There is still a good deal of confusion, even among the IT literate about what “The Cloud” really is. It doesn’t help that some consumer orientated companies are using the term to help publicise their own services, for example, HTC has a cloud, Apple has an iCloud, DropBox lets you store your files in the cloud. The list is almost endless…

To the end user it appears as if all this stuff vanishes into the mythical ether called “the cloud”, but no one actually tells you what the cloud is.

During my time at Microsoft as a PM in Windows Azure I learnt a good bit about clouds, and in this blog post I’m going to try and clear up this perception a little by providing a quick high level overview of what a cloud is, why they are going to be more relevant in the future and roughly how they work.

The cloud in two sentences:

Clouds are a way of organising servers which makes them cheaper and more efficient to run. This way of organising computers makes launching new services cheaper, because of this “clouds” are increasingly becoming the backend muscle which powers a lot of the new consumer services which are being offered.

Peering into the Mist: What is this new organisation?

Traditionally as an online service provider we would try to work out how successful we think our new service is going to be, then we’d do some load and stress testing of our development system and based on this we’d work out how many servers we need. In this calculation we’d try to err on the side of caution, allowing for spikes in users / traffic. Then we’d have to go and buy or rent these machines, configure and set them up.  As a company this would mean that we’d have to fund the purchasing / renting of these machines up front, this could be a large amount of cash for a service which may or may not take off!

Cloud Approach

The Cloud approach is different. It allows us to rent just the machines we need now just for launch and no more. If the service takes off we can add more machines. In fact on some (nearly all) cloud services allow us to programmatically add new machines. An example of an application which makes use of this is SmugMug, an Amazon Cloud hosted service. They experience more users on Sunday night than at any other time. Their service automatically adds new servers when needed, and removes servers when no long required. This means that SmugMug provides its end users with a responsive web site which can cope with demand, and at the same time they can save as much money as possible by only using the computers they need, when they need it.

Making the Cloud Work

It sounds easy doesn’t it; “just add the computers you need when you need it”. To get that working automatically it more challenging than you might think at first. Each of the major cloud hosting companies provide a basic set of tools for developers to use which allows them to cope with these challenges.

Virtual Servers

To allow the cloud services to offer new servers at a moment’s notice each of the servers is offered as a virtual machine. If we want another server the cloud will give us another virtual machine. This machine could be on the same physical computer, or it might not – it could be on any physical computer inside the providers cloud. These virtual servers can be setup and torn down automatically via an API. Almost all cloud providers offer an API to do this, right now.

On occasion virtual servers may crash, or fail. Most clouds providers allow us to cope with this by watching for errors and automatically kicking off replacement servers.

Cloud providers generally charge on a “per CPU hour” rate. This means we only pay for the computing power we need. This makes it cheaper for us to run our service, we only have to scale up temporary when we have a spike in traffic. We no longer need to own all the machines needed to cope with peak traffic for our service.

Cloud providers make this cost effective by having lots of virtual servers running on their physical servers within large centres, and having many clients within the same data centre. Effectively the gamble that not every customer is going hit their peak demand at the same time (an unlikely event).

Load Balancing

So let’s say we have a spike in traffic and we start up a bunch of web servers, how do we direct new web traffic to each of the new machines? Well most cloud operators provide load balancing solutions. In Windows Azure these are VIP (Virtual IP Addresses), and in Amazon they are Elastic IPs. Different names, but conceptually they both offer the same thing, a single static public IP address on the internet, behind which we can have any number of web servers.

From a developers point of view this can cause a number of design constraints, a client web page may make several requests to our static public IP address, but due to load balancing each individual request could be serviced by different virtual severs. Additionally these virtual servers can be brought up and torn down at a moment’s notice. Each of the servers we running can vanish at any time. Got data stored just on that one server and the server vanishes – well bye bye data! Well that sucks! – So how do we store data?

Unified Large Scale Storage

Each of the clouds provides the idea of a single large storage repository which is accessible from each of the servers within the cloud. This means that you can store all your applications data in a single logical location and access it from any machine. This is great as it solves the problem of data storage on vanishing servers. It also helps us scale as it means that every new server we create can access the same data, when we need more space we can just use it – we don’t have to purchase new hard drives or create our own Storage Area Networks (SAN).

Generally each of the cloud provider offer a pretty competitive price per gig for data stored within their storage solution.

Cloud Storage Implementation

To the developer this storage is often provided by a set of cloud hosting company specific APIs, Amazon have a set, as do Rackspace, and Windows Azure. Each of these companies go to some length to make sure that your data is safe. Most will replicate any data you store a number of times in different locations, in an effort to ensure that a physical disk or data centre failure will not destroy your data.

Most of the data storage APIs available offer non-SQL basic access. Typically they offer large tables of name value pairs (think giant INI files). While not SQL, this type of storage is quick, covers most of the scenarios you may need and is an effective structure for data replication within the cloud infrastructure.

Queuing and Messaging

So we have a bunch of servers which can get setup at any time and then torn down whenever we don’t need them all storing data within the same logical location. But how do we communicate between them? – We could just use the Cloud Storage, but often this doesn’t cope with want we want to do, and with virtual machines being created and torn down rapidly it is conceivable that we would request a particular machine to process a job only to have that machine either fail or be programmatically removed. In which case we may loose the job! - To cope with this most Cloud providers offer a messaging queuing system, indeed both Azure and Amazon offer message queuing systems. This allows servers to pass messages between them in a secure way. This is often used to submit jobs from front end web servers to back end processing servers and back again. If a server falls the job should be recoverable from the messaging queue and can therefor be picked up by another virtual server, resulting in a small delay, but no data loss.

Designing Applications for Scaling in the Cloud

At this point it is worth considering some of the design implications mentioned above. Designing applications for deployment within a cloud requires a bit of upfront consideration. We need to design for:

·         A highly concurrent environment where machines get be set up and pulled down and any time:

o   Don’t store data on the Virtual machine, use cloud storage

·         Static IP addresses for groups of servers (VIP / Elastic IP) and load balancing

o   Don’t store state, create job’s which can be considered atomic, once complete the data can be considered consistent and persisted in the large store

·         Message Queues

o   Structure groups of servers together in groups behind Static IP addresses and load balancers

o   Place atomic jobs on the queue and submit to groups of IP’s via static IP addresses or use message Queues and many consumers from a Queue

·         Large, cheap centralised storage

o   Store all application data in the large centralised storage where it can be backed up and made secure by the cloud provider

Recapping

At the top of this blog post I said I was going to cover what a cloud is, why they are going to be more relevant in the future and an overview of how they work, and I have:

·         Shown the way clouds offer a new way of organising computers which makes them cheaper and more efficient to run.

·         Shown the economic benefit of clouds, and hence why they will become more relevant in the future.

·         Briefly illustrated the main tools cloud provide (Virtual Machines, Load balancing, Storage, Message Queues) when they are necessary and roughly how the cloud works.

I hope you find this blog post useful.

 

I was tired, knackered in fact, after many long nights scratching my head and feeling like I was getting nowhere It came to me….in the shower….No, not a big scary knife from an Alfred Hitchock movie, but an idea about how I could make importing feeds from URLs simple. Now I’d just like to know what you guys think of what I did in that shower…

6 Ideas and a bunch of sketches

At the time of my last post I had determined the core requirements for the solution, the problem was coming up with an idea which would satisfy all of them. I remember my art teacher from school always forcing me to come with at least six good ideas for any given problem. So I sat down with my note book every evening and tried…

Sketching the user interaction points and flow down on a bit of paper is fantastic. It allowed me quickly explore how a user would navigate my app, selecting and entering the URLs in different ways. I produced pages and pages of quick sketches, and I was creating them whenever, and where ever I could; from late nights in my study, to train trips as long as I wasn’t driving I was trying to sketch out an idea.

The problem was no matter what concept I sketched I never felt like it was actually going to be good enough. Sure I could just add in a clunky option for importing a URL, but I wouldn’t be happy with it, and I was concerned that if I didn’t think through all the possible scenarios a user may encounter that I would end up with a bucket of bug reports.

I ended up working late, up until nearly 2 am working on ideas and still no luck. Waking at 6am the next morning wasn’t much fun, and to be honest I really didn’t want to leave bed - the thought of getting into the shower wasn’t appealing at all. But it did the trick.

Standing in the shower with my forehead against the cool tiles it came to me – I could eliminate a bucket of additional screens, transactions and events if I let Headlines automatically determine that the user had entered a URL rather than a simple search term….

User Experience

It sounded so simple, but I needed to verify the idea before I could go any further with it. But how could I do that? - I went back and re-sketched the idea, working through what the user experience would really be. After consuming even more pages of scribbles I arrived at a final flow I thought was good enough, but the acid test is drawing it out on the computer in a pixel perfect format to the exact screen size, this would tell me if this idea would actually work.

So I spent even more evenings converting each of my scribbled notations for screens into fully realised images. Then documenting the transition from one screen to another. I know have this ready. You can check out the PDF file I’ve put together with all the screens I have been thinking about. I’d really appreciate it if you guys could take a look at it, and tell me what you think? – Just drop me a line at Headlines@Mind-Flip.com

Getting Implementation Ready

I can’t crack on with the code just yet, I’ve a good bit more work to do before I can. I’ll next be working on reworking the UI yet again, breaking each of the screens down into blocks of text, images, buttons, click areas, scroll boxes etc. and for each item I need to calculate the precise screen locations. Only then when I’ve got this complete will I start to sketch out the changes to the code required to support the new experience. There is much more fun to come.

I've been really excited and chuffed with the feedback Headlines has received to date. It has been really great. People seem to really like it which is great. But I know Headlines isn't perfect and there are some missing features. In particular support for manual entered URLs.

It is funny, because entering URLs manually was one of the major issues I had with existing RSS readers, I can't remember all the RSS URLs I'm interested in and I thought searching would be a great way to resolve this. Of course even the best database of RSS Feeds will still missing someone's favourite RSS Feed.  In addition users who move to Headlines from an existing RSS reader will have a list of the RSS feeds that they use and would like to add to Headlines.

 

I've had feedback from a number of users and one of their top requests is to add manual URL entry to Headlines. I had originally scheduled this for release 1.3, but have decided, based on this feedback to bring this feature forward to the next release.

 

 

Designing the Experience

What is important to a user when entering a URL? We'll based on the second paragraph above the user is probably an advanced user who is familiar with RSS feeds, and understands and knows what a URL is. Even so, some users will stumble across this feature and Headlines should support them.

 

The Scenarios

I've created two scenarios to try to help me think about the requirements. These are:

1. Chris starts Headlines he adds the  URL for his favourite feed and is happy and confident that he has he has entered the URL correctly, once added Chris is confident that Headlines is now populated with his favourite feed.

 

2. As above however Chris specifies the URL of a website, not of an RSS Feed.

 

Writing down these scenarios is a great help. They often help raise many following questions.

 

Question: How is Chris confident that he has entered the URL correctly?

Background: URLs can be long and a single bad character in a URL will stop it from working, it is important that Headlines gives some feedback to Chris that the URL is valid.

Answer: The following things should occur to provide Chris with the feedback he needs:

• The URL once entered should remain visible during the process of adding the feed
• Headlines should provide Chris with information on the process of adding the URL including
• The server could not be found
• The feed was not found on the server
• URL is not a feed (parsing error)
• The URL was a web page
• The web page did not contain a feed
• The web page contains more than one rss feed

 

Question: How is Chris confident that Headlines is now populated with his favourite feed?

Answer:

• The feed appears with the same title he has seen in his other RSS reader
• The description of the feed matches his expectations
• The feed appears with a set of stories he is expecting

 

The next step - defining the user story

Now that I've outlined the requirements from a user point of view the next stage is to work out how to implement them. To do this I'll need to create a user story or use case which illustrates how a user will walk through the process of adding a URL to Headlines. Anything I do create must fulfil as many of the requirements outlined above as possible.

Wow this week has been pretty hectic, frantic and short. But just a quick post to let you know that Headlines show now be available globally! I got confirmation from Nokia that my changes were published, so if you are in a non-English speaking country you should now have access to Headlines!   more »

Following the Ovi Daily review of Headlines by Steve Litchfield I’ve received a number of requests from people around the world for a copy of Headlines – this is fantastic, and I am chuffed to bits at this level of interest. If I could I’d make Headlines available world wide. However I haven’t yet, but there is a good reason for that, and it’s something I’m trying to fix.    more »

I was really chuffed today to spot an exhaustive review of Headlines on the Ovi Daily Blog today. The review is by Steve Litchfield from All About Symbian. If you get the chance you should really check it out. Steve did an awesome job of reviewing the application. It is positive and fair review and Steve highlights some items I am working on to improve, and yes before you ask I am working on updates to Headline and I’m following my Roadmap for future releases.    more »

I have some great news TextQuick 1.6 is now available from the Ovi Store! At only €1 it makes your phone a joy to use – it simply becomes easier to make calls and send text messages.   more »

With the demise of Symbian the Symbian Horizon Program has also stopped. Symbian Horizon has previously published TextQuick on the Ovi store. With the end of Symbian Horizon TextQuick was removed from the Ovi store. So I’ve been working hard to get TextQuick back up on the Ovi Store.   more »

Instead I’ve been working hard and I can now tell you that Headlines 1.01.0* (aka Version 1.1) is now available on the Ovi store!   more »

Headlines version 1.01.0 (aka Version 1.1) has been submitted to Ovi!

I got some pretty great feedback on the new update to Headlines, and after a period of extensive testing I have submitted the update to Ovi for publishing. It will take a couple of days for the update to be published.

Beta Testers! – Thank you
For all those people who helped out with the beta testing I shall be spending them all a free copy of the final application as a thank you.

Existing Users – Free update coming your way!
Existing user and those who have purchased Headlines already can receive this update as a free upgrade – If you can’t get it directly from Ovi drop me a line and let me know and I’ll ensure you get your copy!

What you can expect to see in 1.01.0 (aka Version 1.1)

You can find a blog post covering all the new features here, and you can find the updated manual on the Mind-Flip web site here.

This all forms part of the release roadmap, above!

Happy Monday!

Wow checking out the tech news today and you can’t move for talk of the new “social” app called “color”. Its got some pretty serious weight behind it, famous names in social networking, and some serious investment by some big names in the tech industry. But what the heck does it do?

From what I can make out it is a location aware social photo sharing application….. man talk about tech buzzword bingo!

So how does it work? Well that’s the tricky part. I checked out the color site, and got directed to an iPhone App and an Android App. I found 44 words on the color web page, I read the BBC article, and I read the TechCrunch(1) articles(2)…. and I think I get it…. I think…. maybe… this is what I get so far….

I’m out and about with my buddies and I take a photo, then my friends who are with me also take photos. Then even though I was there watching my friends take photos and saw what they were taking photos of, and like wise them with me. We all decide to checkout each others pictures. We do this, not by swapping phones but by downloading the pictures over the phone network. This lets everyone in the group see on their phone the same images they saw with their eyes only 30 seconds earlier, but you know from different angles and stuff….. ok, that doesn’t sound right… if that is right, then it sounds a little like like a real life Tivo / Sky+! – Man that would be cool, if only I could pause my train and rewind it when I miss it…

Where does the location come in – well anyone else who happens to be with 150ft (30 meters for everyone else) can also see the photos we took, and I can see the photos taken by someone else. That is kinda cool. It sounds like a location based photo notice board.

Scary Scary Criminal Colors
I just can’t get over the following scenario out of my head though. I’m at home and I take a photo, this means that everyone within 30 meters of my house / apartment can also see the photo’s taken from the inside of my apartment. Or better yet – I don’t take a photo, a visiting friend who uses "Color” takes a photo of me standing beside my large and expensive flat screen TV / computer / etc.. and now everyone outside my house can also see inside my house, like you know passing criminals and stuff…

Almost “Got it”
Ok, so I don’t get it yet… I will download it and give it a go, but I’ll probably wait until I go somewhere away from my house first.

I’ve been working hard on some updates and improvements to Headlines and today I released Headlines 1.1.0 as a beta. It is available free to everyone, if you are interested in being a beta tester drop me a line at headlines@mind-flip.com.

This release includes a new auto refresh feature, improvements to the “Recommended Feeds”, font rendering, and search results. I’ve included my mini-release notes below.

Mini Release Notes

·         Improved font rendering

o    Anti-aliasing removal (available in 1.0.1)

The readability of the story title font on the main screen of the application has been improved.

 

o    Story readability changes

The font size of the story page has been increased, and the positioning and alignment of the story "body" updated. These changes make it easier to read the story synopsis available in Headlines.

 

Headlines 1.0	Headlines 1.1

 

·         Auto refresh of news feeds

If you leave Headlines running in the background on your phone, this new feature will ensure you always get the latest news. The auto refresh feature  allows Headlines to automatically trigger a refresh operation. You can enable or disable this feature, and specify how often Headlines should refresh by accessing the new settings screen. You can find the new settings screen from the about screen - Click the running man. Then select the "Settings" button.

 

Safe guards - preventing an inconsistent experience

The auto refresh feature contains a number of safe guards so it can not interrupt your reading of the news. The auto refresh will only occur when the phone has been idle for a couple of minutes, the user is not currently viewing a story, and the users specified elapsed time period has expired. For example, if the Headlines is running, and user has specified a refresh after 30 minutes. Once 30 minutes has elapsed Headlines checks to ensure that the device is idle, then it checks to make sure that the user didn't leave a story up on the screen - perhaps they did this deliberately - so they can view the story at another time. Only after these checks will Headlines preform an update.

 

New about and settings screen available in Headlines 1.1

 

·         Improved search results

Working with RSS Mountain, Headlines search provider, we have managed to improve the quality of the search results returned from this version of Headlines. We made enhancements both to Headlines and to RSS Mountain to ensure we provide a better answer for any search request.

 

·         Updated "Recommended Feeds" (This is available on all versions of Headlines, 1.0.0, 1.0.1, and 1.1)

The process of updating the recommended feeds has started. This will be an on-going process - if you have any recommendations for new graphical RSS feeds I would love to hear them.

 

Initially the "Recommended Feeds" have been reviewed and updated with new graphical feeds introduced, and non-graphical feeds removed. You can find the recommended feeds by selecting the "+" symbol to add a feed and clicking the "Recommended Feeds" button.

Items of note:

o    The All About Symbian

Thanks to Rafe at All About Symbian this now has graphics! – And looks fantastic.

o    Dublin 98fm (Radio station)

o    Irish Rugby News

To help celebrate St. Patrick’s day I’ve updated the Recommended Feeds in Headlines!

The plan is to review an update the list of Recommended Feeds in Headlines, this is an on-going task. The list of recommended feeds is maintained on the Mind-Flip server and can be updated at any time. So if you have any suggestions for great graphical news feeds I would love to hear them! – drop me a line at headlines@mind-flip.com

You can find the recommended feeds by selecting the "+" symbol to add a feed and clicking the "Recommended Feeds" button.

The All About Symbian
Thanks to the Rafe at All About Symbian this now has graphics – if you are a Symbian fan, you really should check out their RSS feed, it looks great in Headlines!

St. Patrick’s day
In time for St. Patrick's day (just) the following graphical feeds have been added:

• Dublin 98fm (Radio station)
• Irish Rugby News

I thought Headlines was great when I released it to the Ovi store, but I’ve got some great feedback from a number of people with suggestions for new features and improvements. Some of these suggestions are simply fantastic, so much so that I’ve decided to delay the next update (1.0.1) so that I can provide additional value to everyone. I thought I would give you a little glimpse of my outline roadmap for future Headlines updates and releases:

 Current Focus
I am currently working on Release 1.1 which will include the font rendering changes mentioned in my last blog post, it will also include a new feature – auto updates. When Headlines is left running in the background then it will automatically refresh the news feeds you have selected. This will, of course be user configurable.

I’ve also been working with RSS Mountain, my search provider. They have been simply fantastic and working with them I’ve a number of changes which should dramatically improve the search results they provide – I am really looking forward to sharing more details about these changes in the coming weeks.

Lastly, for release 1.1 I am reviewing the recommended feeds list. There are simply so many news feeds which contain some much value that I'm going to update the recommended feed list with additional content.

I am working hard on Release 1.1 and expect to have a beta out this week and release on Ovi coming shortly afterwards. All updates to Headlines will of course be free for anyone who has purchased a copy!

“You can’t get through" We were told. Facing a rather longer than expected walk, we turned to our left and walked around the blocked off area of the city centre. It was the start of night out with my sister and her boyfriend in Manchester. The route the the bar was blocked by security and a rather large lorry painted green. No, no it wasn’t anything to do with national security, it turns out a major Hollywood film was being made right around the corner from my sister’s place.

Over dinner we learnt that a movie company had taken over the city centre for a couple of weeks and had been filming Captain America in the middle of the city. My sisters boyfriend had managed to befriend some of the security folks and during the filming had managed from various vantage points, to watch some of the movie being made. Car chases, explosions, and fight sequences were all explained to us.

On the way back from the pub, we took a shortcut and managed to slip in past security and walk through the set. There where whole blocks of Manchester (England) made up to look like streets from the 1920’s in New York, complete with changes to street lamps, posters advertising dance lessons, with prices in USD and locations given in NYC.

Why am I telling you this? Does it have anything to do with Mind-Flip?…. Well, no actually it doesn’t have anything to do with Mind-Flip and I’m only sharing since I stumbled across the Captain America trailer on IMDB

And what was the green truck for? – Well it was used as part of the green screen by the special effects folk. So that when the camera looked down the street they could replace the giant green block at the end of the street with a computer generated extended street scene.

 

Now then… back to real work…

I have been submitting Headlines for review, and Steve Litchfield from www.allaboutsymbian.com and The Phones Show gave me some great feedback. He said he saw red patterned text on the main screen of the application. At first I was completely confused, where could this have come from? What was the problem? It turned out a small change would really improve the usability and readability of Headlines.

Steve was kind enough to send me through a screenshot (zooming in on the offending text) to show me what the problem was:

You can see that the text appears slightly red and a bit blurry in places. This is caused by Anti-aliasing. I turned this on. However the text used on the main screen is so small that it was causing it to look red and blurry. Turning it off ( a single one line change) made all the difference:

Here are some screenshots so you can compare the differences. I shall be releasing the Headlines 1.0.1 update to the Ovi store this week. It shall be free for all current owners!

It is up! – Headlines has arrived on the Ovi store. I just can’t tell you how exciting it is to have Headlines available to the wider world. I’m thrilled. I know that ease of use, and graphical richness of Headlines will really make a difference to how Symbian users catch up with changes in our world.

Updating the web site
While Headlines has been going through the Ovi submission process I have been editing and updating the Mind-Flip website to advertise Headlines. As I mentioned in my previous blog post I created a page for Headlines. I’ve also been busy updating everything from links within the Headlines site,  to ensuring that the front page of Mind-Flip gives everyone information about Headlines.

 

An intelligent web site
I’ve even included a Nokia phone detector on the Mind-Flip web page. It works out if a visitor to Mind-Flip is using a Nokia device, and if so, it displays a tailored faster loading page. If you’ve got a Nokia device you can check this out – just visit http://www.mind-flip.com on your phone.

I’ve produced' Headline’s Icon is more sizes and image formats than I can care to think about, and I’ve produced banner adverts for it on the PC and mobile formats, filled in details of my grandmother’s sister’s next door neighbour’s pet cat’s birthday, and then clicked the “submit” button on Ovi. Now the next stage is to wait for the Ovi QA team to get back to me. Hopefully (fingers crossed) Headlines will be up and visible on the Ovi store within the next week!

There are lots of checks and steps to fill in when submitted the application. I think I’ve got them all filled in correctly (fingers crossed).

In the mean time I’ve created the first version of the Headlines web site – with the video clip, screenshots, and user manual. You can check this out here: http://www.mind-flip.com/headlines/

I also need to create a mobile specific version of the page (coming soon!) – in the mean time Happy Monday everyone!

We normally don’t think about it, but next time you are in the supermarket take a moment out to check out all the packaging. The bright colours, the distinctive styles – you can spot a box of Kellogg’s Corn Flakes from across the room. The same care and attention to packaging is also important for any online offering, it just takes a different form. But before I could even get to creating the packaging I first need to get Headlines signed for Symbian.

Yay! - Headlines is now signed!
Even though Nokia is moving away from Symbian, the http://www.symbiansigned.com website is still up, and this is a great thing, as without it no third party developers would be able to publish any applications. Every application on Symbian needs to have its own unique number. The Symbian signed website manages the collection of available numbers, as a developer I need to ask Symbian for a number I can use with Headlines. Then once this is complete I need to sign the application using my developer certificate. This indicates that I have tested the application and am happy that it is safe. The Signing and testing is intended to ensure that rouge applications can not be distributed.

I am pleased to say that Headlines has now been signed! – the next stage is less technical, now I need to list it and sell it on Ovi.

Cornflakes and Ovi
Ovi – is apparently Finish for “door” and is Nokia’s online store for selling applications. When you list the application on their store you need to provide a bunch of additional information. The additional information is the online equivalent to the packaging for any product you see in the supermarket. As consumers we normally don’t think about it, but a lot of work does go into producing great packaging, and the same is true for any application listed in Ovi, except for Ovi the packaging takes a different form, rather than being a cardboard box, it is images and promotional banners, icons, user manuals, release notes, descriptions and even screenshots.

Producing all the documentation is a surprising amount of work, I am currently in the middle of it I am hopeful that this will be completed by the end of the week. In the mean time I could with a bowl of corn flakes – just to keep my energy up!

You may have noticed a reduction in my blog posting last week, that is because I was attending Mobile World Congress, getting interviewed for German tech TV and learning lots about the next generation of mobile networks, 3D phones, and the rise of dual core ARM chips.

3D Phones from LG
At the show LG showed off some phones which supported 3D displays, ones that do not require glasses. It sounds really cool, but I don’t think it really worked. The 3D displays use a software controlled grid of filters which allow specific pixels to be directed left and right. This allows the screen to shine one image to the left, and one image to the right eye. When you hold the device in its sweet spot the 3D image works. However moving the device away from the sweet spot and you end up seeing  a blurry image. One a few of the applications on the handset support 3D – it is not supported completely on the device, there is no 3D call button for instance.

Switching to 3D a few of the handsets on display appeared to crash – this is to be expected as I am sure LG are still working on polishing off the software. The down side of switching to the 3D was that when turned on the grid basically reduces the resolution of the display – each eye gets 1/2 the pixels. On top of this moving the device away from the sweet spot resulted in blurry images – the over all affect was more like being a kid again and looking an one of those old hologram stickers, I know I couldn’t use it for any length of time.

The LG device uses similar techniques to the Nintendo 3DS which is due to be released  soon. After playing with the LG device I can only hope that the 3D display works better on the 3DS. However 3D appears to be all over the place at the moment and this is only the first 3D phone, I am sure as more devices go 3D that the technology will improve.

LTE (Long Term Evolution)
LTE is the next generation of mobile network. No more cellular specific standards, with LTE all devices become IPv6 devices connected to an all IP network. In non-tech speak this means that they become small computers all connected to the internet. All phone calls over LTE are done using voice of IP – protocols like that used in Skype. For application developers it now means that the networks can offer additional APIs and functionality. – You want to know if a user is online, you can using LTE. You want to make a video call – you can using LTE, you  want to send notification messages directly to the handset – you can using LTE.

The notification technology is interesting, this is a move away from one is currently being provided by device manufacturers. RIM, Apple, Nokia, Microsoft have all created platforms with backend server notification frameworks. These allow application developers like me to send messages to the phone telling the phone to “call home” or contact my server to pick up new data. With LTE mechanisms like this are built into the network. The mobile industry is working on standardise the APIs to ensure that as a developer we don’t have to create network specific versions of our applications.

Bondi – Jil – WAC
The large mobile networks have joined together to produce a development environment, and a developer ecosystem which allows application developers to write applications for all devices. This technology is called WAC, it was once called “JIL”, and before that “Bondi” . As a developer this provides me with a web browser with extended capabilities allowing me to access the handsets native functionality – things like the phone book, the camera etc. Opera have created the initial technology for this and during MWC 5 handset manufacturers signed up to produce devices, and in fact I saw two devices from LG which already supported WAC. The mobile networks are creating this technology because they are worried that us as consumers will become locked into a specific handset because there is a killer application on it which we must have. They really want to avoid having customers who become hooked on only one handset. They also want to start selling applications directly to us consumers and getting a cut of the action – as a developer I’m all for it. As long as they also put in place all the stores / shops , advertising to make everyone aware of the new platform and to sell the apps – and it is as if telefonica (O2) had read my mind! – On day 2 of the show O2 announced they were launching a store to sell WAC applications!

Dual Core
Dual core devices were all over the place at MWC. I saw handsets from LG and from Motorola. The handsets from Motorola were really interesting. Dual core phones are fast enough to run standard desktop applications, full web browsers, word processors etc. So Moto has produced a set of devices that can be plugged into a docking station and used as a normal PC! – You get a full keyboard, mouse and a monitor. When you are finished with you work you can simply unplug the phone and walk off. This is brilliant – the phone becomes your laptop and your desktop! – While using the phone as a PC you can still send and receive calls and text messages, even while you are editing a word document.

German TV
I was grabbed for a voxbox by a Germany TV station as I walked through the show. They wanted me to provide them with my view of Nokia’s move to use Windows Phone…. well… I tried to make my comments as short as possible, but as you can probably tell from my blog I could have talked for a while. If anyone in Germany see’s me on TV let me know!

Headlines is currently going through the Ovi submission process! I am in the middle of signing the final release version!

I know a lot has happened with the news of Nokia picking Windows for some of their future phones, but in the mean time there will still be a lot of Symbian devices in the market and I believe Headlines can be a really great experience for these users. I’ll keep you all posted on Headlines’ progress!

On the face of it current reports about the new agreements between Nokia and Microsoft are nearly all positive, some saying that this is fantastic news for Nokia. The devil however, is in the details, it looks like a fantastic opportunity for Microsoft.

Elop’s Email
The Nokia CEO’s email outlined the challenges the company faced; Growing competition at the high end, with Symbian unable to compete in that area and with out MeeGo, Nokia’s new platform ready in time they didn’t have a product offering, or a footing to compete with.

The challenge was clearly to find something, quickly, which would allow them to compete. Put yourself in Stephen’s shoes, the first thing you would imagine doing would be trying to accelerate the development of MeeGo. Getting that platform out in a product earlier would have helped. One would assume that this was investigated and rejected, Nokia must of projected that it would simply take to long to produce. As Stephen Elop’s email mentions Nokia would have only one device this year.

Given the move to Windows Phone today this would imply that Nokia believe that they can have more than one Windows Phone available in market within 12 months, compared to only one MeeGo device, and that the combined Windows Phone sales and cross licensing of other additional technologies with Microsoft would be more profitable.

We can therefore conclude that the existing Nokia strategy obviously wasn’t going to match with the immediate business need.

The Ecosystem
The mobile phone ecosystem consists of many players, from application and 3rd party developers though to network operators, hardware manufactures and the eventual consumers. The software running on the handset has a large influence on each of the ecosystem’s stake holders. It is the platform that developers work and invest in. It provides a base set of capabilities which hardware manufactures work to match. It provides the end user appeal, and network operators try to convince us to purchase. Increasingly the ecosystem also includes the application retail and the relationship between the application developer and their end user, Apple does this well with the App store.

By passing on responsibility for the ecosystem to Microsoft does Nokia appears to give this up.

The Microsoft View
From Microsoft’s point of view this looks like a fantastic opportunity. With a young mobile OS which is still struggling to find its feed it needed a mature mobile player to help partner with it, and from which Microsoft could learn, they now have this with Nokia.

In addition Bing Maps and Microsoft’s location based solutions have been struggling against Google, with Nokia, Microsoft now has access to their superior map technology.

The collaboration with Nokia allows Microsoft to grow in both area’s and you can be sure that what is learned from Nokia about making mobile devices will be used to grow Windows Phone 7 and then used to help sell the platform to other mobile device manufacturers.

The Old Nokia Strategy - Developer Impact
From the developers point of view the old Nokia strategy provided an upgrade path. “Develop for QT!” Nokia said “ and your applications will work on both Symbian and MeeGo”. This keeps the developers relationship with Nokia, and with the addition of Ovi store engages the consumer and the developer directly. Moving to another platform changes all of this.

The New Nokia Strategy
In a nutshell the strategy calls for Windows Phone to replace Symbian, that Nokia will help Microsoft make this platform work on cheaper hardware. MeeGo will be a future platform for experimental systems, potentially becoming a meaningful platform in the future and that Symbian will effectively “end of life” soon. The Ovi app store will stay and will offer applications from Microsoft’s Windows Phone store and from the existing collection on Ovi.

Nokia’s Platforms: S40, Symbian, Windows Phone and MeeGo
The announcement that Windows Phone will replace Symbian leaves developers working with Nokia faced with a challenge - to continue to work on QT / Symbian applications, knowing that MeeGo sales will be weak, and that Symbian sales are likely to decline within the next 12 months, or move to Windows Phone 7?

Developing applications for Windows Phone means that the developer is now engaged with Microsoft and developing for their platform. When the developer releases their application why would they then limit themselves to only publishing for Ovi? It would make more sense to make the application available via Microsoft’s store and available to all Windows Phone platforms. The relationship with Nokia is now broken.

QT currently will not work on Windows Phone devices as Microsoft stipulates that all applications on this handset have to be written in managed code - aka C#. As a developer this means retooling and re-education. It also makes it harder to reinvest in other platforms, as to move to another handset basically means re-writing the software.

Therefore as developers move toward Windows Phone 7 from Nokia’s other platforms they become locked in a relationship with Microsoft. With no obvious upgrade path to keep them interested in MeeGo, why should they stay? - I propose that they won’t.

Most developers will move with the investment and immediate opportunities and right now, that means Windows Phone. With no immediate opportunity for MeeGo they will effectively become locked in a relationship with Microsoft. Without QT on Windows Phone there will be no common technology to reduce the burden of moving platform again and reducing the chances that they would return to MeeGo.

Where does this leave Nokia? - Making hardware for Windows Phone and competing against others doing the same. What difference now between Nokia Mobile Phones, and HTC?

Perhaps Mr Elop has plans for this already? - What is the way out for Nokia in the longer term?

I got some fantastic feedback from Sophie, she reported some odd behaviour with Headlines showing blank stories and not loading stories which contained images. Turns out Headlines was working perfectly – However  I learnt a whole lot more from Sophie’s email than I expected.

This bug report was worrying and unexpected, as headlines is built load all images if they are available, and should never show a blank. Sophie was kind enough to send be a screenshot of Headlines running on her handset. This was very educational.

Missing the Missing Images

I checked out the screenshot (see left). When the title of the story title fills the entire width of the "box" then that means that Headlines could not find an image associated with that story. If headlines did find an image it would only place the text on the right side of the box, leaving space for the image to arrive later.

Not every RSS stream supplies images, so when Headlines encounters stories with no images then it uses the enter width of the story button for the title.

But what Sophie was reporting is interesting. Her feedback basically said that it is hard in Headlines to work out which stories should have images and which shouldn’t. In the current version of headlines I don’t show any indication that an image is loading – I simply leave a blank space for it. Sophie’s feedback shows that this can lead to confusion. In future versions of Headlines this is something I need to address.

Missing the Missing Title

I  was able to find the feed Sophie had added - it is a NY Times blog series called "The Principles of Uncertainty". I checked out the feed, and the “blank” story is just that, a story in the RSS Feed with no title! I’ve included a little snippet of the raw RSS content below… the blue is the empty title.

A little snippet of bad RSS:

…              <item>               <title></title>               <link>http://kalman.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/12/24/349/</link>               <comments>http://kalman.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/12/24/349/#comments</comments>               <pubDate>Thu, 24 Dec 2009 21:54:19 +0000</pubDate>               <dc:creator>By MAIRA KALMAN</dc:creator>                            <category><![CDATA[Uncategorized]]></category>                 <guid isPermaLink="false">http://kalman.blogs.nytimes.com/?p=349</guid>               <description><![CDATA[By George! 'And the Pursuit of Happiness' will appear on New Year's Day, 2010. ]]></description>               <wfw:commentRss>http://kalman.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/12/24/349/feed/</wfw:commentRss>               <slash:comments>0</slash:comments>               </item> …

So what Sophie was saying was that without some additional information she couldn’t tell if the lack of a title was a problem with Headlines or a problem with the news feed. This is something I need to work on. I’ve added some additional checking to the next version of Headlines that validates the news feed and adds corrective messages. Now when you add a feed which contains a story without a title Headlines will tell you. The title will display “<No title for this story – Headlines>” as the title. I could have used the description text, but what if that is missing too?

I learnt a lot from the feedback I’ve received so far. I have one final release before hitting Ovi! This release, my RC (Release Candidate) will include some of the improvements discussed here.  I look forward to sharing it will you all very soon!

 

Things are moving on a pace. The VAT numbers for Mind-Flip have arrived and this week will see myself and Emma going through the paces of getting Headlines release. As I mentioned in earlier posts I’ve been looking at how to create a well designed and commutative Icon. One which will provide the first time viewer with an idea about what the application does. I reviewed my earlier attempts, took some advice from Paul Rand, and kicked off a second round of Icon design. I think my new Icon is better – what about you?

So based on the requirements we have on hand:

1. It should contain the RSS logo
2. It should contain the running man symbol
3. It should communicate “News” in some way
4. It should not be square
5. It has to be 88 pixels by 88 pixels

I started playing around with the icon design. I had to keep the RSS logo and the Running man.

I started off by just combining the two symbols. I kept the word news from the original newspaper title too. It is good, but not great – the white space on the far left made the image feel like it was left hanging. Plus it is very square, something I want to avoid.	I played with the RSS logo. Spinning it on its side produced this symbol. It looks very radio / broadcast like.	Recomposing the two images ? I got this. I thought this gave the icon a good composition. I like the way the running man appeared to be running through the RSS Waves. However it still need an base, an anchor for the eyes.
Here I added back in the NEWS footer. This helped provide an anchor for the icon. Additionally since the application is called headlines the combination of the icon containing the word News and the application title below will produce the phrase “NEWS Headlines”. The RSS Icon is actually more orange than red. So I started playing with colour and colour combinations.	Colour and combination play. Rather than have the running man as a separate entity I tried combining the two, using tone to try to integrate the two images. I felt this worked – to a degree. However the conjoining of the iconic images of the running man and the stylised RSS Feed was just too much. I felt the viewer would just be confused by the over complication.	I eventually returned to the red based RSS logo and the NEWS anchor. This really conveys what I wanted. The problem was that the text and the radio / RSS appeared too separate. Is there a way to combine the two? This led me on to the final icon.

 

The Final Icon
The final version – what do you think?

Big	Small

 

I increased the size of the running man, and dropped him lower in the image so that his back foot clips the “N” from news. This draws your eyes down the image in the opposite direction to the RSS Waves. I felt that this icon had the most cohesive feel. What do you guys think?

I’ve been checking  out the Paul Rand web site. For those who don’t know Paul Rand was a graphic design who helped to design some of the world’s most famous and iconic advertising and logos. He was responsible for IBM’s logo, NeXT computers logo, and the American Express logos. On the Paul Rand web site they have published some of the presentations he prepared for these companies.

What is fantastic is they go some way to explain the design process Paul Rand used and they show someone searching for simplicity of design and ease of communication.

So I wanted to go back and revisit my Icon, and see if I could make it any more simple. Below is a selection of Icons I have produced to date:

 

As I’ve mentioned in previous blog posts what I' am trying to do is use an 88 pixel by 88 pixel image not only as the icon for the application, but also as a way to advertise the features that the application offers. These are: News, RSS Feeds, Customisation, Speed.

The RSS Logo is as follows you’ve probably seen this in the address bar of your browser, this one was taken from my browser.

As you can see from my original icon designs above I’ve used the RSS feed as an image on the newspaper. I’ve used the newspaper graphic as a way to communicate news. One of things I saw from Paul Rand’s site was that he was not afraid to use words to communicate with. In fact in some of his identity presentation books he spends a lot of time thinking about the text, and the way the text is presented on the screen.

Could I use the RSS Icon in a more affective way?

Another thing that struck me when viewing Paul Rand’s site was this:

“The rhombus stands out in a sea of squares...”, from the Amex Identity Presentation.

Interesting. You can compare this directly to the icon screen on many smart phone screens. A see of squares is certainly what you do see. So this is a shape I should avoid.

I mentioned this originally the Running Man symbol for Headlines was chosen because I wanted to convey speed, as if you where running through the headlines quickly and easily. I’d like to keep this.

So now I’ve gathered a set of requirements for my new Icon:

1. It should contain the RSS logo
This is a well known symbol that most people will have seen in their web browsers before

2. It should contain the running man symbol
As this is used throughout Headlines and communicates speed

3. It should communicate “News” in some way
RSS can be used for many things, by overstating the “News” I can communicate the message of the application more clearly

4. It should not be square
As it will have to stand out in a sea of other icons and logos

5. It has to be 88 pixels by 88 pixels

Now all I need is to get to it!

Woohoo! There is a new release of Headlines out and available for free to anyone who would like to help beta test! Send me an email at headlines@mind-flip.com if you are interested. This is how support from around the world, and a story about an old computer game helped this next release arrive…

This latest release resolves issues with memory management and I discovered and resolve an issue with searching for new feeds. This is the most stable release yet!

A big thanks to the greatest set of Beta testers in the world!
Getting help from the Americas, London, and Australia!
I got some great feedback from my select group of Beta testers. Henry was the first to report that he was having problems adding new feeds to the application. Then this was followed up with an email from Sophie who reported that she was seeing out of memory errors. As you saw in my last blog post I started looking into the memory issue. After investigating I was able to address the out of memory issue. At the same time Glenn started dropping me emails with additional feedback. He was reporting both out of memory problems and problems adding new feeds. I was able to resolve the memory issues by changing the amount of memory the application requests from the operating system. Next came adding feeds.

Banging your head at 1am in the morning
Resolving the adding feeds problem was tough. The problems appeared to happen for some people, but not for others, and I had not seen the problem at all while testing here in Dublin. So I started checking out the application trying to go through all the parsing logic, trying to determine where and when the error was occurring. There were many 1 am / 2am finishes last week as I sat up trying to work out what was going on. At points I did want to pick up my laptop and throw it and my N97 out of the window! I was banging my head of the desk with frustration. Unlike Doc Brown, banging my head did not result in the design for the flux capacitor, just in a sore head.

It was late one night when I decided to take a break from looking at the code and the emulator that I picked up a copy of Retro Gamer, it is a magazine about old computer games with reports and stories from the developers of games and all the problems they encountered. I took some time out and read a really great story about the how Jordan Mechner created the first Prince of Persia game (an old screen shot from flickr here). In fact Jordan has a brilliant web site with some original diary entries from when he was creating the game. He too encountered frustrating problems. It was good to hear his war stories, this inspired me to go back take an aspirin for my now very sore head and look again at the bug.

After all that I was able to reproduce the problem and I discovered that it was all down to one bad line of code! One single change and I rebuild headlines with the issue now fixed! Brilliant! I was over joyed and tired.

To all the beta testers out there – thank you! Please give this version a pounding and let me know how it all goes!

Thank you beta testers! I have been able to narrow down and make progress on some key memory handling issues in the current beta release of Headlines.A new release of Headlines will be forthcoming this week! – I’ll need some help in testing the new version.

I’ve been working hard these last few days on investigating the bug reports I’ve received so far. I got some great feedback and some detailed information from some of the beta testers which has allowed me to narrow down the root cause of the errors seen for far. I’ve two ways to approach this.

The Hint
The bug reports show Headlines running out of memory when dealing with feeds with lots of images. This makes sense Headlines is a graphically intensive application. However I had a report from a user that on his phone Headlines is not actually consuming that much memory at all?! – Confusing! - This contradiction has lead me to two conclusions.

How Symbian Phone Works
When an application runs on a Symbian device the operating system creates a new process in which the application can run. A process consists of a thread (the ability to run a logical sequence of instructions) and a block of memory (RAM) for the application to use. The amount of memory the application needs to run is specified by the program. Unless you tell Symbian differently it assumes that 1 MB (Megabyte) of memory is all the application needs. To give you some context, this is less than the amount of memory on an old 3.5” floppy disk. In the background Symbian starts the program with just 4kb (less memory than an 8bit Spectrum home computer) and will provide the program with up to 1MB of RAM if the program needs it.

Conclusion 1 – Not Enough Memory
As you can probably guess I had not changes these values and so Headlines was running out of storage space for all the information being provided by the RSS Feeds it was downloading. This also explains why, when the phone was checked it looked like Headlines wasn’t actually using that much memory. Headlines had used its 1MB of memory and couldn’t get any more from the operating system, even though it was available.

Where did all the images go?
Images are handled differently to normal objects in Symbian. For speed, the raw data for an image is not actually owned by the application that creates the image. Instead the image data is actually owned and managed by a system process called the Font and Bitmap server. This means that the image data can be drawn more quickly to the screen. The down side is that there is a lot of extra memory needed to manage the image. This is house keeping information that tells the operating system who owns what image, number of colours needed, where on the screen the image is etc.

Conclusion 2 – Could be Smarter About Memory Usage
Headlines uses a lot of small images this means that a lot of memory is used by the system, just to manage each of these small images. I can save some memory by having one large image rather than lots of small ones.

Next Releases
I’m planning two future releases. The first release increases the amount of memory available to the application, upping it from 1MB. The second release will include some additional changes which will reduce the number of  images used, and hence should save some memory. Beta testers, any help in checking to ensure that these changes help the behaviour of Headlines would be brilliant!

Taking the look of the original icon, could I make it look better? Adding some smooth ness and trying to take away the rough hand drawn look in the original?

Dead Router Troubles
I have been away travelling this week and haven’t had the time I would have liked to complete all the work on the icon design I wanted. To top it all off my internet connection at home is down! – We have UPC (used to be called NTL Ireland), when I returned from my trip I saw this (see left) a dead cisco cable modem. The router is actually plugged in, but there are no lights flashing and needless to say it doesn’t work. My wife said it stopped working my week, she’d tired turn it back off and then turn it on again.

The call to UPC customer service was slightly amusing. It took a surprisingly long time to convince them that the wireless router was actually dead. At first they asked if I had dropped it, or damaged it, then we went through the whole “turn it off then turn it back on again” routine. It looked to me like a fuse had gone, it is going to take them until Monday afternoon until someone can come out. So I’ve been using a Vodafone 3G connection to link up to the web, and going over to friends houses to borrow their WiFi for the last few days.

Troubles Resolved & How did that happen?
Oh dear. I think the trouble was caused by the user, and not by UPC! - As I was typing this post up I have been playing with the router and discovered a tiny little master power button on the back of the router that was switched to the off position… I flicked the switch and I’m back online! Now how did the master power switch move to the off position while I was out of the country? – I think I owe UPC a phone call.

Icon Designs
But I did get the chance to do a little and I have been working to try and produce a smoother version of the icon from my last post. It would be great to hear what you think! – drop me a line via headlines@mind-flip.com,

Icon 1 (Original hand drawn version)

Icon 2 (Polished version with added smoothness)

Further ideas
I have one other idea I will try to sketch out this weekend – placing the running man inside the RSS logo!? – I think I’ll need some time sketching this one.

Bug Reports
Glenn a friend in Australia has been testing headlines on a 5800 for me and reported that on occasion the application appears to run out of memory when adding new feeds. He was able to run some additional tools on his device and provided me with some extra information, so I shall be looking into this for the next release of Headlines.I also got emails / twitters from some of the Headlines beta testers running the N8 that they saw the same error message. It could be a bad RSS feed and my RSS parsing logic is off, or it could be very large images and the application is running out of space. I need to investigate this a little more. But just to let you know I am working on it.

I got some great feedback on my post about Icon design from a friend of mine, Rick Wylie. Rick made a good point - that the icon not only has to look good, but it is also one of the first graphical images a user will see before buying or downloading the app. It is therefore important to make sure that the icon is enticing and descriptive.

I really don’t think that the current icon is descriptive at all. So back to the drawing board. Now how can I make an icon that explains that Headlines is all about news, RSS Feeds, customisation etc?

Well, as you may have heard (an audioboo here) I sat down last night and did some serious doodling! First off I did some searching for images on the internet (see left). Just to see what imagery is often associated with the words “news” and “headlines”. Not surprising the newspaper, or images containing newspaper like images occurred all over the place. Taking this as a queue I sat down to doodle.

The Doodle

You can see some of the images and concepts I came up with below.  I initially started (top left doddle) with the news paper image, I even wrote the word “news” on it. This looked good, but didn’t refer to RSS at all, so I added a version of the RSS logo to it. It looked good but didn’t have the little running man it in – which is the motif used in Headlines. So I moved on experimenting with RSS like logos, newspaper concepts and the running man.

When I was at school my art teacher used to tell me that we always had to produce 6 ideas, 6 concept items before picking one to continue developing. Just coming up with 6 separate ideas is hard. I tried doing 6 doodles below, but really I didn’t get any further.

I eventually settle on one idea, the bottom middle one shown above. I added some light colour to the image to get an impress on how it would look.

The Next New Icon

Taking my favourite image from the doodles I converted this into a vector graphic, the result is below, it looks better, but is not completely the style I’m after. The background newspaper and RSS logo look more like an image from Day of the Tentacle, more cartoony (I guess) than I want. This just appears to clash with the running man logo with its smooth sleek curves.

I’ve still more work to do, but things, I think, are progressing in the right direction. Perhaps I could do something with the running man, RSS logo, and folder concept used in Headlines its self? More doodling may be required.

Just a quick note to let you know that there is a new version of headlines available! This one includes some performance improvements and an icon change.

I am still working on the icon design, I got some fantastic feedback on my last blog post from Rick – man I owe you one! I’m still working on a new design and will share my thought and tribulations here soon.

In the mean time Mind-Flip Ltd’s application for VAT registration is in, and we are just awaiting the results. As soon as we have the numbers I’ll be completing the OVI publishing process and getting Headlines up and available.

Of course I’m still looking for beta testers – if you know of anyone with a touch screen device who would be interested please ask them to drop me a line at headlines@mind-flip. In the mean time here are the release notes for the “Jan 15 2011” build of headlines.