Reading and Writing files to the SD card on the a780

Just in case you needed to read/write files to the SD card on the a780, I just came across how to do that today. It's not really documented anywhere although if you use the "listRoots()" method you can find it out. Note that it's "SD" and not "SDCard" as the JSR would lead you to believe.

FileConnection sc = (FileConnection)Connector.open("file:///SD/myFile.txt");
OutputStream os = sc.openOutputStream();

MoSoSo resources...

I just wanted to forward on to you a list of "useful resources" compiled by the participants of the Mobile Social Software workshop at CHI this year. As you guys start to think about your final reports, you might find some of these helpful. A lot are overlap from the list I put together on the course home page, but many are new.

Google Calendar

For those looking for a calendar with a nice open API, google just launched Google Calendar today. It provides iCal and XML feeds for your calendar and lets you subscribe to other people's calendars as well.

EclipseME setup and other common problems

Hey everyone, since so many people had problems getting EclipseME to work I'm posting a troubleshooter here.

calendar on A780?

does anyone know how to access calendar on A780? I know that there is a program called calendar on it, but I was wondering if there is any JAVA API that allows developers to access calendar functions on the phone.

Easy tu use GUI designer for J2ME

I found this GUI design application called J2ME Polish J2MEPolish.org

Thus appears to be a very nice GUI designer. Has anyone vas tried it out?

Software turns laptops into navigators

Software turns laptops into navigators
Loki system melds global positioning, WiFi to find services -- from Boston GLOBE
A Boston company is giving away software that can turn nearly any laptop computer into a global positioning system, enabling users to find the nearest restaurant, hospital, or gas station at the touch of a button.
http://www.boston.com/business/globe/articles/2006/03/23/software_turns_laptops_into_navigators/

Communicating with Bluetooth aka "toothing"

I found this article on MSNBC. It talks about how people have started to use bluetooth to communicate and arrange meetings with each other.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/11763070/

Flickr + mobiles + location

From Marc Davis' research at Berkeley through his Yahoo Research Lab in Berkeley this is an app for series 60 that attaches cell ID to a photo and then tags your photo in flickr with location tags that others have used for that cell id.

http://zonetag.research.yahoo.com/zonetag/

GPS/Location thread

I found an useful reference for GPS/Location-based services. It turns out SUN has a so-called location API. The link is at
http://developers.sun.com/techtopics/mobility/apis/articles/location/
One caveat: You have to download Sun Java Wireless Toolkit 2.3 Beta in order to use javax.microedition.location reference that contains Location API

write gps-related reference that you may find into this thread...

GPS and compiling JAR for phone?

Hi, has anyone been able to get a GPS fix on A780? Are there any special settings required? I was not able to get the fix, and the radar symbol on top of the screen is still greyed out.

Another question on an unrelated topic -- have any of you guys been able to compile an application in Eclipse for cell phone using J2ME? That would be great if you could share instructions on how to do this, assuming that Motorola Toolkit and J2ME are installed.

MoSoSo papers

There's a collection of papers on Mobile Social Software that might be relevant to some of your projects posted on the web. These are position papers (so not a lot of detail) that will be discussed at a workshop at CHI (ACM Conference on Human Computer Interaction) this spring.

Cell Social Network

I found this startup ( http://www.moblastic.com ) that seems to be doing a lot of the stuff that we talked about in class as far as social networks.

You may want to sign up for their invite list to check out the service once its out of beta, it may give some good ideas if you are thinking of doing something similar.

SIM card update

For those who needed SIM cards, they are on their way to coming. After dealing with some corporate-ness (lots of phone calls and lots of form-filling-out), I managed to get 10 cards at a discounted rate without contract. They'll be shipping them to me early next week, and I hope to get them to all of you by Friday. They will be Cingular with no voice service and have 20MB/month of data. They are in a pooled plan, so some people can go over 20MB as long as some people don't use that much. The MB possibly roll over from month to month, but I'm not sure on this yet. Anyway, not totally ideal, but that should be sufficient for everything you guys need to do.

If any projects think they need much more data than that, let me know and I'll let you know the additional cost for adding significantly more data to the SIM. We need to figure out payment for these, but just budget $90 for the semester as we had mentioned earlier and Ed and I will figure out a way to get that money to the appropriate place at some point.