Ask has just launched a mobile version of their site at m.ask.com. I played with it for a bit on my Treo 600 and it seems to work pretty well. They’ve kept things simple, not trying to do too much on any page. Results are all filtered through Skweezer technology, just like Mobile Bloglines recently added. Maps are servicable and in a pinch would probably help you find something. On my 600 at least, the map size was really small, so it was of limited usefulness. Google Maps is going to be tough to beat now. See the SearchEngineWatch page…
This week Google released a downloadable mobile Google Maps application for Treo smartphones. Perhaps proving that Palm OS is not dead yet, this is a great example of an application that can provide a better experience than a web browser. Overall the application is pretty quick, even on my poor old Treo 600. Local business integration and traffic are great. The Satellite view is kind of cool, but I’m guessing most users would stick with the street view. Bonus points for over the air install (i.e. no need to install from desktop and HotSync to the device). How to make…
Flickr’s geotagging features are really cool. I’m GPS-challenged (meaning, I don’t have one yet), but the Organizer makes it easy to associate photos with their location. When viewing other photos, I really wish the UI had a better indicator when the photo has geotag information. Right now, it’s a subtle bullet point under additional information, like: “Taken in Yorktown, Virginia (map)”. To solve this, I wrote a Greasemonkey script to add a small icon just above the photo (after Add to Faves, Blog This, etc. buttons). The icon only appears for photos that have geotagging data associated with them. I…
Over 3 years ago, I posted my small collection of websites optimized for PDA or small screen viewing. Since then I’ve had a steady stream of visitors (recently averaging about 10,000 page views per month) and some great referrals from other sites, but the page and its contents were being neglected and needed a refresh. This past week I rewrote by bookmark system from an old database to del.icio.us. A short Perl script periodically grabs my del.icio.us bookmarks and creates the page content. Now as I discover new mobile websites, I can tag in del.icio.us and they’ll be picked up…
Searching around the Mozilla Add-ons site yesterday, I found a cool extension for displaying mailing list headers in Thunderbird. This addon reads the extended mail headers and if mailing list headers (ref RFC 2369) are found, they’ll be displayed as active links. Common links include subscribe/unsubscribe options (mail or web) and archives.