Almost everyone who has ever developed applications for wireless devices was faced with the problem of the different device capabilities. Some devices support WAP 1.0 only, some do XHTML, some support MMS, some don’t, etc. A serious wireless application should be able to recognize the capabilities of the device which is accessing the service and tailor the service accordingly. But how do you achieve this?

WURFL is a wonderful open source project which provides an XML configuration file which contains information about capabilities and features of most of the wireless devices that are in use today. The information it provides is supplied by many wireless developers from around the world and is more accurate than the UAProf database which is mainly based on information provided by the manufacturers.

There are also ready to use open source libraries for mainstream languages such as Java, PHP, Python, Ruby, Perl and .Net, that parse the WURFL file and provide an easy-to-use interface for checking device capabilities.

WURFL is used by many operators around the world and has became a de-facto standard in its field. It is great to see an open source project make such a huge impact in an area packed with proprietary issues.

Tags: WURFL

Yankee Clipper III (aka YC3) is a powerful and elegant clipboard manager tool. It stores everything you’ve placed on the clipboard and allows you to quickly access those snippets again. There are a bunch of clipboard managers around, but YC3 beats them all. It is completely unobtrusive (apart from the icon in the taskbar), easily accessible when needed and has a good search capability. The one thing I love about it is that, unless I want to perform a search, there is no need to open the YC3 main window at all. When you have to paste an item from the clipboard while doing your work in any application, invoke CTRL+ALT+V and select any of your previously clipped items. Simple + Effective = Powerful.

Another thing that amazes me about this app is that version 1.0.0.0 was around for 4 years, without any updates! It had all the features it needed, it was extremely stable (never ever crashed on me). It is just recently that the author started adding new features to it and, apart from the basic free version, released a commercial version too. The basic version still covers all of your day-to-day clipping needs.

Mates is a very interesting, yet-to-debut social networking engine based on proximity that can be tied into a cell phone, IM, GPS or other personal tracking systems.

Imagine what it would be like if..

• Your instant messaging program could automatically create and populate buddy lists based on the people in your classroom, your office building, or even your neighborhood.
• Your mobile phone could receive a text message when old friends you rarely see happen to be nearby.
• Your laptop computer or handheld device connected you to a live feed of information about nearby people and events.

Well, with Mates this doesn’t seem to be too far away.

Read more at the Mates site

Having been converted from Yahoo to Google for searches in the late 90’s, I’m finding myself using Yahoo more and more again. Is Yahoo search really that good and comparable with Google? Well, check out for yourself with this cool graphical tool.