Andrea Trasatti's tech notes and more

I was checking the latest changes of the webKit nightly to see if it's worth updating my current nightly (about 1 month old) to something fresher. While looking at the timeline I noticed how a few commits have been made in the last few days to implement WML card, timer and do tags, some WMLScript and so on. BIG SURPRISE!

You can see for example a few changesets such as [38816], [38833], [38838] and a couple of bugs, #22522 and #22550.

I am definitely among those that think that WML is dead and that everything should be in XHTML by now and surely Apple as a company has been promoting the iPhone and the iPod touch as "full web" devices and in fact Safari Mobile does not even support HTML-MP. The addition of WML seems very strange to me.

OK, the main committer is not an Apple employee, but rather a KDE developer (Nikolas Zimmermann), but we all know that webKit is mostly controlled by Apple and if they are working on WML it means there is some interest. If they are working on WML, why not XHTML-MP?

We'll see. I'll keep an eye on this and definitely test a recent nightly!

Apple has changed the world with the iPhone. Developers (and users sometimes) complained there were no open APIs to build native applications. Apple noted the request and changed the world again with the App Store.

Everyone in the mobile space seems to be running now to create his own store. Google has launched its store called Market (also see a short review with some nice screenshots) and while at this time it's all free, it is going commercial next year.

RIM has its own BlackBerry Application StoreFront.

T-Mobile, who is already benefiting from Google's Market, is going to create its own based on Apple's experience.

Now Orange comes with Orange Downloads.

There are probably more that haven't announced it, or simply I haven't heard of.

BUT, did any of these guys ever think that the great thing about Apple's App Store is that it is one place and there's no fragmentation? How are these guys going to cope with this? Replicating and renaming won't solve those issues. They will all be just like the existing "Decks" or portals, simply on a pre-installed application. That will not make them win.

I just "stole" this image from Gizmodo that is commenting live on the Apple event. The new iPod nano looks A LOT like the first 2 generations. The third generation was clearly the dark sheep with regards to the design and I have to admit... I'm pleased they went back to the original design, it's much better, IMHO.

Initially Nokia announced the decision of using the webKit browser in their mobile devices in the S60 series and they called it S60 Browser (running on the S60WebKit). That was already a landmark, I think.

Apple of course boosted the users of webKit and Safari releasing the windows version of Safari and then Safari in the iPhone.

Google followed announcing webKit in Android and now with Chrome.

MOTOMAGX is a linux platform by Motorola. They use it for some of their PDA's. The other day I received their newsletter that among the other things mentioned widgets for MOTOMAGX and guess what? The official browser is the webkit.

A lot of big companies are jumping on the webKit band-wagon, but I think my original question still stands, Will Apple share ownership of the webKit? It'll be especially interesting to see how Google will contribute and try to take control of the platform as now they have a lot of interest in making sure it goes in the right direction. So far it looks like Nokia did not have much voice in the project, at least from what I see.

More open questions:

About half of my applications suddenly started "beachballing", when trying to shut them down they did not. I killed them and could not restart them. Looking at the logs I saw this:

It doesn't look like a good sign...

I just read this article on appleinsider.

Wouldn't it be great to have native support for syncML, maybe via Funambol?

PS: If I could also have my iCal and Addressbook to synchronize with a central server (and LDAP), I'd be even happier

Apple's iTunes has been massively successful for two reasons, I think. First of all it got popular thanks to the iPod, of course, but also it did sell well because of a very simple pricing model that Apple could enforce on the content providers. I think most customers loved this (except for linux users that did not like the idea of being locked into a proprietary solution, of course).

On the other hand, according to rumors, the TV shows and movie side of iTunes never took off and I believe the reason was that Apple wanted to enforce a certain pricing model and most likely studios were not so happy. The result of this is the NBC is out of the game, the Apple TV never took off and while I enjoy from time to time to watch video podcasts, having shows would be better. Also, did I mention that in countries other than the US most movies and shows are not available?

Now Amazon's music download service (Amazon MP3)is not yet selling as good as iTunes, but they have been able to sign all the major labels to provide un-protected music and they are using MP3 that while less efficient than AAC it's still a good format and is supported by all portable music players. Looks like Amazon is suddendly a few steps ahead of Apple and I can't think why the next step should not be to sell movies and shows.
Apple still has one advantage, the iPod and the Apple TV, but they need the content. The iPod was successful prior to the iTunes store because people could load their own music, the store was a subsequence.

If Apple wants to keep up with Amazon, they need to become less rigid and think about the business they can build around iTunes and not only on selling the hardware. If they can make iPods and Apple TV's and iTunes store complementary, they can probably stay ahead of the competition.

I was reading this article that does not seem to be huge news in itself as it mentions Apple will lower the prices in the UK in iTunes to match the price applied in the other European countries where the service is available.

What is interesting, though, is that Apple is saying that it wants to have a pan-European view for the content it provides and the pricing that is applied.

I live in Italy and most films and shows are dubbed, nevertheless sometimes I'd love to watch them in English, but unfortunately so far this hasn't been possible in most cases, unless someone made the distribution in Italy. It is annoying when you read about online movie rentals or sales and then discover they are only available in the US. NBC lets you watch their shows online and for free, but only if you're in the US.
I think that everyone who knows technology a bit and is an internet addict as I am, is waiting not-so-patiently for the day content will be available worldwide and for the same price.

I actually think this would also be a great solution against piracy. Think of being home, bored, you want to watch a movie, these are the options you have available:

Honestly for 4USD I would rent PLENTY. I often discover there's nothing on SKY Movies when it's too late to rent a movie (and this also makes me wonder why I pay a subscription to SKY).

See here the article: Apple to standardize iTunes music prices across Europe

The iPhone firmware 1.1.2 adds Italian, that's a fact.

Something I haven't seen around, though, is what I think is the final proof that Apple was ready to release the iPhone with TIM. This is the list of settings pre-installed in a 1.1.2 iPhone (US iPhone, by the way):

According to this article on Electronista Apple has started delivering iPhone SDK's to some selected partners.
It seems like the SDK is not a full SDK, but a way to produce applications in a contained programming environment. Sounds like Apple did not get it and the fact that lots of developers wanted to hack and build their own fully native apps was not enough of a signal.

Also, can you imagine how many developers you could bring to the Mac once they have developed something for the trendy iPhone?

It's a missed opportunity to me. The whole "signed application" process is a bit of a pain (Symbian developers can probably tell you something about this), but reasonable (especially if you want to create a "walled garden 2.0" in iTunes), but not allowing developers to create at all is a misake.

Android SDK has been released. There are videos that explain how the platform works and that the browser is based on the webKit. This was a bit of a surprise for me, I think I was not even considering that Google could go for something that is not Mozilla/Firefox.

Anyway I think this is great news and means that the webKit will keep growing and more sites will work on my Mac. Actually most sites already work, but sometimes I have to fire up Firefox or Camino, especially for AJAX-intensive sites.

Anyway, today, during Future of Mobile, I asked Dan Appelquist (another happy Mac user) if he thought Apple would let any other company take control of the core of the browser. My feeling, so far, is that Nokia is using the engine, but more in their own separate silo and not with Apple... And I have to admit this feeling is not because I think Nokia is evil and do not want to share, but actually because Apple wants to have full control on the browser and does not care to get changes and updates from Nokia!
Dan, on the other side, thought that Apple would have to let go a little bit of control on it so that Google and Nokia would get some space in the project.

Well, it looks like he knows what he's talking about, see this post on Surfin' Safari about Android committing changes to SVN.

Now I'm even happier.

I really like the contrast given by my new keyboard on my natural Teak table.

This is my Tisettanta Carpenter table (picture from official site, I don't have the bench):


And this is how the Mac and the keyboard look like (sorry for the little blur, they just shine!):


You may also see the previous setup on Flickr, it's still about the same, but the table is not a bit more clean. ;)

Someone should probably create a statistic (I'm surprised there isn't one, yet) that shows how lawsuits grow in number when company earnings grow.

I don't agree with all Apple's policies, but it's a pity that many people try to make money out of them (and other big companies every day) with lawsuits.

See here new lawsuits against Apple.

When I moved from Windows (2000 at the time) to OS X I had quite a few problems, initially with Finder (the counter part of Windows Explorer). I simply felt it did not have all the features I needed and that I was used to on Windows.

I tried PathFinder a really nice alternative Finder developed by CocoaTech. I think it's a cool tool and shows many of the little things that could be added to the native Finder. After the 2 weeks of free test I decided that it actually had too many features for me. I went back to the default Finder and over the years I found my way with it and using xterm when needed (opening a file with vi or less is SO easy, fast and comfortable).

A new Finder is going to be introduced in Leopard. An overview of the evolution of Finder over the years and what is coming is available on AppleInsider. I think it's an interesting reading.

I was reading this article @AppleInsider and thought that if Apple is thinking about extending Javascript to allow applications to access more of the features of the device and is going to provide more visibility for Web-apps, then maybe they think that the iPhone is a Web-appliance. This means that the iPhone is a pocket-web browser. It's not a device to build applications for.

There are so many services that have moved from their original interface to a web interface. If you can use Javascript to access information on the device and you can store data on the filesystem (like Google Gears already offers) then why do you need to build your own UI?
See this older post I made on a similar topic and I think this rumor, if true, would confirm.

Apple computers and all the accessories have always been more expensive in Europe than in the US. Once Apple computers were way more expensive than an unbranded PC, but they used different technologies and it was hard to make a real comparison. Today Apple computers are running Intel chips, IDE hard drives, have USB ports and most of the hardware is the same. Prices in the US have dropped and are not aligned with Dell and HP.
In Italy and in Europe they are still way more expensive. Prices are the apparently the same, what in the US costs 1199 USD, will cost you 1199 Euro in Europe (see the iMac's). What strikes me is that today, 1 Euro is worth almost 1.4 US Dollars, so something that costs 1000 Dollars in the US should cost less than 750 Euro here!
The latest example of this is the iPhone that was just launched in the UK, it costs 269 Pounds that are about 390 Euro and also about 545 USD! Once again, the price in USD and Euro is the same it's just that they are not the same currency.

Reporting from Surfin’ Safari Blog:

For all those that believed that mobile devices are the same as desktop PC's.

Read the full article here: WebKit Detect script updated for iPhone and iPod touch.

Apple has posted the developers' guidelines for content aimed to the iPhone.

It is good to see that they are telling developers to pay a lot of attention to the fact that the device is not a desktop PC and despite the fact that it supports web standards such as HTML 4.01 and XHTML 1.0, it still has some constraints like missing a mouse and a small screen.
I also appreciate very much the strong suggestion of sticking to the standards, you really want to keep things simple for the iPhone to process and using weird tags or strange constructs in your markup is not a good way to make the browser's life easy.

Go ahead, get started with the development, as soon as you're done reading Optimizing Web Applications and Content for iPhone.

Apple has hired some IM specialists (such as Justin Wood of Proteus) over the years and Jabber has been part of iChat for a long time now, but the support of Google Talk in the next release is actually not simply a Jabber-news, but another sign of the on-going cooperation between Google and Apple.

I wonder how much cooperation exists or WILL exist between Mozilla, Firefox, Camino and the Wekkit and Safari.

Read the full article at Appleinsider, Apple places full-screen QT, ZFS, more hidden features in Leopard.

At Appleinsider they have a new article entitled Apple says iPhone can be activated by users at home that says:

Wait a minute! I buy the phone in an Apple store, I walk home, plug the phone in the USB port, start up iTunes and... subscribe to AT&T? Select my preferred plan? You know what? This sounds a lot like I'm buying a mobile phone plan from iTunes. Sounds like I'm giving some money to Apple for this. Sounds like I will be able to buy more content and services from AT&T (or another operator) from the familiar interface of iTunes. Sounds like iTunes is turning into the centerpiece for buying media and services. Well THIS is an interesting new approach from Apple. This sounds innovative. This sounds like building more and more services around their iTunes platform.