SMS Interception on Windows Mobile 5.0

Nope – no code samples here, just a link to Dave Glover’s blog. Dave is talking about how its possible to intercept incoming SMS messages with Windows Mobile 5.0 before they even reach the Inbox on the device!

I first saw Andrew Coates playing with this a few months back at the Indigo Ascend training that we were all attending. Its definately a cool idea and I can see Readify using this in the future to allow our timesheeting system to nag us daily to submit our times.

Kieran on VSU

Back when I was at University of Queensland I used to have some fairly strong views on Voluntary Student Unionism (VSU). It looks like Kieran has an opinion as well.

At the time I was anti-VSU. From time to time I marched in a number of protests on campus and through Brisbane itself and also “occupied” the UQ student union building in protest of the stance the elected student representatives were taking on the issue (they were pro-VSU).

Like all good left wing students I grew up into great capitalist (although I wouldn’t say I am right wing, more the disgruntled center ). These days I feel like any process that takes money from you where you can’t decide where its invested to help you is a bit cheeky.

Can’t say I ever really missed the union fees, but if I didn’t have to pay them I probably wouldn’t have.

Innovation in Software

Wes has posted up a blog entry about innovation in software and the movement of research activities into the corporate arena. I tend to agree, I think we are finally turning the corner and through the use of patterns and RAD technologies like SharePoint, BizTalk and Office we can deliver an enterprise application faster and more reliably than ever before.

But the fact that its getting easier means that competitors can’t use their brand new CRUD application as a competitive advantage because their competitors will have theirs updated to be functionally equivalent in no time.

I believe increased competition is driving the need for corporate research activities and I don’t think its just going to be limited to your tier one organisations. Business will start asking their IT departments “we want to do X, we don’t even know if its possible, but thats why we pay you the big bucks”.

Successful IT departments will seek out the “impossible challenge” and try and solve it, its about the only thing left that will differentiate IT systems from a competitive point of view.

Daniel on XAML

I could write a long post (by my standards) about one of Daniel’s latest blog entries pointing all the areas where I disagree with him but the reality is pretty much everything he has said is spot on when it comes to the Rich Client vs. Web Client debate.

One thing that I do want to add comment to is the last points that he made about the danger of XAML.

Let this be the creed of XAML developers everywhere, because we face two futures.In one, we have a variety of well behaving and visually consistent applications that communicate with each other easily over the internet. In the other, we have roaming gangs of malcontent apps, enforcing their own rules as to how they should look and feel, and complaining loudly whenever they have to interface with anything else.

I don’t necessarily agree. For a long time I’ve felt that the user interface is the heart and sole of any business application and the more engaging it is from a user point of view the better it will be. Remember that our users today have been fed a staple diet television with special effects – they love these special effects, they want them everywhere.

My advice is think about your user experience up front – experiment with it, prototype it and present it to your users for review. Just because UI components have to be functional doesn’t mean they have to be ugly.

In my world, application design starts with appealing to the eyes!