I want to thank the hard working guys over at RedBit Development for their excellent work and their awesome apps.now Mobile Platform (currently in private beta – contact RedBit for more information). It’s been a great pleasure to work with them to build this app. Great job guys!!

On your Windows Phone, head over to the Marketplace, search for “Mobile Jaw”, download and enjoy! If you don’t have a Windows Phone yet, you can still check out the listing over on MarketplaceBrowser. This is just the start. We have some really great idea’s planned and we’ll be enhancing the app to take advantage of the new features being delivered in Mango this fall. Let us know your thoughts and suggestions and we’ll take it all into consideration as well.

For those of you that might not have a Windows Phone, don’t worry. There are plans to bring this over to some of the other mobile platforms.

The new Mobile Jaw layout is based on the amazing work of Brian Gardner and his team of top-notch designers/developers over at StudioPress. The previous design was based on a StudioPress template but was heavily modified which caused a lot of problems when trying to add new functionality. Thankfully the new Genesis/Child themes has changed all that. The logo and graphics work is courtesy of the very talented Rob Meyers, who I have had the luxury of working with on other projects in the past. I always enjoy looking at the work he’s doing, and I’m always impressed with the work he turns out. Two great resources you should look into if you need a new site template or some graphics work done.

Enough about those awesome people, and let’s get talking about this awesome new site. There are a lot of changes with this new template. First off, you should notice a significant speed increase when loading the site. Faster is always better, right! We’ve added the ability to reply to a specific comment – it will now nest your comment under the message that you are replying to. We’ve also separated out the comments and trackbacks on a post to make the conversation easier to follow and be easier for you to be a part of. With all the changes we made, you may find something that is broken or missing – I hope that’s not the case, but if it is, please reply here and let me know about it.

I hope everyone enjoys the new design as much as I do.

Xavier from Notebooks.com and GottaBeMobile.com is trying to help the Red Cross help Haiti by matching the first $500 in donations. Since his original post early yesterday, Xavier has been able to raise $5770 from various members of the mobile tech community and from companies like ScotteVest (full list of sites and companies below!). I have added $230 to that total to bring it to an even $6000. What’s that mean? Thanks to Xavier’s efforts, the mobile tech community will be matching $6000 of community contributions – bringing the total support to $12,000!!

How can you take advantage of our matching dollars? Easy, send a SMS to the Red Cross at 90999 with the word Haiti in the body of the message. You will then get a confirmation message, just reply with Yes, and $10 will be added to your next phone bill.  Then, head over to this post on Notebooks.com and let them know that you’ve contributed.

Xavier from Notebooks.com and GottaBeMobile.com started all this with his pledge of $500

Judie from GearDiary.com has added $250 to the matching funds

Carly from GearDiary.com has pledged $100 to the cause

Johan from MobilityMinded.com has pledged $100

Dan from GearDiary.com has added $150 – this brings the GearDiary total to $500!

Scott Jordan from ScotteVest has pledged $2,500 in matching funds!

Andru from GearLive.com has pledged $500

Ivy Worldwide has pledged $500

Harry from Technologizer.com has added his support for $250

Ed from WindowsPhoneThoughts.com has pledged $250

Jason from ThoughtsMedia has donated $250 – that brings the contribution from Thoughts Media gang to $500!

Warner from GottaBeMobile.com has pledged $100

Hector from GeeksRoom has pledged $100

Ewdi from Slashgear has pledged $120

Amisha, Stacy, and Shirley from ServedRaw.com have pledged $100

Mike from MobileJaw has pledged $230

The grand total is $6000 or $12,000 with the community contributions!

Change is good, right? I sure hope so, because I’ve been busy making some changes over the weekend. But not to worry, none of the changes here are anything to be upset about. At least, I don’t think so. The first change was our mobile template. I had this enabled a while back, but turned if off because I was having some problems with the formatting and didn’t have the time to tweak things. It’s back now and looks much better. There will be some tweaks and additions made to the mobile template, but it’s good enough for now.

The next change is for new users. I’ve added reCAPTCHA on the registration page. I’m sure everyone is familiar with CAPTCHA by now. reCAPTCHA is a service that helps to digitize books and newspapers. They use words that the computer was unable to convert to digital format. You can read more about reCAPTCHA here, if you’re interested. Otherwise, just know that by registering here you’re helping to convert books to digital format. I had to enable this to slow and hopefully prevent the bots that are currently registering.

The last change I made was to implement Avatars. In your user profile, you can now choose to upload a small (60x60px) image to display alongside your comments, or you can setup a Gravatar if you would rather have a global avatar across all the sites you visit. (Thanks to the awesome work by Peter Sterling on his Avatar plugin!)

That’s all the changes I made over the weekend.  There are more changes coming along with lots of reviews and giveaways. So stay tuned!

I’ve had the opportunity to write and speak about mobile technology over the years and had a stint with one of my favourite companies, DDH Software; the makers of HanDBase. After that I was doing consulting on mobile tech for business until I found out that when I go on vacation no one can cover for me. Most of my writing was for my own site a few years back but I did some guest writing on other sites as well.

After seeing the beginnings of mobile technology I am always amazed at where we are now. The newest devices coming out are breath-taking in their power and software is just starting to come into it’s own. The next couple years are going to be incredibly exciting for mobile fanatics like you and I with the Palm Pre, iPhone 3.0, Windows Phone 6.5 and 7.0 all lining up for our attention.

Mike Temporale and I met at a PocketPC user group in Toronto and recently started chatting about having me post on MobileJaw.com. With the goodies that are coming out I wanted to have a voice and throw my opinions out there, for what they are worth.

On the personal side, I’ve been married 19 years (holy crap!) and have 3 fantastic kids! You won’t see a massive amount of content from me mainly because I like to spend time with my family whenever I can; they are my first priority…always.

I’m glad to be joining Mike and am looking forward to sharing my thoughts and opinions with our readers here. I’m always open to hearing your opinions and arguments, so be sure to comment often.

You will find me on twitter as well at www.twitter.com/DarrenHumphries so be sure and follow me.

A big thanks to Mike for letting me hang my hat here. Mike, I promise to not eat all the donuts.

Which brings us to today! I’m proud to announce updated look and feel as Mobile Jaw moves to a fully WordPress compatible, fast, and flexible design. There are a couple things that still need tweaking and if you find anything that doesn’t work or just doesn’t look right, please feel free to post in this thread and let me know! The rest of the tweaks are minor and will be coming over the next few weeks.

I hope you like the new layout. It’s not a drastic change by any means. And yes, I realize that if I just listened to Chris from the start, things would have been a lot easier. I will always do as Chris instructs from now on.

Got comments? You’ve heard it before. All the normal rules you find in other online communities apply here. It’s quite simple. Be altruistic – help your fellow human beings by using your jaw on this site for the benefit of others. Have your say. But please tell us what you think without using foul language, disparaging or off-colour comments of people, places or things (including the products). If there is something you like, feel free to rave about it. And if there is something you don’t like, you will find that people are generally more receptive to constructive criticism, and appreciate well-positioned viewpoints. This is a forum for person-to-person communication on what is really great (and not so great) about technology. When you engage in conversation, we challenge you to find a way to be candid without being condescending. We know you will find a way.

There are still issues to resolve on the site, but it’s all starting to come together. I know the search isn’t working, and I still need to do something about Avatars. If you stumble across any other issues, please let me know! With any luck we’ll have everything running smoothly in the not too distant future.