User Review of Safe and SafeDesktop (MobileKnox / Safe)
Today, Safe and SafeDesktop got reviewed on Motorolafans.com. Kiwiguy, this is the nickname of the author, first described how to install Safe and SafeDesktop. Second, he discusses two methods to synchronize the data stored inside Safe and SafeDesktop. The first approach he describes is the one I have envisioned: Using the Internet to easily connect your mobile device to your desktop machine. Unfortunately, this did not work out for Kiwiguy. I am going to get in contact with him to solve this problem because for many users (including me) synchronization over the Internet works pretty well. The second method Kiwiguy is describing is pretty clever: Manually copy the data from the mobile device to the desktop machine. This allows at least a one way synchronization and is better than nothing. I never thought about this way of doing synchronization but I like it. This also allows users with no Internet access at their mobile device to easily synchronize their data. To further facilitate this approach, I am going to enhance SafeDesktop so that it can import encrypted data.

Further, Kiwiguy posted a message to the Safe and SafeDesktop forum. In this posting he is complaining about getting confused with the "ok" button and the "change password" button directly after Safe is started. I already thought about moving the "change password" button to another place and this comment is the impulse to really do it. So, the next version of Safe will only show a "ok" button after you entered your root password.

Thanks Kiwiguy for your review and your comments about Safe and SafeDesktop! I really appreciate any comments about the tools and I just love to hear if someone is using the tools for his or her daily life!

Best regards,
Thomas
Posted by Thomas King at 10:24 2007-08-30 | Trackbacks (0) | Comments (0)

PerCom (Ph.D. studies)
It is 1:35am in the morning and we (=a research assistant student and I) are still collecting data for our experiments that I want to present at PerCom 2008. At the moment, I cannot talk about details but as you might guess I am still doing research in the area of 802.11-based positioning systems. During the last 10 weeks I spend every minute of my work time and most of my spare time on this research project. I have the strong feeling that our research results are another major step for the 802.11-based positioning system community in getting these systems ready for the average Joe to use. Because of this feeling I am working like crazy and at the moment I am quite confident that I will be ready with the research paper until we reach the submission deadline. The submission deadline is scheduled for Sept. 4. After this day, my research work is in god's hands and hopefully the reviewers like the idea of the paper in the same why I like it. Keep the fingers crossed! ;-)

Cheers,
Thomas
Posted by Thomas King at 01:31 2007-08-24 | Trackbacks (0) | Comments (0)

Safe is Application-of-the-Day (MobileKnox / Safe)
Softonic (www.softonic.de) informed me by email that they selected Safe as application-of-the-day. Softonic is a register website such as Download.com and others. They mainly focus on desktop applications and tools that run on mobile devices. Safe is listed on Softonic since many months and according to their statistics it has been downloaded more than 3300 times from their site. Just have a look: http://dewww2.softonic.de/handys

I am very proud and hopefully this helps spreading Safe and SafeDesktop. ;-)

Cheers,
Thomas
Posted by Thomas King at 23:36 2007-08-14 | Trackbacks (0) | Comments (0)

WiNTECH and LoCA (Ph.D. studies)
My papers entitled "Loc{lib,trace,eva,ana}: Research Tools for 802.11-based Positioning Systems" and "Deployment, Calibration, and Measurement Factors for Position Errors in 802.11-based Indoor Positioning Systems" have been accepted at ACM WiNTECH and LoCA, respectively. While ACM WiNTECH accepted nearly 50 percent of all submissions, LoCA accepted only 30 percent. So, I am pretty proud that my paper has been accepted at LoCA. Accepted papers mean a lot of traveling. ;-) This is why I will be out of office for nearly half of September.
I am looking forward to present my research work at these conferences and workshops. And even more interesting are the discussions after the presentations. Hopefully, I will get in touch with some well-known and very clever researchers so that I can discuss my further ideas with them and get feedback from them! It sound like it will be a very exciting time! ;-)

Just a side-note: I am currently working on a paper for PerCom. Hopefully it will be ready before we reach the submission deadline. *g* I plan to release a few details about the paper in the near future. Stay tuned! ;-)

Posted by Thomas King at 11:05 2007-08-08 | Trackbacks (0) | Comments (0)

Safe and SafeDesktop (MobileKnox / Safe)
Just a brief update: I released Safe 2.2.6 and SafeDesktop 0.9.2 a few days ago. Everybody using earlier versions of these tools should visit www.javawi.de and get an update.

Cheers,
Thomas
Posted by Thomas King at 10:45 2007-08-08 | Trackbacks (0) | Comments (0)

List of Fancy J2ME Applications (General)
I am a J2ME developer for many years now. In 2001 I started developing Safe (http://www.javawi.de) and since then I updated this application once in while. So, I kept pace with the evolvement of J2ME. MIDP 2.0, CLDC 1.1 and the advent of various JSR projects improved the plain J2ME framework a lot. Now, it is possible to access files stored on a mobile device and to communicate with back-end servers by using Web-Services. The 3D-graphic API allows fancy game scenarios and the well-known Location-API is an enabler for the location-based service market.
Not only has the Java side improved, also mobile devices advanced. Back in 2001 my Palm Pilot m505 was busy for a few hundreds milliseconds decrypting a short text message that has been encrypted using AES. Nowadays, I cannot recognize any delay in decrypting the same text message. Also, many mobile devices offer a lot of free memory, so that J2ME applications can be executed at high speed without many time-consuming garbage-collection runs.
Back in 2001 and 2002 we have seen an explosion of J2ME applications even that the J2ME-platform was not as feature-rich as it is today and the hardware was much slower. Register-websites such as www.midlet.org list nearly 500 different applications ranging from a Doom port to ICQ instant messenger client. However, my impression is that many software projects and register-websites have been shut down during the last few years. For instance, www.midlet.org's front website lists the last addition of a software project back in 2004. And if you click through the list of applications many project websites do not even exist anymore.
On the other side, companies likes Yahoo! and Google have joined the J2ME software market by releasing tools such as Google Maps, Google Mail and Yahoo! Go. These tools are on the cutting-edge of what is possible with J2ME and show how cool applications on mobile devices can be. From my point of view, we are lacking a website that keeps track of all the cool J2ME applications that have been unleashed recently. To change this I am going to post a list of cool applications I use in my daily life. I ask everybody who is using other cool J2ME applications to complete the list of applications by posting the name and a link to the project website by adding a comment to this blog entry.

Very cool J2ME applications (in random order): This is my list of fancy J2ME applications for shiny mobile devices. Now it is your turn to enhance this list. :-)

Cheers,
Thomas
Posted by Thomas King at 00:00 2007-08-08 | Trackbacks (0) | Comments (3)