iPhone Netbook

According to Register Hardware, "OLO promises Foleo-style iPhone-Air laptop combo" (Tony Smith, 13th October 2008 10:50 GMT), company OLO is promising a netbook small notebook computer into which an iPhone fits. They are skeptical as to if this is a real product. It has some appeal. What might make more sense is a desktop iPhone PC.

Some months ago I went into the new Apple Store in Sydney and asked if I could plug a keyboard and screen into an iPhone, to make it a desktop computer. The staff looked at me sceptically and said they thought not. After some hunting around they found there was an adaptor for plugging an iPhone into a large screen. The iPhone also has a USB port and this should just need extra software to support a keyboard and mouse. What this would make possible is for that you could plug your iPhone into a charging cradle and then use it as a desktop computer with a large screen and keyboard. However, this would be hampered by the iPhone's limited memory and processing capacity. What might make more sense would be a low power low cost nettop computer which the iPhone would be plugged into.

A netbook could be similarly designed to slot in an iPhone, but it is not clear what advantage this would have. The netbook will have little extra battery power to recharge the iPhone and the iPhone touch screen will be little better than a netbook's pad. You might as well save all the trouble of a new mechanical design and link them with wireless.

Parrot RK8200 iPod car radio

With "In dash iPhone for Car?" I suggested having a dashboard car radio with a slot for an iPhone. Parrot have done something like this with their RK8200 car stereo / Bluetooth hands-free kit. This looks like a dashboard media unit with a small colour screen and removable head. But underneath where you would expect to find a blank panel, there is a slot to put an iPod, MP3 player or mobile phone.

The iPod or phone is plugged into the Parrot with a short cable, the iPod is then slipped into the cavity in the dashboard unit and the control unit placed over the top. The iPod or phone is then operated via the Parrot's front panel controls. The unit includes a Bluetooth handsfree unit for calls and music can be played via the car's speakers.

This is a lot more complex and expensive that I was proposing. The Parrot RK8200 is £278.10 on Amazon UK. What I had in mind was a simple car radio which could use the display and controls of the iPhone for complex functions. Instead of this the Parrot provides its own controls, display and MP3 functions. This makes it a better integrated device, but increases the cost by about ten times.

Another problem with the Parrot is that a mobile phone may not work well when inside a slot in a car dashboard. It is not clear if the Parrot has provision for an external antenna and units such as the iPhone have no provision for one. A phone may not be able to connect to a base station inside a box in the dashboard.

IFIP Digital Library on an iPhone

A few weeks ago I sent out a request for people to test the IFIP Digital Library I am helping set up. One reply complained about the sideways scrolling needed. I didn't understand what this was about until I happened to be in the foyer of Apple's offices in Sydney. There was an iPod touch on demonstration and so I typed in the IFIP DL address. The web page came up but with a very narrow column of text, too small to read. I used the iPod's pinch interface to zoom out and it was readable. I was also able to select a paper and read the full PDF text on the little screen. I don't know how many will want to read technical ICT research papers on a pocket size device, but it was impressive it worked.

But why did the text start out so small? I noticed the banner image in a thin strip across the top of the page. IFIP wanted the Digital Library to have the same corporate look as the rest of their web site. So I had to work out how to change the standard interface of the Open Journal Systems (OJS) free open source publishing software to have IFIP's colours and layout. Changing the colours was not too hard, but getting the layout was harder. I used an extra CSS style sheet, which OJS has provision for, to override the defaults. This was made a little more complicated as I wanted a design which would be efficient in the use of bandwidth, would be accessible for the disabled and work on hand held devices.

One compromise I made was to use the same banner as on IFIP's home page. But what I hadn't noticed was that this image was thousands of pixels wide. The image was trimmed to fit the full screen width, using CSS on their site. But in my implementation the banner made the page wider. This did not normally matter as the extra was off the side of the screen. But the Apple Safari web browser shrank the page to fit the whole width of the banner, reducing the column of text under it in proportion and making it tiny. The iPhone presumably does this as scrolling sideways on the tiny screen is a problem.

The most efficient way to fix this problem is to trim the image to the width of a typical screen (it is a waste to send an image and then have the browser throw away half of it). I did this and it worked fine on my own display. I then got more adventurous and decided to remove the text "International Federation for Information Processing " from the banner. Good design says that you should not have text in an image as this is harder to read and makes the image larger. So I carefully blurred out the text, told OJS to insert it as text and then changed the CSS to put the banner image under the text.

Aligning the text with the IFIP banner so it looked like the original took a lot of trial and error. The result is not perfect: the original text has a grey shadow around it which can't be reproduced easily with CSS (current browsers do not support CSS's text shadow function). I then spent hours trying to duplicate the shadow in a portable way, before realising this was a waste of time. But then I thought it did not look too bad and looks much better for people who can't see the image.

However, when I looked at the result on a higher resolution screen (at the National Library of Australia) I found the shortened image did not fill the whole screen and was being repeated. I will need to make the image longer, stretch it to fit or just fill the space with plain color.

Also I find that I had changed the "Contents" screen earlier to insert the banner. To do this I had to change the OJS source code. The result was that the system was inserting two copies of the banner one over the other. I will need to manually adjust the code.

Garmin nüvifone

Garmin have announced the "nüvifone", which is a sort of iPhone for sailors, with a 3.5-inch touchscreen GPS navigation and 3G mobile phone in a handheld gadget. It has a camera which will tag images with the latitude and longitude of where the photo was taken (but not what direction the camera was pointing). This can then be interfaced to Google’s Panoramio photo search. There are not a lot of specifications released about the unit, but I expect it will be much thicker than the iPod Touch (which is so slim I found it hard to hold). Also I expect we will see a lot more gadgets of this sort of device.

iPhone as a desktop PC replacement?

The Apple iPhone and iPod Touch both have DVI output and USB from the connector socket. In theory at least it should be possible to have a connector costing less than $100 to plug the Apple iPhone into a standard USB keyboard, mouse and VGA screen. This would allow the iPhone to be used as a web terminal. From the blogs I have read, the iPhone software doesn;t currently support standard keyboards and mice, .

Automatically Adjusting Web Pages for the Apple iPhone and iPod Touch

About a year ago I wrote about how to adapt web pages for devices, such as the iPhone for emergency management. One problem pointed out was that the iPhone does not think it is a handheld device and so does not activate a stylesheet intended for such a device (using media="handheld"). Daniel K. Appelquist quoted Apple's suggested code for using a special stylesheet for and iPhone:

link media="only screen and (max-device-width: 480px)" href="small-device.css" type="text/css" rel="stylesheet"

As he points out, this will not just detect iPhones, but any device with a screen width of 480 pixels or smaller. Few mobile devices have web browsers which support the media query syntax. Presumably this will work with an iPod Touch.

I have now included this in my code for "Adapting web pages for the Apple iPhone and iPod Touch". If someone would like to try that on an iPghone or iPod Touch, I can then advise the Sahana developers if they should include it in their system.

In dash iPhone for Car?

There are various holders for iPhones and iPod touches in cars, but no one so far seems to have thought to build it into the dashboard. Unlike the average smart phone or PDA, the iPhone and touch can be used in the landscape position. In this position, the screen is about the size and shape of a small entertainment/navigation screen in an upmarket car. Provide a low cost radio and amplifier with a socket for the iPhone to fit in the standard radio dashboard space and you could have a touch screen communications and entertainment system for under $US100 (not including the cost of the iPhone).

An example of this approach is the Eclipse AVN2210P: a dashboard media hub, with a removable TomTom navigation unit. This system got mixed reviews, some good and some bad. This is a large unit, so it will not fit some cars and it is designed to provide a CD and MP3 player, even without the TomTom installed and so is large and expensive. But a similar device, smaller and cheaper, could be made for an iPhone.

An iPhone is 115×61×11.6 mm and the iPod touch is 110×61.8×8 mm. This is a bit taller than the standard slot in a car dashboard for a radio: 180 x 50 mm (the so called "DIN car radio size" DIN 75490 ISO 7736). The iPhone could be accommodated in a double DIN (180 x 100 mm panel) slot (as used by the Eclipse) or simply by having the iPod/iPhone protrude a few mm outside the slot (the average car radio has a surround a few mm bigger). The iPhone is 65 mm shorter than the DIN slot, leaving enough space for a volume control , digital display and some radio controls.

When the iPhone was not in place, the car would still have a working radio. With the iPhone plugged in there would be phone, MP3 and other functions provided via the touch screen. The car unit could be made at very low cost with simple analog electronics, with all the sophisticated functions provided by the iPhone.

As the dashboard unit would only contain a minimum of electronics, it could be made about 10 mm deep and so could also be mounted on a flat surface or on a dashboard top mount, when a dashboard slot is not available. The unit could be made as a removable head, like some car radios. The same unit could then also be used as a desktop dock for the iPhone in the home or office, with some low cost speakers and a power supply attached.

The iPhone does not have a GPS receiver built in. However, the connector on the iPhone includes a USB interface and so the docking unit could pass these signals through to a USB connector for use with an inexpensive external USB GPS receiver. Alternatively a Bluetooth GPS receiver could be used (the iPod touch lacks Bluetooth, but has USB).

See also:

• Eclipse AVN2210p CD receiver with detachable TomTom portable navigator
• Books about the iPhone
• iPhone and iPod Touch Accessories
• iPhone Car Mounts
  
• iPod Touch Car Mounts

Open Source Alternative to the iPhone

Recommended:

Australian Computer Society

Green IT Special Interest Group

In Conjunction with the ACS SQA SIG

August Canberra Meeting

Topic: Open Source Alternative to the iPhone

Speaker: Dr. Shayne Flint, Department of Computer Science, The Australian National University

Venue: Australian National University, Room N101, Computer Science Building, North Road, Canberra
Date: Wednesday 15 August 2007
Time: 5:30pm drinks/nibbles for presentation 6pm-7pm
Event Prices: Free.
Registration: Not required
Announcement: http://education.acs.org.au/mod/resource/view.php?id=3636

Summary

Dr. Flint will demonstrate the software development kit for the OpenMoko "Open Source" mobile phone. While the Apple iPhone has been getting media attention, another touch phone has been quietly under development by the Linux community and will be first to market in Australia. OpenMoko is set to revolutionize mobile communications by providing the power of Linux in a hand held touch screen device. Shayne will discuss some of the software engineering projects being formulated for use with the phones location sensitive and wireless communications features.

Shayne will use the OpenMoko device to demonstrate the ANU's new "ANU Mobile" web service, which has just been released.

Tom Worthington, Chair of the ACS Green IT Group, backs the move to mobiles, arguing that low power handheld devices with open access applications can be used to make a positive contribution to environmental sustainability. Power hungry desktop computers can in many cases be replaced with mobile devices. Some trips can be replaced with ad-hoc wireless meetings, using Web 2.0 "social networking" making further fossil fuel savings.

About the Speaker

Dr Shayne Flint is a Senior Lecturerat the Department of Computer Science, Australian National University, where he teaches Software Engineering. Dr. Flint is the originator of Aspect-Oriented Thinking, an approach that systematically develops, manages and integrates the knowledge and expertise of many disciplines to develop complex software systems.

About ACS Green IT

The ICT Environmental Sustainability Group ("Green IT") brings together professionals interested in balancing economic and environmental aspects of information technology and telecommunications. It is a special interest group of the Australian Computer Society. The group aims to hold joint meetings with other professional bodies interested in technology, the environment and sustainability. Sign up now to get updates on ICT and the environment.

iPhone for emergency management

The iPhoneWebDev is providing a discussion forum for developing applications for the iPhone. A simple way to provide an applciation is by adapting a web interface. So I asked the forum if the Sahana disaster management system works on it. So far I have had two replies. The first reply indicated that it worked reasonably well. The second indicated some problems:

* Sidebar too narrow: This could be fixed if the iPhone accepts the CSS media type of "handheld". We can then automatically replace the sidebar with a menu the full width of the screen, when an iPhone, or other smart phone is used. I have asked the community to test this using my old Sahana prototype on the iPhone. On a desktop PC the menu should appear as a bullet list on the right of the screen. On a handheld device it should appear as a numbered list at the top, taking up the full width of the screen.

* Incident / language too small: The text for the form on the top right of the page for setting the language and selecting the incident needs to be made larger.

* Wrong tab: Using "next" (equivalent to the TAB key on a PC) caused the pointer to jump from "Incident" at the top of the screen down to "login", skipping the menu. As per the web accessibility guidelines the logical tab order should be used. This can be changed using the tabindex attribute. But generally the natural order of left to right, top to bottom (for English readers) should be used.

Web development for the iPhone

The iPhoneWebDev is providing a discussion forum for developing applications for the iPhone. They refer to portable Web 2.0 applications. I have asked the forum if someone with a phone can try the Sahana disaster management system. The iPhone has a bigger screen than many other smartphones so may be useful for use by emergency workers (assuming it is robust enough).

Also Tom Yager has suggested using email to get around the lack of an accessible file storage on the iPhone. You email the data to the phone as an attachment and then the appropriate application can access it. Of course if you used something like the Open Moko Neo1973 Smartphone you would have the Linux file system available.

There was also an iPhone Developer Camp recently in the USA. But I would not want to become locked into developing applications just for the iPhone. I have provided some general tips on how to adapt web applications for smartphones, including the iPhone. The idea here is to avoid having to build web applications just for the phones and instead make pages for desktop screens compatible.

In several years of teaching web design I have seen many proposals for hand held web businesses come and go. So far few outside Japan and some other Asian countries, have
managed to make money from mobile data.

iPhone Smartphone problem for Olympics

On the second day of the China East Asia New Media Conference in Brisbane one of the speakers on a panel before me mentioned the Apple iPhone as an innovative product. Departing from my prepared talk, I pointed out that the Open Moko Neo1973 Smartphone may be more significant. The Neo may be seen as a poor man's iPhone, when in some ways it is more capable.

However, given iPhones are getting attention and may well be the first hand held web device most people see, I thought it was worth preparing a short item on how web pages can be adapted to the iPhone.

If such phones become common by 2008, the organizers of the 2008 Olympics could have a problem. The TV rights have been sold by the IOC. But if thousands of people use video phones to transmit coverage of the events, it would be possible to mashup a reasonable Olympic coverage from them. This would likely be illegal and something the TV companies which have paid billions of dollars for would not be happy about, but which BOCOG could do little about.

Even if this is not feasible for 2008, it is certain for the London 2010 Olympics. This is something the researchers from Westminster University, and other institutions researching for the 2012 Olympic Games in London should look into.

As an example of the type of technology which might be used,Microsoft's Photosynth Technology Preview shows how thousands of photos can be automatically combined to create a high resolution three dimensional image:

Our software takes a large collection of photos of a place or an object, analyzes them for similarities, and displays them in a reconstructed three-dimensional space.

With Photosynth you can:

* Walk or fly through a scene to see photos from any angle.
* Seamlessly zoom in or out of a photo whether it's megapixels or gigapixels in size.
* See where pictures were taken in relation to one another.
* Find similar photos to the one you're currently viewing.
* Send a collection - or a particular view of one - to a friend.

From: Introducing Photosynth, Microsoft Live Labs, 2006

HTML 5 V XHTML 2 web schism

The HTML 5 Editor's Draft, 28 June 2007, was prepared by Ian Hickson at Google and David Hyatt at Apple:

"This specification defines the 5th major revision of the core language of the World Wide Web, HTML. In this version, new features are introduced to help Web application authors, new elements are introduced based on research into prevailing authoring practices, and special attention has been given to defining clear conformance criteria for user agents in an effort to improve interoperability."

HTML 5 appears to be a philosophical split from XHTML 2. Whereas XHTML 2 is for representing documents on screens and print, HTML 5 seems to be for interactive computer interfaces. For example:

"XHTML2 [XHTML2] defines a new HTML vocabulary with better features for hyperlinks, multimedia content, annotating document edits, rich metadata, declarative interactive forms, and describing the semantics of human literary works such as poems and scientific papers.

However, it lacks elements to express the semantics of many of the non-document types of content often seen on the Web. For instance, forum sites, auction sites, search engines, online shops, and the like, do not fit the document metaphor well, and are not covered by XHTML2. "

Much of the philosophy of HTML 5 seems to be embedded in the Apple iPhone. But that device can use ordinary old HTML web pages with CSS to adapt web pages for iPhones and other smartphones.

Also the tone of the document, especially the editor's comments, seem to be much more confrontational, than XHTML's academic style. The HTML 5 editors are essentially saying that they are going to produce a usable standard and so everyone either needs to get on board or get out of their way. An example is:

"Implementors should be aware that this specification is not stable. Implementors who are not taking part in the discussions are likely to find the specification changing out from under them in incompatible ways. Vendors interested in implementing this specification before it eventually reaches the Candidate Recommendation stage should join the aforementioned mailing lists and take part in the discussions."

Much of what the authors are saying makes sense, but the way they are saying it is likely to not go down well in consensus based forums.