Sumit Kataria's blog

Quick demo of what we are going to discuss
Original session was posted here
With launch of iPad and NexusOne - iPhone/Android application market can't be ignored. Both these technologies has great potential to use our existing web based tools such as drupal. You can totally use drupal to manage/update your iPhone/Android native application.

Finally iWebkit theme for drupal-iPhone websites is production ready. Theme now includes Drupal form theming and 12 different subthemes to suit your color preferences.

From Now on this theme will be maintained on drupal.org as iWebkit project.

Features added since last release are:

1. Form elements are now themed. All form elements now looks like default iphone forms. This means there is no need to add custom user-login, comments or node add forms for your iphone website, you can directly use drupal default forms and they will be automatically converted into iPhone style form elements.
   • Select list and Checkboxes look like-
     
   • Radio buttons and Text-area look like-
     

An important part of bulding mobile websites is automatic detection of the user-agent (mobile device) so you can switch to an appropriate theme, or re-configure the layout for your mobile browsing. Once you've detected the device, you can present the website in a theme tailored to it.

This second post in my series of tutorials on mobile themes for Drupal focuses on how to implement automatic user-agent detection and switch your base theme to a mobile theme.

The iPhone and iPod touch continue to gain market share of mobile web traffic. According to edibleapple 48% of all smartphone web requests in the US come from iPhones, while Windows and RIM devices together comprised 34% of mobile web requests.
These numbers show that it is becoming increasingly important to have iPhone compatible websites.

iDrupal is a project aimed to manage your drupal websites from iPhone / ipod touch. This project is basically designed for three things:

1. iDrupal module to act as a bridge for communication between your iPhone and drupal website.
2. iDrupal_ui theme to for your iPhone browser.
3. And an iPhone application - which is yet to be released in app store.

If you are a developer, blogger or a client who manages or participated on a technical project, screenshot-taking tools are a very useful way conveying your thoughts and ideas to others on your team. Screenshots save you from lengthy explanation emails and keep your team on same page while discussing an idea. This blog post is about different screen capturing tools available out there and which to use and why.

1. Skitch(mac only):

Skitch is more than just an image capturing tool. It is very quick, simple and efficient. You can edit your images - crop them, draw figures on them, write notes on them and share directly via uploading to skitch, flickr, ftp with many other options. This all is mere drag and drop with nothing complex to learn. Download Skitch. Images in this blog are captured using skitch only.

Shortcut keys with skitch:

• Command-Shift-5 – Crosshairs Snap
• Command-Shift-6 – Fullscreen Snap
• Command-Shift-7 – Frame Snap

There is also a great short video on the Skitch website that gives you a quick overview of how it works and what it can do.

Drupal is a very powerful publishing and blogging platform, combining its power with apture you can convert it into a POWER publishing/blogging platform.

Apture can:

• Add Wikipedia, YouTube, Google Maps, pictures, music, twitter and more from 50+ sources of multimedia content to your website in one click.
• Upload and Link your own content including images, PowerPoint, PDF, Word documents, and Excel spreadsheets on your web pages.
• Keep visitors on your site, instead of sending them away.

Here is an example how apture can solve most complex publishing workflows where you need pdfs, docs, videos, refs etc. all on one page!!:

Apture is already been adopted by many big publishers like:The New York Times , Washingtonpost.com, BBC news, Reuters etc.

To combine the power of apture and drupal - apture has released a new drupal module: http://drupal.org/project/apture  This module adds a button on node-edit form to add apture rich media content.

One drawback

You need to have an apture account to add apture rich multimedia content on your website but talking with apture's CEO Tristan Harris he mentioned soon they will a way to do this automatically.

You can test Apture with drupal at http://apture.sumitk.net/ . You need to register an account before adding new content or you can use username/password = demo/demo to login.

Example of apture enabled pages:

• Music
• Apture with drupal
• NY Times

Drupal camp San Francisco (a.k.a BADCamp) is coming this weekend. It will be a single Saturday event at the SFSU downtown campus at 5th and Market. The event will be hosted by the Information Management Systems Association, iMSA, http://imsa.sfsu.edu. Registration for DrupalCamp SF is free but you need to confirm it by registering an account at http://badcamp.net/user/register before coming. This DrupalCamp will include whole day introduction to drupal tutorial (9 AM to 5 PM) for beginners. Also many advanced and intermediate sessions will go through out the day. The event is located above the Westfield mall on the 5th Floor in the SFSU downtown campus. You can join for drupal community fun!! OR knowledge!!

Last week was quite interesting, I happened to show up at Google IO developer Conference 2009. Committing to writing about the entire Google IO event in a single post is a tough job, so friends here is a succinct post covering the topics that seems most exciting to me.

1. Google wave:

As many may have read already, Google announced a new Internet-based communications and collaboration platform Google Wave in the second day's key note talk at Google IO. Google Wave seems to be an integrated communications platform that brings together email, chat, twitter, social networks, photo-sharing, and collaborative editing features. Google describes a 'wave' as "equal parts conversation and document" and the Wave team basically sees it as a replacement for email and other collaboration tools. Google's announcement of wave was the most exiting technical demonstration I ever been to, it was full of cheers, applause and whistling, evidence of the excitement about this new product which could revolutionize the world of emails, instant messaging, photo sharing, blogging, social networking and intranet communications.