Apple Safari to support WML?

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!

Wordpress for mobile with advanced imaging functionalities

I'm very pleased of reading a 2-parts article by Bryan Rieger. He has done a very good job with a Wordpress plug-in to make his company site, yiibu.mobi, good for mobiles.

Not only he has done a very good analysis of the problem, but also provided for free a Wordpress module called MIRF. Installation instructions are available on the site.

ESPN.mobi design

I started reading espn.mobi about a year ago and it used to be an LCD (lowest common denominator) approach for any device. A few months later they started offering a slightly better version for the iPhone and high-end devices, but really the main difference was that articles were not split into multiple pages.

I haven't used it much in the last couple of months and today I had a great surprise. Accessing with the iPhone I found a completely new and custom layout. The new layout is far from an LCD approach it is actually a very optimized design for the iPhone taking advantage of the AJAXy capabilities of the webKit, but also keeping in mind the iPhone input limitations providing big buttons for fat fingers.
The new homepage and then the pages inside are very colorful and the big (clickable) tabs give you immediately the opportunity to choose the section you are interested into.




The design is (both in the iPhone and non-iPhone versions) focused entirely on the mobile context which is a proof ESPN understand mobile. From the very first moments you see the latest news and real-time scores. Again taking advantage of AJAX, scores are updated automatically every few seconds using a pseudo-ticker with nice little boxes with team names and scores. Very nice to the eye.



The non-iPhone version has also slightly improved from the version that has been available for a few months now.

The non-iPhone version is very light, but still very nice and is very usable on simple devices such as the Sony Ericsson V640.

Some more screenshots taken on my iPhone.


Real-time scores in nice boxes, scrollable sideways:


Latest news:


Section homepage (NBA in this case):


THUMBS UP TO ESPN!

PS: I know the layout of text and images isn't perfect, but Blogger doesn't let me do too much without breaking all the standard markup

Volantis Mobility Server 5.1

I'm pleased to see that Volantis Announces Mobility Server 5.1. According to the PR version 5.1 is focused around adding connectors for web 2.0 applications such as Picasa and Flickr. Also, the device database has been updated and they now claim more tha 5600 devices! I see that the open-source version of the server is still at 5.0, but I know they are really committed to open-source, so I'm sure they will follow up quickly. These days I'd be especially curious to see the Media Access Proxy in action, if done right it's still one of the most important things in mobile (get the images right!).


They also announced an update to BuzzCast last week, hopefully my operator will buy it so that I can test it. :) I'm a NetNewsWire addict, so BuzzCast seems quite interesting to me.

webKit the official mobile browser?

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:

• Where does this leave Opera (Mini)? Will there still be space for them?


• What about the Mozilla's Fennec mobile browser? If you want to know my opinion, they might be late to the party.


• What about other browsers like Skyfire and Teashark?

Is transcoding a crime?

I was reading my RSS feed and of course this news item from TechCrunch caught my eye, Transcoding Is Not A Crime, Says Court In Veoh Porn Case (includes longer excerpt from the ruling and a video).

I was initially surprised that TechCrunch spoke about transcoders for mobile sites (remember Novarra, InfoGin, Openweb, etc?) and in fact they are talking about video and flash. The ruling is interesting and here is how it starts:

Here, Veoh has simply established a system whereby software automatically processes user-submitted content and recasts it in a format that is readily accessible to its users. Veoh preselects the software parameters for the process from a range of default values set by the thirdparty software.

The topic is very different, but if you read this text and applied it word-by-word to what proxy transcoders do, it would still make sense. So I wonder (and I'm not a lawyer by far), will this ruling also apply to mobile proxies?

DISCLAIMER: I agree this is extreme, but not entirely impossible.

US Smartphone users browse twice the British ones

According to M:Metrics US owners of smartphones (can someone tell me exactly what a smartphone is?) browse the web twice as much as British users.

It is obvious that users who bought a smartphone will make a use that is different from users who bought a cheap mobile device. I always thought Britain was one of the most active countries in this space, anyway.

Interesting how the only site in common is Facebook. No wonder they did an iPhone UI and are getting more active in the mobile space.
No Google? Only live.com? No eBay in Britain?

These are the numbers coming straight from M:Metrics.

Top Domains by Time Spent Browsing per Month: United Kingdom

Domain	Company	Total
Total	Total	2:24:58
facebook.com	TheFacebook, Inc	1:44:47
three.co.uk	Hutchison Whampoa Limited	1:30:51
sky.com	British Sky Broadcasting Group Plc	1:15:28
live.com	Microsoft Corporation	1:11:06
bbc.co.uk	British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC)	0:48:10

Top Domains by Time Spent Browsing per Month: United States

Domain	Company	Total
Total	Total	4:37:48
craigslist.org	Craigslist, Inc.	1:38:51
ebay.com	eBay Inc.	1:25:41
myspace.com	News Corporation	1:25:13
facebook.com	TheFacebook, Inc	1:24:09
go.com	The Walt Disney Company	1:07:04

Also, Mark Donovan, senior analyst, says:

People are becoming increasingly engaged in the mobile medium. Among smartphone users in the United States, mobile browsing has increased 89 percent year over year, and pageviews have increased 127 percent. Consumption is quickly evolving from brief transactions, such as checking the weather or flight status, to time-intensive interaction with mobile Web sites—even without an iPhone.

And Paul Goode, senior analyst, adds:

A primary factor in the discrepancy in the duration of time spent browsing between British and American smartphone users is the relative popularity of flat-rate data plans in the United States, where 10.9 percent of users have an unlimited data plan versus only 2.3 percent in Britain. Other factors to consider are the popularity of devices with QWERTY keyboards in the United States—where nine of the ten top smartphones are QWERTY, while the inverse is true in the UK--and the greater penetration of smartphones in the British market.

Flash, Flashlite, SVG and Java

Flash is a huge success on the web. It's been like that for a long time now.

SVG is a recommendation (read standard) by the W3C that should address some of the functionalities of Flash.

While Flash Lite has been very successful in Japan for many years (and I think simply because DoCoMo decided it would be the default on all devices), it has struggled in the rest of the world.

In the last couple of years Nokia, Sony Ericsson and other top vendors have more or less quietly implemented SVG Tiny (a subset of SVG for mobile devices). From my perspective it seemed like SVG would take over Flash (Lite) in the mobile space, but it looks Adobe is moving to make sure this does not happen.

A few news that I've read in the last couple of weeks, all within just a few days:

• Adobe's Open Screen Project
• Sony Ericsson's Project Capuchin
• Nokia's screencast about JSR-226
  

dotMobi acquires Mowser

The word is out, dotMobi has acquired IP from Mowser and will now be in charge of running the service.

There's not much I can say that hasn't been said already. James over Twitter, Miker, Russell.

I am mostly curious about what will the community say. It's a bold move for a company that has been advocating "Build for mobile" for years while Mowser seems to come from the opposite direction. I think we have some strong ideas about how to use Mowser at best and you'll see it happening quickly.

Working with Mike and Russell is going to be exciting (except Russell is not in Ireland, but I'm used to working long-distance!).

Sprint and Openwave's OpenWeb platform

It looks like Sprint is committed to transcoding and is communicating with its partner developers. Still whitelisting, but at least you can see the effort. Also, the OpenWeb solution should be friendly to mobile sites.

See the post on their forums here, if you had missed it.

Chat with John Puterbaugh of Nellymoser

Last week in Las Vegas Nellymoser announced a version 3.5 of their platform. Reading from the press release:

New Mobile Services Extended With Rich, Interactive Widgets And Microsites, Accessed Across Multiple Platforms And Supported By In-Application Advertising

Following the press release, Nellymoser got in touch with me to have a talk about their announcement. I thought they must have contacted the wrong person as I'm not a journalist, but they explained they wanted to talk to me specifically because this is a product for developers. I have to admit this made me curious.

So this Monday I had a chat over the phone with John Puterbaugh, Founder and Chief Strategist and Betsy Zikakis, VP of Marketing. We skipped all the marketing stuff that is not exactly my business and John went straight to the point of why this product is interesting for developers.
Nellymoser has a number of agreements with US operators, premium messaging companies and media companies. They already have their services provided via operator decks (portals). Why not open the platform to other companies that might have interesting services? Well this sounds like a great plan to me. Nellymoser now gives access to media provided by their big partners, a chance to be listed (via their software) on big operator portals and, if you want it, also manage payments via their gateways.

Nellymoser is specialized in media provision so all the device detection and media adaptation happens on their side. What developers should care about is create compelling services and mix the media Nellymoser provides with their own, if they want to.
The pricing also seems interesting as you will have a chance to either pay a fixed fee (if you know the size of your business) or pay per transaction. It is not exactly a revenue sharing, but rather a fee per active user. This made me think of i-mode, I have to say. We have not talked about the details of the pricing so I just do not know, yet.

So what's in for me? Why should it be interesting for me (I live in Italy, just FYI)?
Well the plan is to extend the platform over the summer and not only to let developers build sites for operator decks, but also for the open internet. They call them microsite, a name that I do not like very much, these will build the web of tomorrow! Still it's good they are looking out of the window and I'm sure they are already seeing the potential.

After about 30 minutes of talk including some business and technical perspectives, I think this is a very good initiative and I look forward to see how it works and what are the tools available. I should be getting access to it in a few weeks. I'll post more once I get that (and maybe after a few hundred dollars sold over the US operators. ;) )

See a flash demo called VIP Access of sites will look like.

I also reviewed a similar service in the past, called Mobispirit, but I think Nellymoser is a step further.

Ron Mandel writes for dotMobi

I'm very pleased to see the first article by Ron Mandel on dev.mobi. We've been talking about this for a while and we now got his official contribution.

Useless to remind you he has HUGE experience in mobile after 8 years in the industry working for Openwave first and Adobe now.

Make sure you read his blog, because it's going to be top quality!

"Over the Air" event in London

Make sure you note these dates on your calendar. On April 4-5 there will be a very exciting event in London called "Over the Air". We are all mobile mammals (read fans and addicts) and this event is really the place to be: the topics will be anything that has to do with services provided over the air. It will not be limited to browsing, one of the most common topics of dotMobi, there will also be Android, iPhone web apps and native apps, J2ME and more.

If you are in London it's a must, if you are not, it's probably worth to start looking for a flight and a hotel.

I will be talking about DeviceAtlas, of course.

See you there.

Yahoo! Mobile also local BETA

I took a look at the Beta version of the new mobile version of Yahoo!. I tested on an iPhone and I have to say that I really like the design and functionality. When you're logged in with your account you get e-mails, your selected news and so on. Pretty good.

I searched for information about Dublin where I was at the moment of the test:



What i liked is that as soon as I specified my location (the default location was set to San Francisco, USA) it provided a number of links for local services. That was really good. I love movies, so I checked for the local cinemas to see if I should go watch any newly released movie:



Too bad that when checking for cinemas it "moved" my location to Dublin, Ohio!! I've never been to Ohio, but I'm sure Dublin must be a nice town, just not where I was.
It's OK, it's a Beta, you don't expect everything to be perfect. I was positively surprised it recognized Dublin in Ireland in the first place, so I expected it to support any location.

I really look forward for the worldwide release of the new mobile site, looks very promising. The interface was clearly very optimized for the iPhone, using the style to show buttons on top of the page and so on. I'll need to test on some other mobile device, maybe lower end.

Viral Marketing in mobile

Last week I received an e-mail from Michael of Mocondi that forwarded me an update about the status of their service. I can't say I have known Michael for a long time, in fact I have never met him, but since the news is about mobile, it got me thinking.

The information is about their product called MeYou that, from what I understood, is a program in which you can buy mobile content and services and you can suggest the same contents to your friends in your network. When you suggest something or perform other actions you earn points. This is nothing new, of course. According to their numbers, their service is very successful especially in Italy (not a surprise, again, as Italians buy a lot of ringtones and contents in general).

What really got me thinking, was actually how they created the service. Reading from the website the service is available in Italy only to customers of 3 and Vodafone (I'm a TIM customer), users should download a Java application to get started. Users can browse a selection of contents available for their device and then can purchase. Billing happens via the operator.

The numbers that Mocondi reports are good, such as 1.6M recommendations sent and 24% subsequent purchases. What I just don't understand is why you need the hassle of a Java application. It's hard to download and sometimes will fail to install. You use it to browse and send messages to your network of friends. I suppose you will also be able to manage your network.
When I think about this application, I think the browser would be the perfect fit. Browsing is just what it's made for, for a start! Managing your network is something you could do via specific pages. Messaging... Well, you have SMS and MMS and if Mocondi already has agreements with mobile operators I do not see problems delivering messages and tracking users. Settings should already be in place so no problems installing the application or downloading the catalogs. Also, I suppose that users will not get notifications if they do not start the application while with SMS and MMS you get them in any case and the browser can be started automatically (read wappush).


I really think that mobile devices are the perfect target for viral marketing and I like the idea. I just think that the browser would have been a better choice. Do you read me Mocondi? Check out Refresh Mobile or Flirtomatic and how they left the Java platform for the browser. There are things that are better in Java (games, etc) and other things that are better in a browser.

Will Apple share ownership of the webKit?

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.

Future of Mobile, 14 November 2007

Future of Mobile is about to come. Next Wednesday is the day.

The event looks great and I look forward to meet a lot of people.

If you still haven't registered, well... It's late, but I guess you can still make it!

mobileAJAX Workshop

On Sep 28 2007, in San Francisco, USA, the mobileAJAX workshop was held. I have not joined it, but it was good to read a couple of reports.

The W3C has published the official minutes of the meeting.

Also interesting to read the scratchpad used during the meeting.

I wonder where will (mobile) widgets go. I'm a bit skeptic. I think there's much more than widgets to use AJAX. It wasn't the main topic of the workshop but seems like it was one of the main points.

iPhone: The Web Browser is the only user interface

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.

Google's GWT

Transcoding is a hot topic these days in the mobile community. Google's GWT has come up a couple of times in some conversations I had in the last 2-3 weeks. I never wondered how they decide to transcode or not, anyway.
I gave it a shot today using cURL and an emulator to get access to some devices quickly.

How I did it
I got on http://www.google.com/m and searched for "WURFL test"; I left the default "Web" setting. As expected my http://t.wurfl.com was the first link. I clicked on it and got to the page, the layout was unchanged, but that's not a surprise, it's so simple. Scrolling down I noticed that the user-agent string is not my phone's, but an ugly generic MSIE user-agent string. Scrolling down a bit more I noticed the standard chrome provided by GWT that lets you disable images or request the page in the original source.

The solution
I sent an e-mail to Sean Owen, who is in the W3C MWI with me. Surprisingly he replied on a Sunday and was very helpful. He explained me how their crawler is able to mark mobile sites and make sure the GWT will not transcode anything. The problem is that at the moment this magic feature is available in the US only and will be rolled out to the world soon. Since I left "Web" in my search I got the web version of my site (t.wurfl.com has a very basic device detection that provides different markup based on the Accept headers). US users should already get the mobile version of t.wurfl.com. Anyway, Sean also suggested a trick that now provides the mobile version to all mobile users without any other update required. I added the following tag in the head of the page:
<link rel="alternate" media="handheld" href="http://t.wurfl.com/index.php">

Seconds after the update I requested again the page with the emulator and got the mobile version.

PS: if you want to get a mobile page using cURL you can do this:
curl -D - -A "Nokia6600" "http://www.google.com/gwt/n?u=t.wurfl.com/"

You will see the page source and the HTTP headers sent by the server. Read the manual for more commands, cURL is super-powerful!