Last December, I wrote about the initial release of Live Search for Mobile, Microsoft's mapping and local search application for mobile phones. As noted in the post, Google only had a slow Java-based client for Windows Mobile devices at the time. Earlier this year, however, a native Windows Mobile version of Google Maps was released, which was a huge improvement over its rather unimpressive predecessor.

Last week, Microsoft improved its offering with the second version of Live Search for Mobile. The update improves performance with better caching, includes user reviews for local search results, and improves upon the GPS navigation features. The most noticeable change, however, is the addition of movie showtimes, powered by data from AMG.

Just like other local search results, movie theater listings can be viewed as a simple, text-only list, or as overlays on a map. Users are given a choice to select either a specific movie to see which theaters are showing it, or a specific local theater to see which movies are playing there. As shown in the screenshot above, the application displays movie showtimes, as well as the address and phone number of the theater so that you can call or get directions in just a couple of clicks. Also included is the option to SMS this information to your friends (with full phonebook integration), which is very convenient.

All in all, a welcome update to a great mobile application.

I enjoy using Visual Studio as an all-in-one IDE for Windows programming, but when I'm writing code for the web, I prefer simpler text editors. I've tried many, and eventually settled on Notepad++ sometime last year.

What I really like about Notepad++ (besides the fact that it's free) is how lightweight it is. It fires up instantly, just like classic Notepad does, and at the same time includes all the features that I want, including syntax highlighting, auto-completion, brace matching and auto-indentation, tabs, support for regular expressions, macros etc.

As I was working on a project this morning, it occurred to me that I should mention a custom syntax highlighting style called Ruby Blue that I've been using (image above, courtesy of the author). It's quite surprising how beneficial a good font and syntax highlighting scheme can be, and Ruby Blue, coupled with DejaVu Sans Mono or Consolas, works very well for me.

The Ruby Blue style is also available for Vim and TextMate.

Do you have a favorite text editor, monospace font, and syntax highlighting scheme?

Engadget has posted what I would consider to be the most comprehensive and balanced review of the iPhone I have seen on the web so far (and believe me, I've read lots of them during the last week). If you have any interest in the iPhone at all, you owe it to yourself to go through this three-part piece that examines just about every aspect of the device's design and functionality.

I, myself, visited the local Apple store this weekend, where I had a chance to briefly play around with an iPhone demo unit. I was going to publish a rather detailed post with my thoughts, but now there isn't really much I can add here that isn't already in the aforementioned review; in fact, I found myself agreeing with almost everything in there.

What I will say is that I think the device met the expectations that I had for it going in. For better or for worse, I've always been more of a functionality-over-form kind of person, so while I really do believe that the iPhone is a beautiful piece of engineering with the slickest UI I've seen on a mobile device yet, I simply can't ignore all the shortcomings like many others can. I could live with a software keyboard if I had to, and I could give up 3G for a slower EDGE connection too, but there's still so much missing from the iPhone that we have come to take for granted on our Symbian, Windows Mobile and Blackberry smartphones.

If I had to sum up my thoughts in one sentence, I'd say the iPhone is a fantastic iPod, a great mobile browsing unit, a decent phone, and a rather poor productivity device, but one that brings them all together in a refreshingly appealing way.

What do you think?

Related Posts: Apple iPhone: Not Quite Flawless...

It's been a while since my last Twessenger-related post. Twessenger was really just a personal project that I decided to put up here on this site, so it (pleasantly) surprises me to see that it continues to draw in a very sizable amount of traffic even four months after the last release. I'm glad people are finding it useful. :)

So anyway, the first bit of news is that the last release of Twessenger is, in fact, compatible with the latest beta release of Windows Live Messenger (v8.5.1238.0601). It's been working fine for me, and I haven't received any emails telling me otherwise.

The second bit of news is that Twessenger was apparently included on the cover CD of the June issue of Internet Magazine in Italy. One of their editors had emailed me for permission a while ago, and I was happy to give it to them. So, hello to all my new visitors from Italy. Keep those tweets going! :)

In yesterday's post, I wrote:

If you thought iTunes and QuickTime looked out of place in Windows, wait till you see this thing; it’s like Apple ripped Safari out of OS X, added a menu bar to the top, and called it a Windows app. Textboxes, buttons, radio buttons, checkboxes…they all use the bubbly Aqua style. I guess this wouldn’t be so bad if it were 2004 and we were all skinning XP to look like OS X, but can we get something more native, please? Probably unlikely, but one can always hope.

And there's a reason why I said a more native interface is unlikely, even after the browser leaves the beta stage - it's because I'm almost certain that the OS X look-and-feel was actually preserved intentionally.

Think about it. There's good reason why Apple made the decision to release Safari for Windows. Jeff Atwood spells it out in a follow-up comment to his original post.

Safari is unapologetically a Mac app and does almost nothing the "Windows way", with the possible exception of maximizing behavior.

I think this is absolutely by design. You have to understand that Safari isn't so much a pretender to the IE/Firefox throne as it is a *Mac Emulator*. It's intended to facilitate development of Safari compatible web apps (and technically iPhone apps) by making them dead simple to test. You no longer even have to beg, borrow, or steal a Mac to see if your web app behaves under Safari. Just download and go.

So from that perspective-- and I can't think of any others that make any business sense-- the closer Safari's behavior is to the Mac version, the better.

There you have it. Making the Windows version of Safari almost identical to its Mac counterpart is actually beneficial for development testing, which is undoubtedly the primary reason why Apple is bestowing Safari upon the Windows world.

End-users on Windows are surely not going to be happy about this, just as Mac users dislike the way Firefox paints non-native widgets on OS X, but that's the way its likely to stay. Perhaps a team of enterprising individuals might spin off a project to build a WebKit-based Windows browser that fits in better, similar to what Camino does with Mozilla's Gecko, but it'll take a long time before something like that reaches the level of maturity that other mainstream browsers on Windows have achieved by now. Swift, for instance, is still far from really being usable.

P.S. If you like the textarea resizing feature in the Safari beta, you might want to try the Resizeable Textarea extension for Firefox that I've been using for several months now. :)