Software and Opinions » mobile

Social media in the Sahara desert

Ian McKellar — Sat, 24 Oct 2009 18:33:44 +0000

My wife and I just finished a week long camel trek in eastern Morocco with Berber nomads. While our hosts had no formal education, no running water, no grid electricity (just a little solar), no flush toilets and no floors in their homes, no land lines and no computers they did have mobile phones. Pretty much everyone seemed to have a low end (Series 40) Nokia. Their lack of education didn’t stop them texting madly. Perhaps more interesting was that they used their mobiles both as music players and for playing what we’d call viral videos. I’m not sure how they get content on their phones, probably an hour away at the super cheap internet cafes of Rissani. At Danger one of the key ideas that differentiated us from the Blackberry and later iPhone was that we were a standalone appliance, not a peripheral for your existing computer. We’ve seen some failure in this model recently but I think it’s ultimately a worthy goal.

A simpler mobile OpenID workflow?

Ian McKellar — Mon, 14 Jan 2008 04:56:09 +0000

Chris Messina posted today about the problems with current OpenID work-flows for mobile users. In spite of a long list of chores I was intending to complete today I had a bit of an experiment with an approach to solving this.

The main problem I wanted to solve was to allow a user to prove their identity without having to enter a password. Most mobile devices lack physical alphanumeric keyboards, and without that it’s very hard to fill out password fields.

My initial approach was to offer an OpenID URL for phone numbers and use an SMS message containing a one-time password to verify that the person attempting to log in had access to that mobile phone. Unfortunately there’s no free web service for sending SMSes, so did the next best thing and built it on top of Twitter.

I began with JanRain’s PHP Standalone OpenID Server and hacked it to pieces. I removed the requirement for registration – it transparently adds accounts as you use it. It doesn’t use password authentication, it sends a Twitter direct message with a one-time token to verify identity. I removed the OpenID Simple Registration support since the server has no idea about the user’s profile information – it might be possible in the future to put that back in, pulling the data over from the user’s twitter profile.

The server seems to work okay for the couple of services I tried it with. If there’s interest in this I might continue to develop it. Right now it’s up at http://twauth.ianloic.com/. It might be broken, it might go away at any point, it likely has security holes. Have a play and let me know what you think.

What I really want is a variation on this. I want to be able to use this simple single-use-token authentication when I’m on a mobile device and use a more traditional system the rest of the time. Magnolia allows me to associate multiple OpenID identities with my account so it’s easy there, but most services have a one-to-one relationship between identities and accounts.

The Sidekick ID and the iPhone

Ian McKellar — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

There were two interesting announcements today. First the Sidekick ID which had been previously leaked was formally announced and reviews have started to show up. Secondly Apple announced that the OS X Leopard will ship three months late – more than two years after the previous release of OS X. This slip is being seen as evidence that Apple is having trouble building as many products at once as it wants to.

In the four years I was at Danger we were building exactly one product at a time. We failed to separate the development of the hardware, the OS and the applications. Separating the client and server schedules was a slow and painful process. In the two years since I’ve left things seem to have improved. The fact that they’re able to ship two products (even if they are quite similar) is really exciting. That Danger is succeeding where Apple, with their 30 years of experience, is beginning to stumble is cause for congratulations.