My posting has slowed recently as life has sped up.  I get married April 2 and go on honeymoon from April 5, getting there is tough as house renovations need to meet that deadline too so that our Aussie guests have a place to sleep.  The day job is kicking off with 2 major Six Sigma improvement projects at the same time and I’ve got new personal time work projects at the inception phase too. 

Big posts will be slow for a while, smaller ones and items should keep up, as will Twitter.

Proactive.

Some people really don’t get it, so here I’m going to define what it means to be proactive.

This is from the single source of all truth that is Wikipedia:

to act before a situation becomes a source of confrontation or crisis" vs. after the fact.

Well actually as it says it’s from Stephen R. Covey’s 7 Habits of… .  The next one if from Dictionary.reference.com

serving to prepare for, intervene in, or control an expected occurrence or situation, esp. a negative or difficult one; anticipatory: proactive measures against crime.

The first of these is interesting because it states that you do something before confrontation or crisis, the latter talks about preparing to prevent something necessary.  Why is this a source of frustration…mainly because I’m being asked to be “proactive”, but to wait until people feel the pain first. 

That, to me, is being poised to be reactive, which is not a bad thing, but call it what it is!

Image from anothergreatescape.co.uk

Finally I’m launching TwitterMyFlickr, it’s a neat little app that posts a picture to Flickr and Links to it on Twitter.  Give it a go!

I wrote this app because I like to share on Flickr and on Twitter and it was fun.  The really tricky stuff is done using the FlickrNet API. 

Obviously there is AppToDate Support.

Let me know what you think, comment on the TwitterMyFlickr page.

I’ve just posted the following article on MobileTechAddicts 

Vito software, a Russian mobile software development house has recently updated to of their applications SMS-Chat and Fun Contact.  Both applications make SMS and Contacts on your Windows Mobile device far more finger friendly.  I’ve been using them every day for a while and after the jump you’ll find some more details on these excellent applications, available for sub £10 each.

Click here to go to the full post

I’ve just posted the following article on MobileTechAddicts…..to read the full article go click here to the post…

Having launched the new iPhone and with the new SDK on the way Apple have added in a couple of clauses to curb what developers can do with the GPS built into the new iPhone.  According to Electronista the agreement states that the GPS cannot be used for real time navigation applications.

Inspired the the TV series Chuck, there’s a new logo on the site.  Much nicer than my old shoes.  This is a great show with a great theme by the band Cake:

For the past week I’ve been toiling away on integrating Summize into HelloTwitFace.  Summize replaces TweetScan as HelloTwitFace’s replies and search tabs.  This was a challenge as I’d already built in RSS reading capabilities to read the TweetScan results, but Summize works with ATOM.  I did some diggining and finally got it working…and I have the start of a Summize .NET API.

I think this is the first Windows Mobile app out there to include Summize capabilities.  Summize rocks by the way, it is SUPER FAST!

Deets on how to use what’s new after the jump.

So how do those new features work then?  Simple, you click on “@” to see all replies sent to you, including those that just mention you with an “@” in there and thoser replies that come back when people have responded to many people at once.

Search is simple too, click the “Summize” tab and enter the search criteria.  All your searches are cached locally on your device.  Note not the actual results but the search criteria, I did that ‘cos like the rest of the app, I find it useful.

The final change is also one that’s under the hood, but it won’t crash now when TweetScan goes down.

Final comment, when you download me, follow me, @simonster , on twitter.  I release HelloTwitFace about 24 to 48 hours in advance on twitter and to AppToDate users.

Well, I’ve just put up my first post for mobiletechaddicts.com – go check it out.  That’s were most if not all of my mobile tech news and reviews will land form now on.  Also on Mobile Tech Addicts is lots of the latest news on cool mobile tech developments.

Ok. That caught me out. I think twitter updated their xml format on Tuesday. On Wednesday hellotwitface stopped working, it wasn’t immediately obvious but they added an extra tag inbefore the user tags on the friends timeline.

It’s now fixed and an update is available through apptodate.

I’ve also included a sneak peak at the next release, with is using http://tweetscan.com to fine all your replies. hellotwitface is moving into a phase me becoming a mobile mashup for twitter and related services.

If there’s a feature you’d like comment on this post!

Posted from moBlog – mobile blogging tool for Windows Mobile

It’s taken me a couple of weeks but here is version 2.0 of HelloTwitFace!

This was quite a major update, the main portion of which was moving away from using m.twitter.com to using the API and the great new tweets display that includes the image of the person twittering.  There’s what’s new:

• Nice twitter interface
• New De-Scobleizer tab – the ability to move one of your contacts into a separate tab
• New Icon 
• Automatic refresh at user set interval up to 10 minutes

Go get it from here!

Another hard night of geeking out and I’m almost there. There are a few ui changes to make and I still have to work out how to create a cab that doesn’t overwrite all files but its getting there.

The new version has a nice new twitter tab.

Posted from moBlog – mobile blogging tool for Windows Mobile

I’m planning on updating HelloTwitFace at the weekend, probably late on Saturday with new feature I’ve been working on.  I’m going to move the twitter tab away from simply using http://m.twitter.com to using the twitteroo 1.4 API to build my own twitter stream.  I’m planning on including an interesting feature in that too.  The option to keep the mobile page will be there still too.

For now, as they’ve been requested and I need to upload them, here are two screenshots.

I’ve just spent this evening on a bit of a GeekOut quest.  I’ve just put the finishing touches on HelloTwitFace.  It’s a really simple app that combines three of my favourite mobile sites, hellotxt, twitter and facebook.

I think this is the first app to include hellotxt in any way, let me know on that one.

It’s a very simple Windows Mobile app that draws the mobile versions of the above into a tabbed environment and uses hellotxt to do the updates.  I’ve been using it for a week and it seems to work really well.  I’ve also built in MoDaCo AppToDate support and it works just great!

Now to tell people about it!  Oh and sorry about the rubbish Icon!

If you don’t know who Robert Scoble is then you really aren’t listening are you?  Robert Scoble, or the Scobleizer, gets involved in all that’s new and cool on the Web.  Today he’s been over to see the folks at FriendFeed and has announced on his blog that he’ll be redesigning it to revolve around his feed.

FriendFeed, if you don’t know, is a social aggregator…what’s that?  Well these days we use loads of “social” channels share our information.  I for example use this blog, Facebook, twitter, del.icio.us and Google Reader to share with people, you can see my friendfeed here.  So if you want to know what I’m interested in and doing you need to look at all of those to get the picture…if you care.

Scoble has started to use twitter a whole lot more, and he’s doing the same thing as me, short things get a tweet (that’s a twitter message), long things – like this get a post, other items become a shared reader item, and websites get a del.icio.us tag.

I’m going to take the lead from the Scoble and syndicate my FriendFeed through my blog.  Why not.

via Scobleizer (and twitter and friend feed)

Just read on the hellotxt blog that they don’t require coupon codes now for the mobile version, m.hellotxt.com.  Great news, great tool.

I was just looking for couple of plugins for Windows Live Writer and came across this. I already use the brilliant portable apps suite to use Firefox but this is a really cool addition…tested and working fine…right now infact. Get this!

Windows Live Writer Portable 2.0 Now with U3

This is one of my favourite books.  It’s a very friendly management piece that takes you on journeys.  My all time best management book.

hiojioj