I’ve been using Bloglines for a while now to keep up to date with RSS feeds and their associated sites, including news, webcomics, blogs and so on. It’s a great web application for organising feeds and keeping track of which articles are unread. It also has the added perk of grabbing the contents of feeds even when I’m offline, ready for me to read when I log in next.

The problem with Bloglines is that it’s buggy, occasionally failing to actually display feeds, and quite resource hungry for the browser such that mobile browsers – even on the powerhouse that is the N900 – struggle with it. It’s also not very finger friendly for the aforementioned device.

Therefore, I decided to put together my own tool that reproduces the functionality I enjoy from Bloglines, while being better suited to a mobile browser – including a certain amount of finger friendliness. It’s not quite finished yet, and the it doesn’t download any content when you’re offline, but I think I should at least offer a link to my project to the outside world.

And so, I present, GaliRSS (yes, it really needs a better name…)

Beyond what I’ve already mentioned, a handful of its features include (in no particular order):

• An AJAX driven interface – almost no reason to reload the page.
• Caching of feed content, so feed content can be read later even after it drops out of the feed itself. The cache is currently limited to up to 4 weeks of history.
• If a feed only offers excerpts of content, the actual content can be either loaded in a new browser window/tab, or in an iframe within GaliRSS – no need to leave the site if you don’t want to.
• Feeds can be organised into groups of similarly themed content, available from a sidebar (which can be collapsed or hidden entirely).
• Feed items can be ‘pinned’ to read later.
• The feed list can either show all unclicked (unread) items, or items from a single feed, or items from a group of feeds, or pinned items.
• A ‘cleanup’ button is provided to hide clicked items. Clicking it a second time will reveal them all again.
• Each feed is colour coded, with a ‘strong’ colour picked at random for each new feed. This colour can be changed easily.
• Usage of GaliRSS is quite customisable from the Settings page.

At present, it doesn’t support authenticated feeds, or feeds with a https:// url (ie. http:// only)

Note that it’s not entirely break-proof at the moment. I also couldn’t completely guarantee the security of it at this stage.

Comments are welcome, and I’ll probably keep working on it for a while yet – but it is provided with no official warranty or support for now.

One thing that I did appreciate about the n900 was that doing a complete flashing of the firmware didn’t wipe things like the text message log, and a lot of application settings survive presumably by being safely stored in the mass storage somewhere. Sadly, the downside of this is that when an application breaks (most notably in my case, the built in Ovi Maps), there’s no obvious way to fix it, including reflashing the firmware. Nokia do, however, offer blank image of for the mass storage that you can ‘flash’ onto the device. Before doing this though, I’d like to take a copy of a few things that I do want to keep…

Anyway, whatever your reason, taking a copy of your SMS / IM / call log is actually pretty simple. All it needs is a command to be executed within a terminal window.

Before doing this, I would recommend installing an SSH server (available from the Application Manager) and using a tool like Putty to connect to your device so you can use a normal keyboard and/or cut and paste from here…

Start out by opening a terminal and using cd to find a directory you want to put the backup in – the default location is probably fine if you’re using a terminal on your phone. Otherwise, you might want to do something like cd /home/user/MyDocs/ before doing anything else.

The following command, tweaked slightly from here, will dump all of the data from your phone’s communication database into a file called output.html:

sqlite3 -html /home/user/.rtcom-eventlogger/el.db “SELECT start_time,service_id,event_type_id,free_text, remote_uid FROM Events ORDER BY start_time DESC;” > output.html

This will create a file called output.html, which you can copy to your PC. For some browsers to view the file properly, you may need to open it in a text editor and add <html><table> to the top and </table></html> to the end – the command seems to omit these parts.

Once you’ve got the file open in a browser, a couple of the columns could benefit from some explanation. They’re displayed in the order they were mentioned in the command (there are no headings in the file):

• start_time: The time the item ‘began’, I presume. For text messages/IMs, this would be the time it arrived/was sent, whereas for calls it represents the beginning of the call.
• service_id: 1 for a call, 2 for an IM, 3 for SMS.
• event_type: This value depends on the service_id – there are two values for each. The larger value represents sent (outgoing) items, and the smaller represents received (incoming) items. For instance, for SMS (service_id is 3), the event_types for sent and received are 6 and 5 respectively.
• free_text: The actual text content of the message. Blank for calls.
• remote_uid: For calls and SMS, this is the phone number of the remote phone. For IM, this is the email address or screenname of the other half of the conversation.

Of course, there’s no easy way to restore the messages to the database afterwards – though some clever coding could probably pull it off. There is a Backup/Restore feature built into the phone if you want to go down this route, but personally I’m loosely planning a complete wipe and would like a stash of my old content stored somewhere, just in case there’s something I want to come back to later.

I recently started keeping up with Leo Laporte’s TWIT podcasts, with its very American technology content with accompanying chatter. While it is very much put together from a US of A perspective, they do make nods to us over here in Europe where its relevant, and he and his guests genuinely seem to be having a good time. Anyway, they have a habit of mentioning technologies, software and links that inspire my curiousity. Since I’m often out and about while listening, and don’t want to be distracted from the podcast too much, I note things down on my trusty N900 to look up later. Given this usually inspires only 2 or 3 items per podcast, I suspect that these may be a source of many posts on here in the future, given my current track record of posting at least. It’s certainly more manageable than trying to put up content covering everything I think is cool on Engadget or Gizmodo…

The first, small item I want to mention is gdgt.com, which seems like a pretty cool idea, at least for gadget lovers out there. It’s also worth noting that it’s the brainchild of the previous founders of the two major aforementioned technology blogs…

Gdgt (GDGT? gdgt?) is something of a social network for people and their gadgets, and that’s about it. You’ve got your normal list of friends and a profile as with any other social site, and it’ll let you hook into big names like Facebook, Twitter and Gmail to find more friends automatically. What it then does is give you the ability to add gadgets to your profile, under the categories of “Have”, “Had” or “Want” to represent your relationship to this gadget. Personally, I somewhat would have liked a couple more categories – notably “Used” and “Have Access To” to represent those I’ve played with, or those that are owned by family/housemates living in the same building – or that are available to me in my workplace. That said, I suspect they were aiming for the tried and tested intention to keep things simple.

The site then goes to offer you the chance to discuss and review gadgets (whether they’re linked to your profile or not) and to look up the gadgets your friends have against your name. There’s also a news feed, which seems to display news about random gadgets, and a ‘features’ page which seems to contain blog posts and news updates from those behind the site itself.

The site very much feels like it’s just starting up still. The functionality they have in place is solid, and just about unique enough to stand out in the world of social networks. There’s a lot they could do in the future too, which would be great as long as they keep it simple. Ideas that sprung to mind off hand included:

• Finding other users with the same gadget(s) as you? Perhaps the ability to search based on an overlap of a specific number of gadgets, 1 – n (where n is the number you have on your profile). Connecting this up with a location based search would have a lot of potential – I’d love to know how many other N900 or Gigabyte T1028X owners there are in my corner of the world, for instance.
• It would be nice if the news feed could be (optionally) toggled to only show news about gadgets you have on one of your lists (either all of them or specifically). There’s a lot of news about the next iPhone appearing, and to be honest I’m not that interested at the moment.
• Going a step further, the site has some awareness of manufacturers behind devices. It would be cool if the site’s news feed could offer me news specific to them, so I can see what’s coming up in the future. After all, Nokia just announced the N8, and there’s no sign of that on there.
• It’s nice that users can ‘like’ news posts and rate gadgets, and that you can get a view of what’s popular as a result, but it would be nice to develop this on the social side a bit more, giving me more feedback from my friends, or from others in my corner of the world. I imagine they could pull out some really interesting figures about what gadgets are used where as their membership builds up…

Of course, the site is still in beta, so there’s a long way for them to go yet. I just hope that they can get some distance along that road before someone else comes along overtakes them.

In the same vein, I signed up for Twitter to fall in behind other tech-enthusiasts everywhere. I posted occasionally, but tried to keep up with my friends’ activities more often. This was assisted by my Nokia N97 after purchasing a license for Gravity. This made using Twitter an absolute pleasure, and I found myself posting (slightly) more often and glancing at the updates from others throughout the day. However, I then shifted over to my Nokia N900, and its inability to run any Twitter apps even close to Gravity in quality and features…

I tried a number of apps written for the N900 – Mauku and Witter to name a couple. They did an OK job, but generally felt a bit clunky or scruffily presented. It then dawned on me that the N900 is designed to be ‘always connected’ and has a blindingly good web browser built in, so I tried out dabr. This site claims to be a ‘mobile web interface to Twitter’s API’, and it certainly succeeds at that. In the absence of Gravity it would have been a fantastic tool for use on my N96 or N97 in the past. For the N900, with the high resolution screen, the text was just too small and the links were far from finger-friendly.

It was at this point that I started to consider writing my own Twitter client. My development skills for Maemo are far from perfect, and I came to the conclusion I wanted something that I could use on multiple platforms anyway, so something web based seemed to be the way forward. I decided it would have to be finger friendly, but ideally in a way that wasn’t too intrusive when I used it from a desktop browser.

PHP and Javascript are my current languages of choice for web development, so I set to work on decyphering the Twitter API (not a difficult task) and exploring code examples for actually pulling data out of Twitter.

It was around this point where I happened upon TweetGo.net, which already seemed to do the basics of what I was planning – a finger friendly UI for Twitter. However, it’s also in its early stages, and lacks a few features that I’d like to see in a client – which would recreate a lot of the functionality and ease of use of Gravity.

And so, GaliTwit was born. You can check it out in current (also early) form by following this link, or from the link I’ll shortly add to the navigation bar at the top of this site. I’ll hopefully write some more posts about it in due course to cover what features it already supports, and what I plan to implement in the future.

What they don’t tell you is that since the days of the n900 and perhaps before, it’s been possible to work with some Office documents, including quite sophisticated editing of said documents.

Word Files

Easy as pie – all that’s needed is AbiWord, which is quite happy to read, edit and save Word 2003 documents. I don’t remember whether its in the Extras or Extras-devel repositories, but it’s already waiting to be installed on the device if you have them both there.

Excel files

This one’s a bit more complicated as gnumeric isn’t yet in a repository for the n900. However, Maemo is quite willing to let some older stuff install, if you do it from a Terminal window with root.

I’ve adapted the instructions for this from here and here, though with the slight change in that I’ve mirrored the .deb files locally for convenience.

And there you have it, a gnumeric icon should make its way into your menu, ready to run.

Or there’s OpenOffice

It is possible to get the full OpenOffice suite running on a n900, thanks to the easy-debian package (also available in Extras or Extras-devel already as ‘easy-chroot’ if I recall correctly), but this does come with the requirement for downloading a debian image over 1Gb in size to your device (fortunately, it can be stored in the larger chunk of space on a n900), and then the performance isn’t quite as great. However, I imagine it does offer significantly more power when it comes to working with documents, and it’ll work with many more file formats, including Powerpoint…

So, my first trick (after playing with installing a load of software from the application catalogues and a few things from Ovi Store) was to get set up so that I could do things with my phone from my PC without letting go of my keyboard and mouse. On my previous Nokia phones, I had some success with RemoteS60 once upon a time (though it always seemed a bit unreliable) to view and interact with my phone’s screen, but that wasn’t free to use. Nokia’s PC Suite (and Ovi Suite) software offered a range of features for working with contacts, calendars, text messages and generally moving content to and fro, but none of that is readily available for the N900…

So I turned my attention to VNC, a technology for interacting with other computers’ desktops that is great for its cross platform compatibility, but has somewhat fallen in popularity with the advent of Microsoft’s Remote Desktop, and various other third party technical support solutions to remote control for support purposes.

I was glad to see that everything I needed was already available, so here’s what I did to get it all set up, with a little oddity to be aware of noted at the end.

Note that in order to get everything working, root access is needed. This is easily achieved by downloading the gainroot package and then using sudo gainroot in a terminal window.

First, I downloaded a VNC Viewer for my PC (TightVNC was an old favourite of mine, and offers a nicer UI than the ‘official’ VNC client) and downloaded the x11vnc package on the n900, which is just available from the extras repository.

I grabbed a widget for my desktop so I could have my current IP address visible – I tend to hop between different wifi networks at home and work, and don’t have the benefits of a consistent IP address in either location, so having it visible quickly helps.

Now, at this point everything does just work. I can run x11vnc on my device and connect to it with VNC Viewer, and find myself happily remote controlling my N900. However, it’s not incredibly secure – anyone that guesses my IP address can do the same. So, here’s how to add a password for some basic security:

Open a Terminal window, and get root access. Personally, I have SSH installed and opted to do this in a Putty window from my PC.

x11vnc -storepasswd

This doesn’t actually launch x11vnc, but instead prompts for a password. This is the password that will be needed every time VNC Viewer connects.

However, this stores the resulting password in a directory called .vnc in the root user’s home directory. Time to move it somewhere more useful, with the following command:

cp .vnc/passwd /home/user/.vnc/

I’m not sure whether it is necessarily, but I also threw in a chown user:users on the passwd file to ensure it was owned by the ‘user’ account.

By default, x11vnc doesn’t know to use the password that’s been created so, still armed with the root terminal, a small change needs to be made elsewhere. Time for the following to get where we need to be:

cd /usr/share/applications/hildon/

The file we want to edit is x11vnc.desktop. The n900 comes with vi installed for terminal-based text editing, but others exist – leafpad is quite popular I hear, though I stuck my old friend nano onto my N900 from the fremantle/tools repository (instructions part way down this forum post).

We find the line that reads:

Exec=/usr/bin/x11vnc

and change it to:

Exec=/usr/bin/x11vnc -usepw -remap Return-KP_Enter

There’s an extra bit on the end there designed to remap the way the Return key works from VNC. By default, it triggers the on-screen keyboard (if enabled), and so this remapping changes the behaviour so that Return sends an Enter keycode (the key on the numpad of most keyboards) so get the expected behaviour.

And now we’re set to go. Start x11vnc on the device, and VNC Viewer can, after the password has been entered, connect to the device’s IP address. It’s worth noting that x11vnc only accepts a single session before closing. To make it remain open, a -forever tag needs to be added to the command line above, though I opted against this personally.

However, I found one small problem with x11vnc (I’m not sure if others have had similar issues). After connecting to it, a process running on my n900 seems to go crazy, maxing out the CPU (and draining battery life rapidly).

I find the process by running top from a terminal and looking for /usr/bin/maemo-xinput-sounds at the top. Interestingly, for the first time when writing this article the problem didn’t occur, which makes me wonder whether having the Media Player open in the background prevents it. Either way the problem is resolved by simply using the kill command followed by its process number. This doesn’t seem to have any negative effect on the device, though I tend to reboot my device after using VNC just in case…

And there you have it, remote control of the N900 from a PC – ideal for when you’re hard at work on a full size keyboard and don’t want to context switch your fingers onto a smaller device. It’s not perfect, and if there are issues with VNC not responding to clicks, take a look at the advice from Forum Nokia.

The decision did not come lightly, but it was a long time coming. I love Symbian, and will continue to do so. I expect that in 18 months time when my contract next comes up for renewal, I will be tempted to go back.

As I always do as my current contract comes to its end, I looked at what I do with my phone on a daily or weekly basis, considered what I was interested in being able to do, and then looked at the options out there. A previous blog post looks at some of these things.

It was obvious that I was going to look at a new smartphone, with plenty of functionality and software that would break it out of the ‘phoning/texting’ device and into the realms of an always-connected mobile computer. Ultimately, it became quite clear that most of the ‘popular’ smartphones out there wouldn’t satisfy my needs. I wanted to stick with a large, high resolution touch screen (Blackberry out of the question, iPhone weak). I wanted an open platform that would let me install a range of applications, ideally chosen from a pool of useful tools that weren’t blocked by a strict QA process (iPhone now out of the question). It needed a decent camera, hardware keyboard, plenty of on-board storage and generally good hardware supporting a responsive, well thought out UI.

While the N900 lets itself down in a few arbitrary areas (why is there no MMS support, Nokia?), it was quite apparent that it was the only device that satisfied the things I was looking for. In fact, the only other device that came close was the Nokia N97 (and its little brother the N97 mini), and I wasn’t keen on upgrading to what I already had. A look at the internal specs of the N900 and some visual reviews of its blindingly quick interface had me sold – no more jerky interface or RAM issues that had been plaguing my N97 when I really pushed it.

Given I spend a fair amount of time on the web, the iPhone did get a brief consideration, based on its supposedly having the best mobile browsing experience out there. So I looked at the n900′s browser a little more closely, and what followed cemented my decision. While the N900 lacks multitouch gestures, its browser makes up for it by essentially being a full, lightning fast version of Firefox (albeit with no Firefox branding) with full Javascript and Flash support… and the N900 has the hardware to handle it well. It doesn’t quite manage 100/100 on the acid3 test, but it gets close. Combine it with the very nice 800 pixel wide screen and it was onto a winner.

So, I’m happy with my N900. I’ll probably be even more happy once I’ve stopped installing random junk and experimenting, and have something that I can use on a day to day basis. The biggest risk is that I will hack into place a number of bits and pieces that aren’t possible outside a hackable-Linux environment and will ultimately put myself into a position where I cannot go back to Symbian. On the other hand, maybe Symbian in its journey from Symbian^1 to Symbian^4 over the next year will get its user interface sorted and earn its place at the top once again (despite it never actually letting go of it in terms of sales).

And as a passing note, the N900 seems to succeed where just about all other Nokia phones fail by having a battery meter that represents how much battery is genuinely left, rather than a seemingly arbitrary scale that’s apparently adjusted based on current use.

The phone I want most at the moment is probably the Nokia N900. It has amazing hardware specifications, and a pretty funky operating system and software community behind it. However, it doesn’t appear to be available on O2 and while it is expected to appear on O2 unlike other recent Nokia flagships, there’s presently no ETA.

But it got me thinking… if I find myself looking to other handsets, possibly even outside the Nokia box, what do I actually need in a phone? What do I actually use in my current handset that I would ‘feel’ the lack of?

There are a number of features that I use in my phone on a daily basis, and others that I use from time to time but could maybe live without.

It’s Upgrade Time for me, and while I find myself quite happy with my Nokia N97, that doesn’t mean I want to pass up the opportunity to get my hands on a shiny piece of new hardware. After all, the sooner I upgrade, the sooner I can do it again next time around – and Symbian^4, Maemo 6, the next Android and iPhone and who knows what else should be out by then.The phone I want most at the moment is probably the Nokia N900. It has amazing hardware specifications, and a pretty funky operating system and software community behind it. However, it doesn’t appear to be available on O2 and while it is expected to appear on O2 unlike other recent Nokia flagships, there’s presently no ETA.

But it got me thinking… if I find myself looking to other handsets, possibly even outside the Nokia box, what do I actually need in a phone? What do I actually use in my current handset that I would ‘feel’ the lack of?

There are a number of features that I use in my phone on a daily basis, and others that I use from time to time but could maybe live without. Here I shall consider them, largely for my own reference…

• Phone: Clearly I need a device that can make and receive calls. It also needs to be able to store contacts, totalling in the hundreds, with details beyond just their name and number (such as email address, address, notes, photos, etc)
• Messaging: The ability to send and receive text messages is also a given, including those longer than 160 characters. Similarly, the device needs the capacity to store a few thousand messages (I never delete anything) without grinding to a halt – being able to archive old messages into folders is good too. I don’t use MMS often, but it’s nice if it’s there.
• Decent Camera: 2 or 3 megapixels is not enough. My experience is that a phone needs at least 5 megapixels of camera goodness so that they are of good quality where I need them. More megapixels makes little difference in this regard, but less is no good as they will likely be unpleasantly grainy and awkward to make usable. Decent optics helps – something that only Nokia have really pulled off, unfortunately.
• Touch screen: Ever since my Psion Series 5, I had been missing a touch screen in my ‘main device’. My N97 brought back the touchscreen to my world, and I would rather not go without again.
• Good text input: I’ve never met a good on-screen keyboards – not a proper keyboard anyway. My N97 has a decent hardware QWERTY keyboard, and a good onscreen method of text input through reproducing a phone keypad including T9 predictive text (therefore allowing one handed input). If I had a good hardware QWERTY, I could probably live without the onscreen T9, but the next point may come into play…
• One handed operation: I could probably live without this. With my old Psion Series 5 it wasn’t an option, and I found text input on my first mobile phones a little irritating. I’ve now got used to predictive text with one hand, but more and more with my N97 I find myself sliding out the keyboard and entering text with two-thumb typing once again. A year ago I would have said I can’t live without being able to use a phone one handed… now I probably could, at least as far as text input goes.
• Microsoft Exchange support: This includes integration with my email, calendar and contacts. I need to be able to see upcoming  appointments I have from my homescreen, along with new emails, and I need my contacts to be sync’d with the server. Changes made on either my device or a PC should be kept nicely in sync.
• Twitter: I probably could live without this one, but I’m spoiled by Gravity, which probably offers the best Twitter experience on any platform, and is especially good on a mobile display.
• Third Party Apps: Symbian is currently lagging in this area – even Android is making more progress with its App Market. Nokia are promising a major overhaul of their Ovi Store in coming months though, so we’ll see. Either way, access to more software is a must, preferably including things that don’t need to be approved by a major corporation first…
• GPS, Maps and Navigation: I don’t need these very often, but there have been a number of occasions when it has proven invaluable since my Nokia N95.
• SSH/Terminal software (for free): My current phone has Putty. I use it to sign into my server regularly, mostly to connect to an existing screen/IRC session. This one is a definite must.
• Tethering: There are two sides to this point. When I’m travelling on train, the ability to connect my laptop via my phone (by Bluetooth or cable) to the Internet is incredibly useful. For shorter periods, there’s a fantastic little tool called JoikuSpot for Symbian that lets me turn my phone into an ad hoc wireless network that shares my Internet over wifi with other devices (such as my iPod touch).
• Web Browser: Ideally with Flash support and decent rendering, but I think (at least thanks to Opera) this is available – perhaps less the Flash in some cases – for just about every mobile device out there. I was most impressed when I saw 100/100 come up on my phone’s screen for the Acid3 test.
• Podcasting & Music & Storage: My Nokia N97 can happily store 32Gb of data, which I’ve about half filled with mp3s, podcasts and media from iPlayer. I can live without iPlayer, but the rest I’ve come to rely on.

There’s probably more… I’ll add it as I think of it. Certainly some games would be nice, and the ability to at least view PDFs would be great (but I’ve not had a phone succeed well at that yet). There’s nothing else specific that leaps off the page yet though…

Regardless, I was keen to put the stats of these four devices side by side for my reference at least. In cases where items could be compared to some extent, I’ve highlighted the perceptual ’best’ and ‘worst’ entries in a light green and pinky red respectively (I’ve not declared a winner for the display row as I can’t find details of the Nexus One’s colour count and I’d argue that the N900′s higher pixel density counts in its favour over the Nexus One’s bigger display. The processors can probably fall under some debate due to extra GPU power that I’ve not considered, or the different multi-chip ARM hardware is used in different devices).

*Wifi positioning available via 3rd party product

I should note that while the table suggests that the N900 and Nexus One have a similar number of plus points compared to the other devices, it’s worth comparing the text in green to the text in grey – some devices only just have the edge over others, and others are still highly spec’ed enough for most people (after all, who is really going to see benefit from a device supporting 802.11n wireless when others can manage 802.11g).

The amount of red in certain columns certainly is interesting though. Some may accuse me of bias – when I created the table I was certainly not looking for bias, and I’m happy to add other rows if I’m provided accurate data for all four devices.