It's almost been a couple years since I've put an entry here.  However I've been blogging much more frequently on my Jyotish Tools Blog which also gets very technical because I have a following among astrology programmers.  I just recently updated the Jyotish Tools web site and added Twitter as well.  The new site is PHP driven and all hand written.  Though I've downloaded both Drupal and Wordpress I haven't had time to mess with them.  Doing the site upgrade to web 2.0 "style" was an interesting exercise.  I also added a listing of the current planets driven by a PHP script that will update the listing if it's been over a minute since the last access of the home page.  Otherwise the PHP script for that page just writes the file on hand to the listing.  I also made that listing available to mobile phones formatted so I could even see it on my LG phone.

As of late I have released 4 Android phone applications all for Indian astrology (Jyotish).  The first was a simple program that brought up a horoscope of the moment known as a prasna chart.  Since Android can support GPS it was a natural to implement GPS in it.   I was surprised at the number of downloads and installs as I didn't know that many people would be interested in such a program.  But I suspect looking at the other GPS apps that it may be the only one that reports the current longitude and latitude.  Most of the GPS apps seem to do things like show you a list of restaurants and friend's addresses instead.

Much of the Android development was spurred by customers who inquired about mobile phone software.  A number have been using Palm Treo and Windows Mobile devices for several years.  My software work on those devices which had the PDA section partitioned off from the phone.  Phone apps required certification and not something that a small shareware developer would want to engage in.   The iPhone is very popular but since I don't own a Mac a bit of an investment to develop for.  Then I was uninspired looking at Object C.  At last Java, which Android uses is not that far removed from C++ and much of my existing code was easy to port. 

Given that up to 18 Android phones are supposed to be released before the end of the year the Android market looks much more promising.  Their model is correct as the API cannot access any data other than it's own or that on the memory card.  Certainly the development costs were nothing and signing to the Android Market only $25.   What I don't have yet is an Android phone because I would prefer something other than the G1 possibly the Magic which was just released or some of the other phones such as the forthcoming Samsung Android phone.   Besides I believe that emulators should be sufficient for product development.  They have for years on the Palm and Windows Mobile platform.

Speaking of Palm, I've also downloaded the Palm Pre SDK.  Currently developers aren't very enthusiastic about it because the Javascript can be obfuscated and thus only open source programs are likely to be released.  I might take a couple of my open source Javascripts and format their usage to the Pre screen.

Also in the mobile realm the downloadable version of Myst for the PSP launched last week on the Playstation Store.   This is the same version I developed three years ago for Japan, Europe and Australian markets on UMD but the first time it has been available in the US.