Our goal was to nicely integrate the mobile phone into the user’s “desktop experience” and utilize the current coexistence of PC and mobile phone. Desktop widgets give a nice opportunity to show you relevant information in a polite way while you are using your PC and allow you to use the good UI capabilities of the PC (bigger keyboard and screen) for mobile related features.  

 

We have reported on individual pieces making this before. What’s positive news is that an open standard is being developed for use of mobile phones as integrated controller inside a number of wide use areas, like home automation and medical applications.

“The mobile phone has changed the way people communicate, but a consortium of Japanese researchers and companies are banking on the device to do much more.

The P2P Universal Computing Consortium (PUCC) has developed a set of networking standards that allow mobiles to remotely control domestic appliances from afar.

At CES the consortium showed off an iPhone application that allowed a user to control a flat in Tokyo.

The user could switch lights on and off, control the air conditioning and even turn the washing machine on.

The technology is already available in Japan where users of the NTT DoCoMo network can keep an eye on their home from afar.

The consortium has also shown off healthcare applications including a wireless nappy for use by bedridden patients and a heart monitor that allows a doctor to monitor a patient from afar.

Later this year the group will release software that will allow anybody to build applications using the standards. ”

via BBC

New work by Chris O’Shea created with a new ‘creative C++ framework’ called OpenFrameworks.

Check out some of the other quality releases by Jonas too, this guy is on a roll.

“Ah yes, phones have become so much more than just a bar of plastic that you talk into. NTT-Neomeit announced an inexpensive service that lets you control home devices with cellphones. The service is called “U-Consento” and it’s scheduled for availability this September (in Japan at least). They plan to rent out the home remote control system starting at around 500 yen ($4 USD) a month.
According to Pink Tentacle, the “service is designed to be compatible with a wide range of existing home appliances, so users do not need to purchase new devices or perform extensive home rewiring.” Imagine being able to adjust temperature, control audio and television, while monitoring the status of each.”

thanks (again!) to Ministry of Tech

(via Bright)

March 6, ‘07: Version 0.2 has been released! The changes for this version are:

• L2CAP client sockets for Mac OS X and Linux
• finddevicename() now takes usecache argument to specify whether to do a remote name request if name is in local cache
• stopadvertising() is now automatically called for a socket when close() is called on the socket
• Added SIS build for Series 60 3rd Edition
• If some of the SIS files for PyS60 didn’t work before, they should now
• Improved buffering of received data for sockets on Mac OS X
• Fixed recv() for mac sockets if other side has closed connection
• Fixed mac sockets to receive binary data

Great stuff! Download the latest version from the LightBlue sourceforge site.