Talking to a few of you, it seems that there’s interest in continuing with the “100 Ideas” thread. I think I got to 110 before I stopped the thread, although not the ideas

I’ve just finished writing the second edition of Next Generation Wireless Applications, which is a fairly major upgrade. As you might expect, the 2.0 theme, in various guises, appears throughout the book. I shall post a separate update to describe all the changes for the new edition, which is due for publication in March 08. The opening chapter in the book is still an account of a fictional lunch break during which the participant uses a plethora of mobile services habitually. I was trying to show the potential for mobile data services and just how dependent we might become on being connected to the digital world.

One of the ideas in the tour is the use of “hot buttons”, so this is the idea for this posting. It is an idea that I had back in 1998 when I created a wireless portal called Zingo, which was the first ever wireless portal to be shown at GSM World Congress (since renamed 3GSM and now something else).

The idea of hot buttons was to allow developers to create “short cuts” that would allow a communications task to be automated in order to achieve a common task, such as inviting friends for lunch (the example used in the book), arranging a football match and so on - all things that we commonly do with the aid of our mobile phone anyway (and perhaps other comms tools, like email), but could be made so much easier with a little automation. Where required, the button would prompt the user for inputs etc.

Back in 98, we didn’t have widgets, which we now have for the mobile from Opera and Nokia (Widsets). I haven’t created any of these, but a quick glance the scripting environments and APIs seems to indicate that there is no access to phone functions. As I have argued before, native phone functions should be exposed via a browser DOM and associated scripting APIs. These should be accessible via chromeless (i.e. widget-style) web applications. The Opera Platform was once headed in this direction, but that project was scrapped. Perhaps this will come alive again with IMS. I remain convinced that it should be possible to use the browser as a UI for SIP user-agents, thereby creating blended SIP/Web applications. If this becomes possible, then the idea of configurable hot-buttons becomes even more powerful because of the ability to add SIP messaging into the task flow.

No doubt, Apple are soon going to show us how some of this should be done when they finally get around to releasing an SDK for the iPhone that will inevitably be widget friendly.