MobUser

Makimo was a fun demo Moblet that we developed in a few weeks for the CTIA conference. For those of you that missed the conference, Makimo was a mobile portal of sorts that aggregated XML services and content from various sources and delivered them as mini-Moblets to a device running our Moblet Runtime Environment (MRE).

Here were just some of the features of Makimo:
My Netflix Queue: Check your Netflix Queue and search the Netflix catalog for other movies by category
My Tivo: See what your TiVo is recording or what has already been recorded.
Stock Checker: Lookup Stock Quotes by symbol
RSS Reader: Read your favorite RSS feeds on your phone
Amazon Item Search: Lookup a product using Amazon’s XML services

What is most compelling about Makimo is the extensible aspects of the way it was built. Imagine a Makimo with modules developed by a larger community and personalized by the end-user to meet their needs and address their personal interests. Apple’s widgets were a driving force behind the idea of Makimo. Many of the Widget users ultimately became developers that as of today contribute more than 1000 free widgets to the Apple user community and that number continues to grow.

mWorks makes it simple for anyone with a background in XML, Javascript, and XPath to quickly create mobile content that is as compelling and easy to use as it is to develop. Makimo could provide a starting point for users to initially become aware of the possibilities (just as Apple did with the initial Widgets that came with OS X Panther) and ultimately convert to developers creating their own mobile services and content.

As I wait to give my talk at Eclipse World I decided to post some of the highlights from the event.


Without a doubt, Eclipse is winning the Java IDE war. Major competitors such as JBuilder are dropping their products and even joining the Eclipse foundation as members. Several major companies such as Oracle and BEA have also embraced Eclipse as a development platform for their technologies. Most exciting is the mention that Symbian will be supporting Eclipse as the exclusive development IDE for their operating system.

Read more