I just upgraded this site to 3.0 and nothing seemed to break. My part of the major transition included one step: clicking the “upgrade now” button. (Yes I did backups first, but that’s daily routine, right? :)

Big thanks again to the awesome WordPress hackers who made it happen!

If you see something broken, please let me know.

I’ve had my new HTC Desire for about two weeks. It’s a very nice Android phone, looks awesome, and for the most part it’s a delight to use. I have, however, been cursing the difficulty of text input. I’ve been using Nokia smartphones and communicators for ages, with solid and usable physical keyboards or numpads, and getting used to the touchscreen is not very easy. What made things worse is that the virtual keyboard on the Desire was not localized, and typing characters such as Ä and Ö was not very fast. (English speakers would call them ‘accented characters’ and bury them behind tricky UI maneuvers, but they are in fact very common vowels in the beautiful Finnish language.)

I had no idea what to do except try and learn to type even just a little bit, and accept the idea that this is not a very good device for text input. Oh well, I can always use the netbook if I need to write a long email or notes. It never even dawned on me to complain to fellow Android users about this, or ask for survival tips and tricks. They were probably just trying to cope and enjoying YouTube and the marvelous Web browser.

Only today, after two weeks of usage, I learned something that blew me away. Browsing the web, I stumbled upon a Finnish Android forum discussion about the relative merits of different options for Finnish typists on Android. Turns out there’s an app called ‘Scandinavian Keyboard‘, and it’s Free Software and all.

I launched the Android Market on my phone, and downloaded this new keyboard.

I downloaded a keyboard.

I also downloaded a Finnish dictionary for it, so that predictive text works both in Finnish and English (unlike before).

So then it dawned on me. The Nokia Way that I have learned since getting my first Communicator, working through all my life with Nokia devices, is the paradigm of shipping a very powerful ESeries smartphone to you that does everything out of the box that most people ever need. You only download a few special apps that geeks need like PuTTY.

The iPhone Way (and the Android way) is all about shipping a nice, lean system (and don’t forget to make it pretty!) and making everything available as apps.

And when I say “everything available as apps,” i mean everything! When I got my Desire it certainly looked good, and it paid due attention to importing my Facebook friends, but I had no SIP calling. I had no password manager. I had no system task manager (worth mentioning). The RSS reader sucked. I didn’t even have a damn task list to go with the calendar! And worst of all, no Finnish keyboard layout or dictionary.

But there sure was an app for all that.

P.S. I have no idea which way is better. I always enjoyed a new Nokia device, because it was so powerful right from day one. But the way of the Android might be a good idea as well: just try and ship a nice, lean base system and let users add their own bloat.

P.P.S. In case you’re wondering, I fixed SIP with Sipdroid, passwords with KeePassDroid (yay!), processes with Advaced Task Killer, RSS with … nothing! the iPhone version of Google Reader rocks. For a Task list I use Astrid, which has very nice Remember The Milk sync and a friendly and funny nagging feature. Feel free to suggest better/more!

• Mobile Jabber clients simply are not there yet. There is no way they can compete with a screened irssi over PuTTY. Notifications are nice, but the cost in RAM usage (for Java apps) and usability (for native clients) is too high.
• 24/7 connectivity is too hard to achieve with Jabber clients.
• I like being available on IRC at all times without people having to find out my Jabber ID or email address. This is for making myself more available, not to keep my contact information  more private (that’s not my cup of tea anyway.)

Bottom line: old school server/client solutions still rule in chat, just as I’ve found with email (IMAP) and PIM data (SyncML servers).

I still love Jabber though, and my Bitlbee session is open. Running Jabber over my irssi session may make my Jabber presence less exciting and featureful, but it also makes it client-independent and more reliable.

There are two main routes to solve the sync problem: the Web2.0 Way and the Old School Way. Both have one thing in common: if you’re a Linux user, you should keep your data online. Forget about plugging your Nokia smartphone via the USB cable and pressing “Sync”. While software such as OpenSync and Gnokii exist, I’ve never had complete success with them. Also, when your data lives on a centralized server maintained by professional Other People, you get backups as a bonus!

There are three main things that I need to be able to access at all times: email, calendar, and todo list. I’ll describe my sync methods below.

The Web2.0 Way

The hip and the cool among us enjoy Gmail and other online apps and services, and I do like them as well. For example, Gmail’s user interface changed the way I looked at webmail forever, and in some ways it’s superior to any desktop email client. Who has better search than Google, after all? When you have a mail archive of hundreds of megabytes, it’s safe to say that the network is no longer the slowest part of your system when you search for that message from Charlotte she wrote in 2004, saying she doesn’t love you anymore. We’re generating increasingly large amounts of information, and as Paul Boutin noted a while back, you would never allow a system in your house that would compete with Google’s search.

Sync-wise, the Web2.0 Way has one obvious advantage over the Old School Way: there simply isn’t very much to synchronize! Gmail has an awesome interface for your desktop browser, as well as for the puny WAP browser on your mobile phone, so that’s a no-brainer. Even better, Google’s Java mobile client application is top notch.

Google Calendar is a very nice web app as is, and it has a more-or-less adequate mobile version as well. Google doesn’t give you a todo list of any kind though, so I recommend Remember The Milk. RTM has all the features you can hope for and then some, and comes with a very nice mobile version for your WAP browser.

On the desktop, you can integrate all these apps into your GNOME environment with read-only access. GCal and RTM provide standard iCal interfaces you can subscribe to with Evolution. This allows you to view your appointments and tasks right from GNOME’s Clock applet. You can also make a smart bookmark for Epiphany to search Gmail, and have it accessible from the deskbar applet if you like: 1) Go to your Gmail inbox. 2) Switch to “basic HTML” mode. 3) Search Gmail for a recognizable string like FOOBAR. 4) Bookmark the results page. 5) Edit the bookmark, replacing FOOBAR in the URL with %s and give it a descriptive name such as “Gmail search”. You will now be able to search your Gmail archives from the Epiphany location bar and deskbar-applet. (Firefox version is left as an exercise to FF users.)

Old School Way

In a nice paradox, the good old fashioned computing lifestyle demands much more from your tools than the “more advanced” Web2.0. However, if you have such tools, they are usually more comfortable and flexible to use than web apps. They will also survive network outages, which naturally is a tremendous benefit. My gear is Evolution on the desktop and the native Messaging and Calendar applications on my Nokia E70. The phone has to support the SyncML synchronization standard (sometimes called OMA these days) and IMAP for mail.

On the server side, we need an IMAP account, which rules out every free email provider I know of, including Gmail. We also need a SyncML server. ScheduleWorld offers this one for free, so we’re in luck. Evolution does not speak SyncML, but we can use a simple command-line tool called SyncEvolution as glue.

The benefits of IMAP are obvious: multiple clients can connect, even at the same time, and all mail is accessible to all of them. One can argue we can achieve the same with Gmail, but synchronizing local folders is far from trivial using POP.¹ Also, since mobile phones usually don’t have lots of storage (mine can handle 2GB at best,) it is nice to work with only the mail headers and download and delete message bodies as needed.

SyncEvolution doesn’t come with Ubuntu, and I haven’t seen any suitable Debian packages floating around the Internet. Not to worry, the source builds nicely on Ubuntu, and you’ll be up and running soon enough. There is a nice tutorial on the Ubuntu Forums as well. I’ve setup a bash alias syncevo=’syncevolution scheduleworld’ and run that whenever needed. Works like a charm.

Which Path should i take, Master?

Whichever you like more! I’ve been using and loving both, and the best thing is they don’t rule each other out. ScheduleWorld not only syncs your phone and Evolution but Google Calendar as well, and recently introduced experimental support for syncing Gmail contacts. It also has quite a usable web interface too. Mail can be duplicated between your IMAP server and Gmail via simple forwarding.

Ultimately, the more advanced your mobile phone, the more you will like old-fashioned “native apps and sync” approach, while the Web2.0 applications’ mobile versions will work in your old phone’s WAP browser, and even have SMS interfaces.

1. But see the “recent hack”, which is useful for other things as well: I use it to backup my Gmail with fetchmail.

juha@marvin ~ >history | awk '{print $2}' | awk 'BEGIN {FS="|"} {print $1}'|sort|uniq -c | sort -rn | head -10

• 94 wajig

  74 ls

  59 sudo

  54 cd

  19 less

  15 rm

  13 syncevolution

  13 nano

  12 u

  11 fetchmail

Looks like most of my command line work is administration related. This could mean that GNOME users don’t need the terminal very much in their daily work. Most notable exceptions are syncevolution and fetchmail. SyncEvolution is used to synchronise my evolution calendar and address book with my phone via ScheduleWorld’s SyncML server. I use fetchmail to download backups of my Gmail account.

A couple of other commands in the list may be unfamiliar to some. u is just an alias for cd.. and wajig is my favorite front end to dpkg, apt, and init script handling.