Breeze - Alan Lynse / Cascada Mobile - DemoCamp Toronto 21

Alan Lynse of Cascada Mobile presented Breeze at DemoCamp Toronto 21 at the Velma Rogers Theatre (333 Bloor Street East) on July 28th, 2009. Breeze is a platform for building mobile applications using web technologies that run on a wide array of mobile phone platforms (iPhone, Android, etc.):


In this case, not only can you click through to YouTube, I recommend that you do, since part of this demonstration involves coding in Eclipse, which is a lot easier on your eyes if you switch to the larger HD mode.

Seems like a good way for companies to build simple applications that cross all handsets. If you want the polish of a fully native application that's tailored to the capabilities and design of a particular device, this probably won't cut it, but not everybody needs that, particularly for the first pass.

I don't see this surplanting native mobile application development any time soon, but it's a useful option to keep in mind.

Java ME: Pain Points

Frank Sommers asks, "What are your Java ME Pain Points?". Mine are:

Carrier Stranglehold
Carriers want to own the phones. This seems to be consistent from Canada to the USA, and quite possibly elsewhere. Carriers don't want you messing with your phone, loading things on to it. Actually, they do, they just want to charge you for it in as many different ways as is corporately possible.

This means, among other things, that they usually don't go out of their way to make it easy for you to load software onto your phone for the purposes of development. It also means that if you do manage to get an application on your phone, it's not easy to share that application with others.

This is, to my eye, the biggest barrier to adoption.

Canadian Data Rates
Data rate plans in Canada are brutal. There's no serious 'unlimited' plan at this point, and the non-unlimited ones are highway robbery. Between this and the previous point, Canadian carriers are themselves destroying adoption of the very tools they sell. If carriers would just let users use the phones the way that PC manufacturers let them use their PCs, wireless applications would be a much larger, more vibrant world. Let this be a lesson to OS vendors who have been implementing DRM. Sooner or later we're going to dump your over-protective operating systems and move on to other pastures.

High Barrier to Entry
Many Palms don't have Java VMs for free. iPhone may not support Java. Different phones have different support for Java, require different tools and procedures. I've looked into Java ME development several times, only to get thrown back by the high barrier to entry. I don't want to buy a JVM for my Palm, and it's not that easy to learn which tools I need to build a Java ME application for my Nokia, build it, and install it. This needs to get easier, be more seamless.

There are others, but these three are the biggest categories of pain. Fix these, and you'll see more consumers and developers interested in what Java ME can offer them.

Wireless in Canada

Canada is a country that is so large, but not so populous that its geographically dispersed population has often been quick on the uptake of connecting technologies: broadband internet, wireless phones and devices.

However, when it comes to mobile phones, Canada is not in the forefront, and I blame that firmly on the Carriers: Bell, Telus, Rogers/Fido, etc.

I read about interesting mobile applications daily. Things like GMail and Google Maps on mobile, like Radar or (forgive me) even Twitter. And yet, these don't impact my life, or the life of my friends. Why? Because the Canadian mobile market is all locked up, and those who have the keys are just looking for the leverage to make a little more money.

When infrastructure is new, or difficult to acquire, people seek to control it. Electricity, internet access. These slowly, sometimes very slowly, become commodities, even subsidized, and the community, both business and personal, often benefits from it. While electricity helped to turn on the lights and automate laborious tasks, cheap electricity brought us radio, the telephone, television and the internet. Yes, I admit, it also brought us wall-mounted singing fish and the home shopping channel, but nothing comes without its price.

Similarly, you don't build more bandwidth into the network because people need it for the applications they already have, you build it because they don't even know what they can do with it until they have it: videoconferencing, iptv, voip -- these are technologies that become possible when bandwidth becomes cheap.

This is why I wish that the wireless providers could get it through their dense heads that giving us increased, unfettered access to wireless data and the applications that require that data only makes us their dependent customers. That the idea of paying $100/mo for 250MB of data, 200MB of Data while limiting access to applications and charging monthly fees for access to your phone's GPS capabilities is hurting them as much as it's hurting us.

Get over it. Free us from your mindless restrictions and help us help you make wireless applications and data a ubiquitous part of our daily lives. We'll keep paying you for this stuff, just stop getting in the way.