According to Apple, MobileMe is launching on July 9th Between 6pm-12am PT, just few hours away now. Apple describes MobileMe as a suite of web-based applications (Mail, Contacts, Calendar, Gallery, and iDisk) and Push sync services.

As I said in Is MobileMe Innovative?, Apple is approaching their massive consumer base with the message of Easy-to-use, elegant interface and desktop look-n-feel. As an application deverloper, I am interested in MobileMe’s perfermance behind the SproutCore javascript platform, and I am going to do some simple tests, including:

1. I will test the speed of the iDisk with some large files. (Reason: To see if it gives me the desktop look and feel)
2. I will test the mail with all basic features and then compare with Gmail’s conversation-style. (Reason: MobileMe and Gmail target the same market)
3. I will run MobileMe on IE6 (Reason: According to W3C, 26.5% browsers are IE6, which is not on the supported browsers list of MobileMe)
4. I will go throught the javascript to do a brief test about security.

P.S. MobileMe lives at me.com

1. Google Trends – search patterns and trends.
2. xinureturns – search engines, social bookmarking results aggregation.
3. quantcast – Internet ratings
4. alexa – traffic and changes
5. analytics – keywords / traffic source / visitors and more
6. compete – advertisers like reports from compete
7. search-directory – categories search tool

I’d like to say a massive thank you to the guys developing these fantastic search engine optimization tools, which make our life much easier.

Matt

The application is made with PHP and javascript, and we use a MySQL database. Amazon’s S3 is used for storage of files upload by users. Prototype and script.aculo.us provides us with easy-to-use and sexy user interface. We use Zend Framework APIs to support web services (such as Google, Flickr, Yahoo and Amazon). Meanwhile, we support microformat and RSS.

Wordpress helps us to build our fantastic Bizroof Blog which is powered by K2 theme, and iconshock provides all the icons we need.

If you never heard about Apple’s MobileMe, what do you think it does? Mobile… mobile phone? get connected anywhere? Me…. all about my stuff? Yes, you are absolutely right. It is a simple way to keep everything organize and sync. If you look closer, MobileMe is actually a web-based application which helps to store and manage your emails, contacts, calendars and files on both your computers and iPhones or iPod.

The idea is not new and so simple. Well… all the brilliant ideas are simple. The question is that what is the innovative stuff involved?

SproutCore, a javascript platform is being used to provide the desktop-like feel. This approach is definitely not new as there are plenty of similar platforms being used all over the place, you name it… Google Web Toolkit, Ext-js, Objective-J, YUI etc.

The business model is not new neither. Keep everything up to date and share large files with friends are well discussed and executed throughout the web industry.

Could MobileMe succeed? I think so…. The reasons are simple:

A. Apple has a good reputation building easy to use stuff.

B. Apple has a massive consumer base, among which there are plenty of evangelists.

C. MobileMe can solve problem, fairly enough

According to the latest browsers statistics report (May, 2008) from the W3C, IE is still the most common browser (IE7 26.5%, IE6 27.3%), and Firefox becomes more and more popular as 39.8% of the public are using it today. At the same time, Safari and opera takes 2.4% and 1.5% of the market respectively. However, as we all know, different browsers response to CSS and javascript differently, and this will definitely give the developers and graphic designers some extra work.

As for the Bizroof development team, we dive into the specifications of each browser and try to discover all their preferences, and then we test our code in all the 6 major browsers, including IE6, IE7, FF2, FF3, Safari and Opera. It is a painful and time consuming job, but we are doing it now and we will continue doing it in the future. The reason is simple: As a web application provider, we need to make each user’s experience count!

The new calendar is in iCal format which is a standard for calendar data exchange with apps like google calendar, yahoo calendar, MS outlook, MAC iCal and lot more. We use AJAX wherever possible for this design, and keep improving on the usability.

The Current features include:

1. Customize “first day of week” (i.e. week start on Monday, Saturday and Sunday)
2. Support multi calendars (coloured labels) for each user
3. Drag and drop events to make changes
4. Quick add events (just one click)
5. Translate human language to computer readable language. i.e. “Lunch with Jason 3pm tomorrow”
6. Auto detect “Time Zone” and “Daylight saving time” on the user’s computer
7. Support multi languages
8. AJAX auto-completer to add guests to events
9. Feed for events
10. Export in iCal and MS Word formats
11. Filter events by tags

Don’t hesitate to contact me if you have any suggestions.

Yesterday, I installed wordpress on the server where my website hosted, and I decided to show several of my latest posts on my home page in order to let my visitors know my roadmap in real-time. Also – since I am using smarty templates to to facilitate the separation of application code from presentation, I don’t really want output (echo) the post data directly onto the page. After playing with the loop process for a while, I finally got this sorted out. Here is how I did it:

<Step One> Include the wp-blog-header.php file.
require('blog/wp-blog-header.php');

<Step Two> Collect all post data as required.
query_posts('showposts=4'); //Show latest 4 posts
while (have_posts()) //checks if any posts collected
{
static $blog = 0;
the_post(); //prepare for the iteration of the loop
$title[$blog] = the_title('','',0); //the_title function has 3 parameters, including 'start', 'end' and 'output or not'
$url[$blog] = get_permalink(); //post link
$date[$blog] = the_date("M d, Y", '', '', 0); //the_date function has 4 parameters, including 'date format', 'start', 'end', and 'output or not'
$blog++;
}
$numberOfPosts = $blog; //$numberOfPosts will be assigned to the loop number in the smarty template file.

Note – I created 3 arrays to store the relevant post information from the blog, including $title, $url, and $date, and then I use smarty template to display all them onto my home page (Demo Page)

Have Fun!