tekArtist

We were planning on releasing a WPhone 1.3.2 tonight. Then we figured the new Plugin Management feature and some of the backend improvements called for a 1.4.0 release instead.

Moving forward is fun!

On a related note, I though the following was just brilliant: We got our first confirmed post from a BlackBerry. What’s so interesting about this? Well, Sergio, the author, embarked on a 4×4 expedition to Morocco (and its desert) last Friday, and will be using WPhone to blog for his family and friends back home.

Thanks a lot of for your quick support. I want to post for my family and friends in my recent blog http://www.sergiorico.com with my blackberry traveling into Morocco (from this friday)… probably nothing is going to work… least wphone!! Great extension!!

Lucky him.

What a great first day!

The sponge analogy explains itself when you take in consideration the amount of information you’re exposed to on your first day in a new company. Dataset acquired, time to parse.

One sure thing is that I lucked out, because this team sure knows how to make someone feel right at home. Can’t wait to be productive, so I can carry my own weight. And then some.

Like good old Stimpy would say: happy happy, joy joy.

Yesterday was my last day as McGill University’s Web System Architect.

It’s always sad to leave a team you’ve so enjoyed working with for five (long/short) years, but how could I refuse taking on the role of technology director for the dynamic Plank Design?

As Doug, a teammate on the WPhone project, would so elegantly put it: *grin*.

And as Buzz would, since one analogy is never enough (…): to infinity, and beyond!

My team and I released version 1.3.1 of WPhone. This will be the version which will be judged in the little challenge we got involved in/with. Matt, at Automattic, will judge the entries with what is released by October 22nd, so we’re all eager to know how we did.

And now, let the wait and nail biting begin (00:16 in Montreal)… ;)

Thanks to Warren Wilansky, owner of the excellent Plank Design, who was kind enough to lend me his iPod Touch for the weekend, we were able to finally view and use WPhone on an actual Apple device and hammer out most of the display glitches our original releases had. Well, that and a whole lot of tweaks and new features, such as some fixes in the bundled iUI Javascript library for which I started submitting patches upstream, etc.

Sure feels good to not be flying blind anymore! Though I did have to give the iPod back today, which was about as painful as cutting off one of my own fingers… :p

So, if you had downloaded an earlier version, be sure to try the new 1.2.0 release. Or if you’re into the whole living on the edge thing, checkout the development branch of our Subversion repository, where we’ve already started to add some neat new features after 1.2.0 came out (otherwise known as rapid fire development).

Now, since our core focus is actually full support for the widest possible array of mobile, lightweight and accessibility devices (smart and non-smart mobile phones, PDAs, micro tablets, screen and braille readers, etc) what I really would like for the next step is to somehow gain access to some of the other targeted devices.

So if you happen to be in Montreal, have any of the following devices/environments and are interested in helping us out, please drop me a note (comments or wordpress-AT-tekartist-DOT-org) and maybe we can get together for a bit of geeky fun. :)

• Nokia devices running the S60WebKit browser or earlier versions (w/ or w/o JS),
• Blackberry (any xhtml capable generation),
• Windows Mobile smart phones or PDAs (EDGE and/or WIFI),
• Symbian-based devices,
• Opera Mobile and/or Opera Mini capable devices,
• Jaws or other accessibility device/software,

… or anything else that you would like to use WPhone on really.

Who knows, maybe I’ll luck out at one of the countless tech events organized in Montreal, such as the BarCamps, etc.