embracing the mobile revolution
a little late, i know, given that half the people i know have iphones and most of the rest of them have some sort of blackberry/mobile windows hoo-ha-thingy while i'm still languishing with an almost-2-years-old sony ericsson w810i, but i felt that as i'm embarking on a collaborative project that requires me to programme for the mobile web, i should really be using it and finding out first-hand what works and what is seriously annoying.
so cue a little experimenting with my phone. most people, i believe go through this when they first get a phone. i did give it a go at one point, couldn't fathom it for some reason and figured it would be too expensive to use if i did get it working, so installed google maps and left it at that.
today i started by trying to work out how best to keep track of my expenditure (because i'm flat broke at the moment and i've decided i need to start budgeting properly so i don't end up like this again) and figured if i could find a little expense-tracking app for my phone, it would be better than writing these things down on little pieces of paper and hunting for pens and things and none of it ever getting put anywhere where it could be of any use at all. so i hunted one down and actually managed to install it which felt like a disproportionately great achievement. it's a long way from beautiful, but it actually seems to be quite well built - easy interface to use, minimal typing required and it keeps track of the basic stuff i need - what i spent, what i spent it on, and i can even put a note alongside it. and at the end of the month apparently i can export it all to xls so i can look at everything that happened in the month with ease. it was an interesting exercise in seeing how simple but how useful an app can be.
the next step was actually getting webby stuff to work. sony's interface leaves a certain amount to be desired, i feel. the email set up has HRs between sections, so you keep thinking you've got to the end of the page of options, when in fact there's a bunch more things to fill in underneath. so i managed to set it up to send, but didn't realise there were still outgoing-mail-servery things it wanted from me - it had looked like it was done with the questions, so i'd assumed it was going to use the o2 settings or something to send the mail, but it seems it needs a normal outgoing mail server just like normal email. once that was set up, sending and receiving was go. yay! i don't know that i'll use it for checking email very often (and the download seems a bit haphazard - rather than just downloading the new email since the last check, it seems to pull down a bunch of random other stuff too. and there doesn't seem to be any way to actually delete msgs out of the inbox, just to "mark them for deletion", whatever that means).
anyway, now that email's set up, i've been able to set up something a bit more useful - to be able to send tasks directly into my remember the milk account whenever i think of them. the only drawback with this is that to use the import-list function for rtm, you need to be able to separate items listed in the body of the email with line breaks, and i can't see that the sony ericsson mail client allows this, but will be checking the manual for that one and, if need be, attempting to find an alternative mail client. next step: set up email for evernote, so i can snap things i want to remember - posters for shows, or jot down random project ideas - and file them away before i forget. third step: set up emailing to flickr, which seems to work...
so i'm beginning to see the light, i think. but there's still a fair way to go before i can see this mobile web malarky becoming totally integrated into my life. at least it's a start and i hope it'll help me understand about the limitations of accessing a webpage through a mobile phone so that i can make pages which are a joy to use :-)
