diggMob

Brian — Tue, 26 Feb 2008 22:56:40 -0500

diggMob is a FlashLite 2.x program which allows those of us with capable cellphones to feed our Digg.com addictions. Now you can get the most popular articles from most of the main Digg categories while on the go.

Designed in part for Digg's API Contest as well as for a Mobile Development class taught by Steven Merrill in the Multimedia Program at Bradley University in Peoria, Illinois, diggMob utilizes the power of Digg's new API to retrieve its information quickly, which is extremely friendly for mobile browsers with data packages and generally slower connection speeds.

Unfortunately, in development of this application, I discovered that Stamen's Flash Dev Kit for the Digg API doesn't work in FlashLite. It isn't that the dev kit isn't supported in FlashLite 2.x, which has pretty decent support of most Flash 7/8 compatible code; it's that Digg's API requires proper user-agent headers and FlashLite doesn't send them correctly. To compensate for this, I wrote a custom proxy in PHP to which diggMob connects in order to query Digg's API.

I had more features planned for diggMob like sparkline graphs of diggs vs. time, but most cellphones have extremely limited memory available for FlashLite applications and just the current feature set nearly maxes out the memory allotment on a lot of phones.

This application has been confirmed to run on Nokia phones running Symbian Series 60 (I specifically tested on the Nokia 3230 and Nokia 6670) as well as Windows Mobile Smartphone Edition (specifically the T-Mobile Dash), and Windows Mobile PocketPC (specifically the Sprint PPC-6700). It should work on any phone powerful enough to run FlashLite 2.x standalone.

Brian McMurray - Interactive and Web Developer - Mobile Projects

diggMob