a MacBook Pro (and an extra USB port

Which Mac would be on your next shopping list for Eid?

A great article from Howard Dahdah published in COMPUTERWORLD about how AlJazeera’s New Media group are going open source with some existing and upcoming projects.

Although i think there’s too much mention of PHP and Linux and not enough Mobile related information. Well, okay till now there really hasn’t been such a thing as Open Source Mobile yet but hey, let’s wait and see if Google’s Android lives up to the hype once the venture by the Open Handset Alliance really gathers momentum.

… I digress, back to AlJazeera. I think this quote from the mastermind behind it all sums it all up. We look forward to great things to come from AlJazeera New Media:

“My team is looking more at the experimental side of things - new platforms, new technologies. One of the things my group is doing is trying to promote and evangelise the use of open source technology internally, partly because we see a lot of value in lots of open source tools that are being developed,” said Mohamed Nanabhay (Head of New Media).

Last week, while innocently driving through Sharjah with a friend we managed to get caught up in a drugs raid. Crazy stuff like this could only happen to me on my holiday!

While driving along the water side we saw what looked like a group of people wrestling each other. Some in head-locks etc. So i naturally pulled out my N96 and snapped away. Almost instantly, one of the guys outside ran to our car and confiscated both of our phones. Turned out they were undercover drugs police on a raid. We were given a number of the drugs police department to get our phones back.

After what seemed like hours of driving, we finally managed to find the police station. We were summoned by the undercover police from the scene and asked a few questions. They mainly wanted to see the pics taken at the scene. The funny video of Arab Usher on Zain’s phone induced an interesting reaction when our phones were being interrogated

Tip: Be careful what rubbish you store on your phone in case you get pulled.

Lessons learnt: All this Citizen Reporting stuff is risky business!

I received the Fring newsletter by email today titled “It’s Fringing Freedom!” inviting me to download the latest Fring 3.30.

As well as all the previous cool features like accessing Skype, Yahoo Msgr, MSN, Gtalk, Twitter all from one application on my mobile - now they have added the ability to send & receive files, install a FringME widget on your homepage and other cool stuff.

With fringME!, your online buddies will now be able to:

	chat with you from fringME! on the web direct to fring on your mobile – even if they don’t have fring
	see where you are. You can choose for fringME! to show your location via Google Maps using your GPS-enabled phone
	view your online presence status - and see if you’re online, offline or in a call

The feature which sounds most interesting to me is for others to see my location via Google Maps using the GPS on my N95. Will have to play around with this to see if it really works as cool as Nokia’s betalabs Sports Tracker application.

You will notice i have already added the widget on the right of this page. I’ve tested the ‘Chat’ feature and it works great!! Will play with the GPS tomorrow to get the ‘find me’ part working.

Click here to download Fring or to check if your mobile is supported.

So it’s true, Mozilla is entering the Mobile space alongside Opera and others. It will be interesting to see what range of products they come out with. Hopefully building on the huge success of Firefox which runs on Open Source, Mozilla will be able to carry the feature-rich capabilities over to Mobile. It remains to be seen if they will take a multi browser approach like Opera which has a paid version of Opera Mobile and a free and quite limited version called Opera Mini.

• “Mozilla is rumoured to be in talks with operators about its mobile Firefox browser.

  By the end of 2008, Mozilla aims to release a mobile browser that can run on Linux and Windows Mobile devices. Mozilla expects a variety of responses from operators, with some resisting it and protecting their walled gardens, and others welcoming a browser that encourages mobile web exploration.

  But it’s hoping for co-operation from the mobile community as Mozilla is run on a free, open source model.” (ME)

- Nokia brings you music - free music downloads (not streamed) for 1 year. When CEO was asked the question about how they will make money, the answer wasn’t so clear to me. Rumour has it though that the price of the handsets will go up to cover this.

- New Star Wars N-gage game release.

- http://www.pangeaday.org/ announced (see my previous post).

- Ovi - announced some months ago, more details and screenshots shown today. Looks cool. Syncs your mobile, web and pc client. Looked bit Netvibes with room for mashups and your favourite apps.

- Nokia embracing Open Source
- Why? Cost savings, quality, flexibility and simplified licensing.
- N810 -powered by Linux-based Maemo OS and Mozilla browser. Knows as the geeks device.
- Open Source Maemo Apps
- S60 Apps (not open source but many API’s available for developers), also uses Apache web server and Nokia web kit
- Tools - Open C, Carbide and Python (fast prototyping tool)
- Developer Support websites

Open C Developer website - Grand prize $10,000US -

Prize winners anounced in forum
- 3rd place runner uip - Steve DeLaney (developed video app)
- 2nd place - Tong Ren (virtual multimedia courseware)
- 1st runner up - Pu Zhihua (Traffic assistance) - 8500 lines of code in 1 month!!!
- Winner - Sittiphol Phanvilai (Flash lite video player) 25000 lines of code in 10 weeks. MobiTubia.

When asked what he would do with the prize money, said he would buy a car for his sister

Here is a screen shot of his appication demo that i just took 5 mins ago on my N95

Will add more later…