Kids treat you like a taxi service? Now you can act like one with this GPS enabled taximeter application on your mobile. It even includes additional annoyance tolls and children-friendly payment options.

It’s a simple looking app but it does indeed use the GPS and the calculation of the fare is done following London’s official taxi rules. It also takes into account if for whatever reason you lose connection with the satellites. Well, not so simple after all!

But I cannot take full credit, fellow ustwobie Dain Demmel did a big part of the app (if not the biggest), plus we teamed up with WorkClub for art direction.

Anyway, very happy to release an app that people actually use and are happy about.

[UPDATE] Here’s a video demo of the app. [/UPDATE]

And lately we’ve been releasing quite a few apps at UsTwo:

** Ben 10 MouthOff in partnership with Turner.
** .™, brutally addictive first release of the 48hours app series (watch the interview with Mills if you want to know more about the concept).
** Hell-oween MouthOff special.
** And the soon to be released inkstrumental in collaboration with Jon Burgerman.

We don’t stop : )

Couldn’t help myself. One of my workmates bought it so I had the chance to see it in real action. After that, couldn’t help myself.

I spent some time crunching numbers about what should I do. Buy it unlocked or get a deal with a carrier? If so, contract or pay as you go? Which company? I think for the first time in my LIFE I created a spreadsheet. Put nice rows detailing contracts, pay as you go, companies, initial payment, minutes, texts, internet… Very boring indeed.

I finally decided to buy it unlocked from HTC (well, a distributor, 390 quid, sent in 2 days) and get a “Solo 30 days” contract with T-Mobile. Basically for 20 pounds a month I have more minutes and texts that I can ever use plus 1GB of internet on the phone, which was the important bit. Also this is not a long contract, I can go somewhere else only after 30 days.

It finally came on Friday and I’ve been playing with it since. Overall impression is that it’s REALLY good. Interface is second to none. Is fast, slick, responsive… integration with Google services is almost flawless (little bit scary privacy-wise, to be honest), GPS on Google Maps is really good, you can customize whatever you want, etc.

The things I don’t like so much are: proprietary mini-USB connector. As opposed to the Magic, this one has a standard 3.5mm jack but still the USB connector is HTC only. This is so bloody annoying and I hope the EU law to force a standard charger kicks in once and for all (NOTE: the USB port and charger is the same). I also don’t find very useful the button that opens a search box and takes you to Google straight away. I find difficult to believe that Google has forced HTC to put it there, but who knows. Whatever the reason, to me is a hardware button that I don’t need and I can’t remove.

An interesting spin from the Hero is it turns out Linux IS very ready and capable for the GUI/desktop space. So why don’t we see an interface as polished as the Hero’s on Linux desktops? Well, when you design for one and only one device it’s so much easier to get it right. Your testing efforts, UI design, drivers… all of them target and focus a single piece of hardware. And if you get 80-90% of the job done from Google already, you “only” need to put the cherry on top.

Android is lowering A LOT the the threshold to become a mobile manufacturer, you only need to put the hardware and testing instead of having to also build the underlying OS. I could be pretty wrong, but I think Android is going to be the base for a ton of devices in the near-ish future.

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To wrap up, who said websites should not offer a “watered down” version for mobile devices? Fuck that! I’m loving the mobile version of these sites:

• Wikipedia
• BBC
• Google Reader
• Marca

They are the non-fatty versions of their big brothers, load very fast and most of them don’t even have ads, so you get what you are looking for quickly. And when you are out and about on a not-so-fast mobile connection you really appreciate succinctness. I’m all up for adding the extra value mobiles could bring to those sites (GPS location, for example, but there’re privacy issues as well), but please keep the mobile versions, thanks.

PS: Yes, it comes with a Flash Player installed. Which one? I don’t know. The beta of the Flash player 10 for mobile devices is supposed to come out late this year, and I don’t think this one plays AVM2 swfs. It does play Flash fullscreen (including YouTube), but I haven’t run any tests just yet. Will keep you posted if/when I do.

Setting up Kuneri is a little bit messy. There’s a nice list of very specific requirements, so my advice if you want to give it a go is:

1) Get Kuneri, install and open the requirements wizard.
2) Install the requirements the wizard tells you about in the same order and the same versions, use the links they provide. I specially got problems with S60 SDK because I got a wrong version. With Java I saw the missing DLL error.

[BTW, to download the S60 SDK you have to register with Nokia, what a nice way to annoy your developers. I'd like to know the % of real data they get. So well done Adobe for not requiring this annoying step to get Flex SDK]

3) Until you can’t compile the test application, you will not be good to go.

Once you are all set up, you can start using Kuneri. Create a new project, add the plugins you want to use, compile, install and live happy ever after.

Where’s my API dude?

It turns out Kuneri is a tiny webserver on the phone, thus you communicate doing http requests and parsing the results you get. Somehow weird, but whatever, I’ll play along. What I was really surprised about is that there’s no official higher ActionScript API. I mean, if you want to talk to the GPS, the documentation tells you to do something like this:

loadVariables? Sorry, are you from the past? Apparently they are not, they recommend loadVariables to be compatible with FlashLite 1.1. But because of that you also have to use a MovieClip and an interval to receive the answer from the server. A graphical element to receive the answer from a network call, that’s good ol’Flash in all its glory!

The point is KuneriLite doesn’t provide at the moment a clean ActionScript API to use their plugins, they only document how you should make the requests and what you should expect as their response. No way in hell I’m going through that so I’m presenting (drum roll, please):

Kuneri ActionScript API

Check it out:

That’s much better. Not only you hide all the crap of calling the server, you also get a strictly typed response. Sweet. ATM I’ve only created the API for the GPS because that’s what I need now, and also the Camera for the sake of it, really. I’m not sure if I’m going complete it and I’m almost sure I’m not going to keep up in sync with Kuneri development, so if anyone is interested, please contact me, I’ll gladly handover the project.

Special thanks to mr Elecash for explaining to me the why-the-hell-they-use-loadVariables mystery and for pointing out this nice bug that, thanks to him, nobody else has to suffer. Plus, he’s always available on IM for my silly FlashLite doubts. Yo! Thanks mate :)

Extra ball: KuneriLite vs HippoHX

As I said at the beginning, can’t help but compare Kuneri with HippoHX. Here we go:

- Both are based on somebody else’s codebase (SWHX and S60 SDK), but because SWHX is Open Source I can redistribute it myself saving the hassle to my final user, something that Kuneri can’t with Nokia’s SDK. Another nice side effect is that if a new version of SWHX breaks HippoHX for some reason, I can hold the HippoHX release till I fix the problem.

- HippoHX GUI is only that, a GUI to the CLI packager, so you can integrate it with your compilation scripts. I have the feeling that Kuneri GUI is the same, but haven’t seen the documentation.

- HippoHX GUI doesn’t use the installation folder to store its data, it uses user’s space for that. See Where should cross-platform apps keep their data? to know why.

- SWHX and HippoHX are for Win and Mac and Kuneri is Windows only. Might be because of the dependencies, but I’m not sure.

- I can’t find a download for the documentation, it seems to be on-line only.

Some of these are bigger deals than others, and I’m sure the Kuneri team will fix them in the future, but being a commercial app, I feel most of them could/should have been fixed already.

Anyway, will add a link to the OVI store (Nokia’s copycat of the Apple store) once the app is finished and ready to download. It’s a little silly app, but, hey, I coded it!