New g-wizMOBILE CTO

I am excited to announce that in addition to my responsibilities at Judd Solutions, I have excepted the position as the g-wizMOBILE CTO. g-wizMOBILE is a service and product company targeting the mobile platforms of J2ME, iPhone, Android and WAP. Mobile is such an exciting and emerging market. I look forward applying my years of J2ME and enterprise Java experience to create exciting new products and help other companies trying to develop and deploy their own mobile applications.

Other advantages to Apple distribution model for iPhone apps

Another great advantages of distributing applications for the iPhones is not having to write installers or complicated installation instructions. That alone should save lots of development time and support headaches. Wouldn't it be nice if all software installation could be this easy.

Apple's iPhone application deployment model is fair

In talking to some of my fellow developer friends about the recent iPhone SDK launch, they are shocked and disappointed with Apple's for distribution model but especially with Apple's 70/30 split of the sale of the applications.

I happen to think this model is quite fair. Here is a list of things included with sharing 30% with Apple:

• distribution
• credit card transactions
• marketing
• platform

I think this makes the program a great bargain. For example other forms of distribution like retail often have a 40-50% markup. More importantly Apple is providing the opportunity by providing and opening the platform and SDK at no additional charge.

I also can't believe the Standard Developer Program is only $99. I have been developing J2ME application for several years now. Whenever you deploy you typically need to sign the J2ME app it can be $500 for a single deployment option because of certificates. If want to make your application available through several carriers you might have to have several certificates which cost additional money and add to the packaging and deployment complexity.

But the final benefit is the program includes free distribution for free apps. So if you don't want to share 30% with Apple, there is a missed revenue opportunity in Apple's plan. I have not heard or seen anything relate to participating in sharing for any other monetization options. So if you give away your application for free but sell ads, you can save it all :)

Finally, if you are looking for iPhone developers please contact me, I am very excited about the platform and would love the opportunity to work on this new frontier.

Excellent cell phone browsing experience with Opera Mini

I have a MOTORAZR V3 from Sprint. I have been some what satisfied with my browsing experience and the embedded Obigo browser for websites designed for mobile content. However websites not designed for mobile content look awful. So when I hard the Java Posse talk about a J2ME based browser I had to give it a try. The browser is the free Opera Mini browser. It was easy to install, just use your embedded mobile browser and click on a link and it installs. Sites designed for mobile content look incredible while sites not designed for mobile also look good. For regular content, it renders a scaled down version and gives you the ability to zoom in and move about the page. The other great thing is unlike embedded browsers, it is easily upgrade able. If you are not pleased with your current mobile browsing experience you should give Opera Mini a try. It is not as nice as the iPhone browsing experience but if you have a standard phone for making phone calls this might make you look at your phone differently.

Announcing FallME 0.6.0

FallME 0.6.0 is now available. In addition to a forms initialization enhancement, there is now a example application. We hope to have a better example and tutorial soon.