Whilst searching the Opera Mobile forums, I came across this fairly comprehensive list of free software for S60 phones. Some of the links are broken and there’s nothing on the development side, but a useful list nonetheless.

Also, if you’re excited by the prospect of Flash Lite 2.0 announced back in November, you’ll also be excited to hear from this official forum post that this will be available to developers from Macromedia Labs in January.

Update: Lost my phone recently. Here’s my list of the first five essential S60 apps I re-installed:

( Technorati tags: opera | s60 | flash-lite | isync | shozu | flickr | salling-clicker | python)

Something that seems unnecessarily cumbersome to me is getting a url from my Mac to my phone (a Nokia 6630). So I knocked up a simple solution using QuickSilver and Framework Labs’ Bluetooth Object Push Automator Action stuck together with a little AppleScript.

After you’ve installed the action, create an Automator workflow using the Push File to Bluetooth Device action, configure it for your device (assuming you’ve already set up your phone for use with your Mac using the Bluetooth Setup Assistant) and save this to your desktop as an application named Push2Phone. (Anything you drop on this app will now get pushed to your phone.)

Then copy this AppleScript for QuickSilver to ~/Library/Application Support/QuickSilver/Actions and be sure to modify the tmp_file_path and app_path properties in the script for your environment.

Now you should be able to select a url - like this:

http://m.gmail.com

Google’s new mobile version of Gmail - and in Safari hit Cmd-% to send this to QuickSilver (in Firefox you’ll need to cut and paste) and then type ‘pu’ or similar to forward it to your phone.

See also Robert Hall’s post on how to use the Bluetooth Object Push Automator Action to enhance Flash Lite development.

Now all I need to do is to figure out how to make Opera the default browser on my phone. Anyone know if this is possible?

( Technorati tags: quicksilver | bluetooth | applescript | automator)

15 months after its initial launch, Rails finally reaches 1.0. Maybe now the constant stream of innovation will slow down long enough for some of us to catch up… oh, wait, perhaps not… “1.1 is already pretty far along in development and will see some of the biggest upgrades of any Rails release”. Can’t wait.

( Technorati tags: rails)

A few months ago Google bought Urchin, provider of web analytics software ‘used by over 20% of the Fortune 500′ and also, until their recent move, by TextDrive where this site is hosted. TextDrive seemed unable to re-negotiate a site license for Urchin (and began work on a home-grown Ruby on Rails solution code-named Anemone). Here’s the reason why: Google Analytics, released today, is essentially Urchin 5 for free. And I was just thinking about buying Mint.

If you’re looking for something more immediate (Google Analytics only updates every hour), try Tom Dyson’s Peastat a simple, free, ‘live’ web stats analyser which “looks at the last chunk of your log file to create real-time summaries of recent user activity” and best of all provides an Atom feed.

(Technorati tags: google-analytics | textdrive | mint | peastat)

I spent some time yesterday playing around with the Skype API because I wanted to see if I can initiate text-to-speech calls for a project we have in development.

Seems like the Mac OS X API, like the Skype app itself, lags a little behind the Windows/Linux versions and the Applescript interface (which is easiest to use from a cgi script) is only partially implemented.

I did manage to get a simple web-based IM sending app running on OS X server. Try this form to Skype and I’ll post your message here as a comment:

This obviously only works if I’m online too. Seems to get queued in the Skype cloud even if I’m not.

(I’m not providing a generic web to Skype gateway here, for that try InstantSkype.)

(Technorati tags: skype | applescript | os-x)

For some reason, my PowerBook decided not to recognise me this morning and wouldn’t allow me to log in. Eventually, I figured out I could reset my (corrupt) account’s password from the login window using my ‘master password’, but then I wasn’t able to start up to anything other than a blue screen. (Coincidentally, I’d earlier read that one of Mac OS X 10.4.3’s fixes - released today - addressed (an unrelated) issue in which high ASCII characters in a password could lead to a blue screen at startup, or prevent log in.) Previously I’d been able to fix this kind of problem by booting into single user mode and renaming Preferences and Caches folders as detailed in this Apple tech note, but today this didn’t help. I finally figured out I simply needed to reset my account’s password back to match that of my home folder’s FileVault disk image.

Apart from providing myself with a reminder of what to do next time, this post is by way of introduction to AppleJack, an excellent utility I came across today that enables you to run a set of tasks in sequence to repair your disk, repair permissions, validate the system’s preference files and get rid of possibly corrupted cache files, all without loading the GUI.

(Technorati tags: applejack | os-x)

(Note: this post was originally written on release of the Flex 2 alpha. I’ve since updated it for the Flex 2 beta.)

Macromedia recently announced Macromedia Labs and the availability of the Flex 2 product line alpha, which includes a new Eclipse-based IDE and a new high performance client runtime (Flash Player 8.5) alongside the development framework. Unfortunately, for now, development on the Mac is not supported and Macromedia only provide an installer for Flex Builder 2, the Flex Framework 2, Flex samples and command line tools for Windows.

So I set about trying to discover, if as with the 1.0 release, I could get the framework at least to run on OS X: and the short answer is yes, it’s relatively simple.

First of all you need to extract both the framework and the player from the Download for Windows. To do this, just unzip the relevant components from the .exe file. Assuming you’ve already downloaded FlexBuilder2_Beta1_Install.exe to your desktop, this script does exactly this and then copies the ‘frameworks’ and ‘lib’ directories to a flex2 directory in /Library and the Install Flash Player 8.5 OSX.dmg to your desktop. (Or you can obviously just run the installer on Windows and copy across the relevant files.)

Once you’ve got the framework installed, you can use mxmlc - the (Java) Macromedia Flex Compiler - from the command line or better still with Ant. Here’s a version of the ‘Hello World’ example Flex project from Macromedia’s Quick-start tutorials book with the simplest possible Ant build file: just download and run ‘ant’ (defaults to the ‘build’ task) in the Quickstart directory, and - assuming you’ve already installed the player - then open QuickStart.html. You should see the movie initialise and the words “Welcome to Flex” appear.

(I had no luck at all getting the IDE work, I did try extracting Flex Builder 2’s ‘features’ and ‘plugins’ directories and copying the contents of these to my Eclipse installation. Although I was then able to create a new Flex project, I wasn’t able to start the MXML editor which failed with a NullPointerException.)

(Technorati tags: flash | flex-2 | os-x)

Today I let my .Mac subscription expire. I’ve been a .Mac subscriber since Apple began charging for what was once a free service, but I can no longer justify the ‘equivalent of £5.75 a month’ for Apple’s suite of Internet services. I’ve grudgingly paid the $100 fee for the past couple of years, largely for the ability to sync my bookmarks, calendars and contacts across machines, even if each time I’ve felt vaguely conned at having to pay for something that ought to be free (the same feeling you get on finding out you need to purchase a new QuickTime Pro key with each version bump).

Even with the latest upgrade from 250MB to a mere 1GB of combined email/storage, as webmail .Mac really doesn’t cut it alongside Gmail and for $8/month with Strongspace I’ve got four times as much secure offsite storage.

So it’s goodbye .Mac.

Update: One of the things I did like about .Mac was Apple’s Backup app, which at version 3 was finally worthy of its name. Here’s a way to replicate Backup’s handy ‘Personal Data and Settings’ plan using rsync and Strongspace.

Update: ‘Wolf’ Rentzsch on why “Backup 3 is easily the worst piece of software Apple is shipping today”. Although version 3.0.1, just released via Software Update, may address some of these issues: “Backup 3.0.1 addresses file restoration and other issues and is highly recommended for all users of Backup 3.0″.

Update: on the subject of QuickTime Pro, here’s a fantastic rant about “the split between Quicktime and QuickTime Pro and what a silly anachronism it is”.

(Technorati tags: dot-mac | strongspace)

Just had my first SkypeIn wrong number: “‘Ello, is that KwikFit?”

After a year long fling with Sony Ericsson, I’ve come back to Nokia and upgraded to a 6630 Smartphone. Actually, I haven’t dumped the T610 entirely, this will sit next to my server, with a pay as you go SIM, so I can start working on a couple of SMS apps using Tim Ellis’ excellent UltraSMS utility.

The 6630 is a great phone. Not only does it have a very usable 1.3 megapixel camera (I tried to love the T610’s pitifully lo res images, I really did), there are new development tools like Flash Lite and Python for Series 60 and a whole bunch of freeware apps: see David’s review for some examples, and more here. Best of all though is Lifeblog, Nokia’s diary/media manager, the perfect accessory to your Flickr account (see here for details).

Of course mobile phone love is always short-lived and it doesn’t take long before you’re lusting after another, like these just-announced Nseries phones.