Russell Beattie

So I saw this review of a really cool photo app from a company called Yellow Software. It's a photo-album creator for the Nokia Series 60 phones. I saw this yesterday and it started the wheels turning, but it took a day for me to get it. Look at the description:

With Yellow Computing's PhotoExpress you can publish your pictures, including basic navigation, to your website. Just select photos from phone, choose a background color and your topics and upload via FTP to your site. Get it from Handango.

From author:

You can publish the latest photos from every event that is important for you in the world wide web ? even if there are family events, sport events or a meeting ? within a few seconds all your photos are accessible via Internet.

Features:
-Dialog to choose your pictures comfortably
-Generate a complete navigation inclusive labels.
-Fast file transfer via FTP to your web space

Visit demo page here:
http://www.yplayer.de/xpress/

For a trial and to buy it go to:
Handango

Price: $14.95
Size on phone: 150kb

Do you see how it works? It organizes your photos on the phone, then uses FTP to send the images and the HTML to your web server directly from the phone!! This is really cool! I would never have thought of it. I'm finally getting the idea and it's cool as hell. It's really close to moblogging, no?

If you saw my post about the GPRS phones having IPs and being little computers then you may have started thinking the right. I wasn't but now I am. I've been spending the past week or so thinking of ways to create a moblogging server. To use email or MMS from my phone and send a post to a server which would use the Blogger/Metaweblog API to then post it to another blog server somewhere that uses these APIs. And then it dawned on me just now:

Why not post to your blog using XML-RPC directly from your phone?

Duh! It's obvious and in front of my eyes. The Symbian OS is a full-fledged 32 bit OS running on an ARM processor with megabytes of memory and an IP address with a dial-up speed connection to the internet. Why mess with a middle server at all, especially for something as straight forward as this? I mean, maybe for news aggregating or email, you'll want to have a server to do the heavy lifting and filtering, but for many apps I can imagine that you'll want to have a "fat client" that will do the job without messing with slow and unreliable servers.

Really cool. I'm getting it. Slowly but surely.

-Russ