Google Instant

Google launched instant previews on mobiles and while trying it out I got curious how they build that. It doesn't feel that you leave the browser when you click on the magnifier which takes you to the screenshots of the pages, but you it also doesn't look & feel like a classic mobile webpage.
So I emulated an android user-agent in chrome and inspected the source. Actually it is a XHTML page with some nice CSS animations and script magic.
Why is that interesting? AFAIK this is one of the few commercial products (Google's mobile search, not a small fish) which uses modern web-technologies providing a user-experience beyond classic web-page browsing.
Well done Google.

Sync, offline, online

Techcrunch pointed today to a side project of some googlers called Camlistore. Since the weather was great today I didn't had much time to check it out but it looks quite interesting.
As I mentioned in a previous post I still think that it's crucial for a good mobile experience to have content online AND offline availble whithout bothering the user with details.
Google contacts implementation on android is a good example. Your address book is in sync and online while you have full access to it even when you're offline.
Now it's getting of course more complicated when you're looking into things like photos or music where you want only a subset of your contents offline due to your limit storage on your mobile.
Anyway I'm curious how the guys from Camlistore proceed, it looks like the first really interesting open-source sync solution for me.

Google Maps Navigation with roaming

A short post regarding my experiences with the new google maps navigation client and offline maps.
I took the opportunity to test the praised feature of google to be able to navigate offline with the new google maps client during my latest short trip to the netherlands using my Nexus One

First try: Route to the destination from Germany (home network). I switched data roaming off and entered the destinatation. As expected everything works fine. A few kilometers behind the boarder, mobile lost data connectivity and it still had > 200 KM to go. To my suprise, routing was done perfectly to the end, sometimes map-tiles have been missing, but the routing worked well.

Second (harder) try: Route without data network back to Germany. It turned out that the client needs a data connection to generate the initial route, so I switched Data Roaming on, calculated the route, switched it off again. Again the client was able to route me back without any hickups.

Overall: Pretty good job google!

Useful Android Apps

In this post I'd like to share my experiences with useful android applications for travelling. My scenario looks like this: We planned a 3 weeks trip to Canada and I wanted to keep my roaming data as low as possible, means 0 if possible, and only rely on cached data on the SD-Card or sporadic WiFi connections.

The following Apps turned out to be very useful and worked well during this time:

• Maps: Maverick lite

I tried several Mapping applications which promised to be able to cache Map-tiles on the SD-Card. I also wanted to have support for different map-providers (Open Street Map, Google, etc.) and a comfortable way to generate & download the tiles. To make it short: Maverick lite worked perfectly, and I think I really pushed it to the extreme by pre-loading over 1 GB of tiles to the SD-card with google map tiles for car navigation and Open Street Map tiles for hiking trails in the national and provincial parks. With Mobile Atlas Creator, you can easily batch download and prepare map tiles.

• Dictionary: QuickDic

Simple & straight forward, QuickDic puts a 25MB data file on the SD-card and provides english <-> german translations for not commonly known words. Works perfect!

• Currency Converter: Currency

Works offline, and does not complain too much if there is no online connection available.

And don't forget to get some casual games for the long flight which also works in an offline situation, my recommendations are:

• Hotel Mogul lite
• Bistro Cook
• Fishin' 2 Go lite
• and of course: Flight director

Some other thoughts on offline / cached data:
Beside the fact that data roaming is horrible expensive and slow, it turned out to be really comfortable to work with offline data as it is incredible fast to access. Due to tha fact that coverage is not always given, your nice online-services will leave you lost in many areas.
No one would rely on an online-only contact list, would you? You'd like to have it synced with an online service, but cached or stored on your device as well.
I hope that we'll see more Apps, especially for maps which supports a smart & easy way to cache data on the phone.

Tourist's view on Hamburg in 4 days

I've been to Hamburg quite often because I know several people there, but I always missed the chance to do the usual tourist stuff there. So this time, we booked a hotel, bought a tourist guide, and made a tourist trip to Hamburg. It was really great. We had really good weather and spend most of the time outside.
First day we took the train to Blankenese and walked back to Hamburg. Okay, from Övelgönne on we took the ferry boad back to Landungsbrücken.
Second day we visited the Miniaturwunderland (that's a must for everyone who likes model railways), walked through the new Hafencity and the Speicherstadt, climbed the stairs of the "Michel" and had a boat trip in the harbour.
I can really recommend Hamburg, it's worth spending some days there. The northern people of germany are very different and I like their style ;)
Finnally some pictures... enjoy...

DLNA Media Server for my PS3 (update)

One year ago I came up with a post about my media server installation on the Linkstation for my PS3. I still stick to the TwonkyServer on the Linkstation but just due to lack of mips-support on other servers. For example the PS3 Media Server has some really interesting features for example YouTube, flickr and picasa support, where the YouTube feature did not work for me, but anyway, the project is work-in-progress and worth to have a loot at.

Happy new year!

I wish you a happy new year 2009, which started very cold & snowy in my home town, duesseldorf. I took some pictures, see here.