Evan and I have been trying to hack Android onto one of the Nokia tablets on and off for about four months now. He recently pointed me to a guide that makes the whole process fairly simple. (Note: try at your own risk).

I’m excited to finally be able to have it on an actual device (my N800). It runs a bit slow and the touchscreen doesn’t work (which means no typing) but it looks very neat.

Charlie and I were talking about Socialight’s open source client and one good point he made really stood out: How do you create a groundswell out of this? How do you get others to do the same? He said it felt too much like “here’s what we’re doing” instead of “here’s what everyone should do”. The latter idea is exactly the point I was going for but I don’t think my language was right. I probably got distracted by the excitement of being published again (like in grad school). So, some amendments are in order.

Why should everyone do this?

For starters, if there had been a similar open and well-documented client in the marketplace, we wouldn’t have had to spend two months of hard work recreating our own application. This had to have been one of the most frustrating things we went through. There were so many other features to work on but we were devoting nearly all our time on simple client-side interface details. We know other mobile developers have the same difficulty in developing interfaces but have done very little to share their work. We hope to lead by example.

This is not a new concept, really

We’ve already seen numerous examples of how openness and sharing can lead to better products and faster development cycles. Consider the work that’s been put into Rails. The platform not only provides an underlying development framework, but also makes available numerous plugins and sample code to make your job easier. If we have something similar in the mobile world, we’ll have a much easier time creating the products we love and want to build. We’ll spend less time worrying about the underlying principles behind something like GUI buffering code (which is not something every mobile developer needs to know).

Open for you…and you and you and you

More than anything, this code means more openness and should mean more to developers and others in the industry that it does for Socialight itself. If the app were closed, Socialight would still need a client and we would continue to develop it closed for our needs. However – if the app were open, Socialight would get the same benefit of having a client but now other developers will have something to touch and use. Both external developers and Socialight win in this situation because by having it open, both parties benefit from future improvements.

So where does that leave us

Open code is not a unique thing – it’s been around for as long as software itself. I think the difference here is open startup code. We’re all in the same small developer boat – especially in mobile. I think we can really help each other out even more if we all did this. I hope to leave you this time not only with a “so here’s what I did” but rather “here’s the start of something bigger”. Here are the first bits of what we’re going to do.

I guess the one thing I didn’t do in my last writeup was to make a call for action. So here it is. The game’s started – knight to f3. Your move.

I can’t believe this idea hasn’t received more press considering how valuable it is – and how simple it is to setup. In the past, I’ve written about how you can tether your Nseries handset to your computer to take advantage of your GPRS/3G connection for Internet use. This requires pairing of the two devices over Bluetooth – and only allows a one-to-one connection. That is, you can only connect one laptop to a handset. If you and a friend are both traveling and struggling to check email at an airport or something, you’re out of luck. Joikuspot aims to solve this problem with a brilliant solution. It is an application that turns your Nseries handset into a WiFi hotspot. Now you can share your handset’s Internet connection with a few different machines – all over WiFi – no need for tethering and other miscellaneous setup. I’ve successfully connected both my MacBook and my iPhone simultaneously to get at content. (Technically, the iPhone was browsing over a 3G network!)

I wrote about Joikuspot setup on the Nseries Workshop blog.

I’ve always liked neat hacks that allow me to control my phone from my computer. For instance, having the ability to type up a quick SMS from my computer instead of my phone is sometimes just convenient. My hacked iPhone allows me to control it in various ways just by logging into it like any normal server.

But what if you don’t want to hack your phone? Nokia just took a step ahead in bringing such features to the mainstream. An application called Nokia PC Phone is basically an extension for your browser and it exposes your phone’s contact list. You can use this list to make calls and send text messages directly from your browser.

I wrote up a quick howto on the Nseries workshop blog.

It’s 2008. I’m at some of the biggest tech conferences around. Yet there’s still no free blanket WiFi. *sigh*

Anytime I’m on the road without Internet access, I connect my laptop to the Internet by tethering to my N95. I wrote up a little guide on how to do this over at the Nseries workshop blog. It’s been very useful at conferences, airports and even car rides.