iKOZ

At last! Nokia have finally got around to releasing what I think is one of the most important devices to come on to the market for a long time. The N95. The last time I said this, it was about the N91 with its Wifi and built-in 4Gb hard disk – two years ago. A fantastic podcast listening device. (The time before that, it was salivating over the Sony Ericsson P800 four years ago)

I had the opportunity to play (for a very short time!) with a Nokia N95 while at CES and a couple of other places over the past few months. It absolutely blows my mind what is possible with this device – if it can hold power for long enough!

Words can’t describe how much I want one of these. As. Soon. As. Possible.

So what’s so good about it?

Not only is it a mobile telephone with a very nice big QVGA screen, it is also a GPS device. It has WiFi 802.11g. GPS / HSDPA / EDGE. A 5 megapixel Carl Zeiss camera lens. FM Radio. Text-to-speech. Stereo Bluetooth. It has landscape and portrait viewing. It has hard buttons for the media player and camera. It has a regular headphone jack (now becoming a wise standard on the NSeries handsets). It has USB for transfers to the microSD card. Shows up like a hard disk (when set to). It comes with some podcast software too, supporting OPML and RSS data very nicely. FlashLite 2 support. Phew! *takes a breath*

The built-in mobile browser on Symbian Series60 supports the input type-file tag! This is VERY important (take note Microsoft Windows Mobile). It means that it supports a standard file upload form which you see everywhere – with the bonus of a progress bar already there for you. I think all the latest Series60 browsers now support this money-saving feature. Ever see the difference in price to sending an an MMS over uploading/emailing with web access? A lot.

Oh, did I also mention that it has a TV-OUT! (Perfect for my Samsung SyncMaster171MP monitor/tuner with PiP)

AND to put the icing on the cake, Nokia are giving you the mapping for free! Amazing, though I think you might have to pay if you want ‘voice-over directions’ etc. And no doubt other info like where the nearest caffeine fix is.

Also, with the GPS capabilities, you’ll be able to store your Geo location data in the ‘EXIF data’ part of a jpeg photo taken by the camera. This will be optional.

So, this is why I built NOKLOG.COM in preparation. When I eventually get my hands on the N95, I will add maps to the system – as no doubt flickr will automatically do too since they read EXIF data all the time – and make the real world of blogging very much like the virtual world of blogging which I have cooking away over at blogHUD.com in Second Life.

Also think what Twitter will be like with real GPS data with posts. I met with people from Nokia Series60 a while ago, and asked them about seeing if we can get the GPS data available for a browser form. So we’ll see about that

Noklog will allow crossposting (as blogHUD does) to your own blog, supporting WordPress (.com and self-hosted), Blogger/blogspot (old and new accounts), LiveJournal, Typepad and Friendster.

What’s wrong about it?

The only possibly unwise move I think Nokia have done recently is to get too deep under the duvet with SixApart. For many years, Nokia have had a product called LifeBlog, where they provide a system to post your life’s txts, photos and stuff to a timeline / blog.

But from what I remember, the problem with this was that you were forced BUY a TypePad account if you wanted to blog using this software. Argh!

Due to some new abilities for developers on the new Series60 version 3.0 using .cfg files, these new N95s and some of the other models will be shipping with the ability to post your photos immediately to flickr. And also – hello again SixApart – post to a blog on a VOX.com account.

Double argh!!! If Nokia had looked around at all the most prominent Nokia based blogs there are out there, not many use Vox do they? And do you think they are about to swap their blogging systems over to a blogging system, which doesn’t output an RSS 2.0 feed – Atom only! (not to mention the most consistently vague developer docs I have ever seen)

So fear not, dear gadget-loving, pocket-burning, blogging friends. When I get the N95, I’ll have a solution out there for those of us who want to use OUR EXISTING blogging systems! A free one. With all the things I NEED to do, all right there

Where can I get one? NOW!

More reports from the blogosphere here:

Engdaget , EngadgetMobile , jkOnTheRun and a great unboxing ceremony at AllAboutSymbian

Nokia N95 Product support

Update: I have also just found something else this phone does with an app called ‘Sensor’. But that’s for another post.

Now, I have been battling with this on and off for ages. Soon Google will be moving all ‘old’ Blogger accounts over to their Google Account system. This means that all those people who have third party applications to post to their blogspot Blogger accounts will need to switch over to the Google login and system (and get a Google Account, if they don’t already have one) – rather like Yahoo! will be doing to flickr users on the Ides Of March – Beware!

All these third party apps will need to be upgraded too. The thing is, we all want security right? So, you really want to go and register your application with Google to remove the big yellow Warning box you might start seeing a lot of soon.

The documentation to do this with PHP has been non-existent, which I found pretty weird as I bet there are plenty of PHP-based systems out there offering the ability to post to Blogger. (BlogHUD is one that I created for Second Life, which is a model system for something bigger and ‘real’ I have planned soon)

So, for those of you out there who are looking to do this for your own PHP systems hop on over to this post of mine on the Google Group for Google Accounts (crossposted to the Blogger Dev Group) and see the link to the source PHP example I have provided down at the bottom of that post.

For those who can’t be arsed reading all the intro and explanation, here is a link to the PHP source example, where there are plenty of comments to explain what is going on, each step of the way.

This example only goes as far as listing a users’ blogs, after obtaining a non-expiring secure token for your users, which itself has to be generated using secure signing methods. You’ll want to use this new-found knowledge to do cool stuff like post to the users’ blogs.

http://kosso.co.uk/PHP/blogger_google_secure_AuthSub.phps

Man, am I glad to get that bug out of my head! It’s been there for months!!! I hope this helps others get the same out of theirs!

You should be able to use this example to build a connection to any of the Google services. This is just using Blogger.

I will finish by saying that WordPress support for doing the same thing is EASY!! No problems. Ever. Whatsoever. Great job! Rockin!

I’ll also add that I don’t do this sort of thing much – and by that I mean posting my code up online. But I have learned SO MUCH (if not all foundation knowledge) on the web, that doing stuff like this makes me feel good. I can feel the Karma restoring – step by step

OK. So I have recently been working to support the new Blogger / Google logins to post to Blogger blogs. I was easily able to register my app to remove the warning on the login page, but they offer no support of how to actually ‘sign’ the request to keep them secure.

I have posted to both the Blogger Data API Group and the Google Accounts API Group but it seems like I am dealing with some kind of ‘dark art’.

I think it’s a good idea to make connection for secure for people, but they are about to ‘force’ their bloggers to the new system, yet offer no support on how application developers like myself are to support this new ‘secureness’.

Even the Zend GData framework, which is available does not appear to handle the secure method required. I also cannot use this without upgrading my PHP and installing some more stuff. But there is no need, as PHP and Curl can do the job required just fine.

For those who may be able to help, here are the docs for the signing I am on about. But there’s just not enough info there on how to do it.

When I get this working, I’ll be happy to share how I did it.

Anyone got any ideas? I have the insecure method working fine.

Argh!