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!

It looks like Microsoft has really picked up quite a bit from Zumobi for their next mobile OS.

On Techcrunch they have some screenshots that make it obvious. It will be interesting to see how the UI really works and if it's any better than the one on current Windows Mobiles. The competition on UIs in mobile is now serious and I look forward to see if Nokia/Symbian will make the leap or will stay stuck on their existing UI (that seems a bit old to me).

PS: If you don't find anything about a UI desgin on Zumobi, you might want to see this (now old) press release.

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.

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

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 always run Rescuetime in the background, even though I have to admit I don't check it so often (anymore).
It was interesting to see that the week before the DeviceAtlas 2.0 release my efficiency was very high. See here:


It should be noted that normally during the day I spend some time developing and some time writing specs, talking to colleagues, on the phone and so on, but of course, just before the release it was all about development. :)

Within the DeviceAtlas team, on Monday 29th September, we worked an average of 11 hours and 30 minutes, plus the what the designers worked, that is probably about the same. What a team!!

My first video online is about DeviceAtlas, of course!

Introducing the new DeviceAtlas Data Explorer

This definitely the year of funding and competitions. There was the Android competition and then the 10M USD fund. There was the iFund for iPhone applications, there was the Blackberry Fund with a stunning 150M USD and now there's yet another competition from Sony Ericsson. I got a message from David Cushman who claims to have a lead on this, see here: Sony-Ericsson X1 developer competition coming soon. The details are still lacking, but if you are a Windows (Mobile) developer you might consider this interesting, especially if you were wondering if it's worth starting something.

For many years developers have been locked out of mobile devices, then J2ME came with its sandbox, it was better than nothing, but it was really limited. Over the years most of those limitation went away, but it looks like this is the year of the open development. So start coding, because mobile (web, J2ME and web applications) is where the is money for companies and developers!

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.

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:

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:

The other day I was trying to do some house-cleaning of HTC device names, clones and HTTP request headers for DeviceAtlas.

The result was that I was one step from going crazy. All those devices have names that are almost the same, UAProf or user-agent string refer to slightly different names, different network operators re-brand with *other* different names.

Just to give you an idea, I found a couple of useful sites that talk about HTC devices, platforms, and model names:

I have been a happy NetNewsWire user for years now. As I posted in the past, I understand a lot of users have moved to Google Reader, but I still like my NetNewsWire client for the Mac and especially the ability to read articles offline.

NetNewsWire was acquired and integrated with Newsgator a few years ago and now it's all free (this is free publicity for the newsgator guys!). This means that I can read my news on both web and client interfaces and get everything synchronized. I've started using the mobile version more or less a year ago and while I still don't understand why they don't use their .mobi extension, I think they have made a good effort. They started with an iPhone version only and quickly had to make it at least XHTML Basic so that other mobile users could access it (the full web version, for example, is too AJAXy even for clients like Opera Mini).

I have recently upgraded my iPhone to version 2.0 and immediately installed the free NetNewsWire for iPhone client (this is more free publicity for you guys). The interface is very similar to the Mac version, adapted to the small screen, of course. Every time you load the main page it tries to update the feeds. Only feeds with unread items are displayed. This is very reasonable as on the mobile device you'd rather want to quickly go to new items (while on the Mac client you can also see feeds with old items and read them again). Nothing particularly fancy happens, you select the feed, get a full list of news items, read them. You can make the entire feed as read.
This is, all in all, everything you would expect from a mobile feed-reader.

I have to say that I'm surprised that some of the good features of the mobile web version haven't been translated into the iPhone-client. The mobile web client has a minimalistic approach, in fact news items in a feed are split into pages of 10 or so items. The iPhone client lists all the items in one big page. Scrolling to the oldest news is of course much quicker than on the mobile web version, but at the same time, if you have a very active feed and haven't kept up for a few days you'll find yourself with 100+ items in one long page. In the mobile web version you may mark all the items in one page as read, but on the iPhone client you may only mark all the feed as read. Imagine I have a feed with 100 items; I start from the oldest (that's what I normally do) I go up; as I read articles they are marked as read, but of course I will not read them all. If I have to close the application, when I come back I will only see the unread items of that same news feed, but since I could not mark "as read" items that I did not want to specifically read, I will still find them there. This means that I have to go back to the bottom and go through the same articles again. I will be quicker, of course, but if I could mark groups of items as I can do in the mobile web version, that would be much easier.

Another feature that is present in the mobile web version and not in the iPhone-client is the ability to mark a single item as "read" without opening it. Again, in the iPhone client you either really open it, or you'll have to mark the entire feed as read.

For some reason in the iPhone client is possible to mark items as "clippings", but you are not able to see the "Clippings" folder. Clippings are the same as "starring" an item on Google Reader, news items that you want to store for some reason, they will appear in a special folder and not go away even if they have disappeared from the feed.

While it's obvious that the mobile web version is synchronized in real time as you are in fact connected directly with the newsgator site, it's unclear how synchronization happens on the iPhone client. You may at any time force the feed update, but you have no way to force synchronization and there is no preference pane. Using the Mac client almost at the same time gave me the feeling like the two were a bit out of sync. On the iPhone I am often offline (I only use Wifi) thus the ability to force-sync would be much appreciated and I think it's something that is particularly useful for a mobile client in general. You never know if and how the user is really online and actually the advantage (maybe the ONLY one) of the NewNewsWire client is that you can read news offline.

The browser and some, but not all applications in the iPhone let you use it either in landscape or portrait mode. I got used to it and I like it. Why can't I read my news in landscape mode? This is definitely a needed feature for the NetNewsWire client.

Overall I think that feed-readers show how thin is the list of advantages of using an online/web-based feed reader as opposed to a specific client. Offline reading is probably the only consistent advantage, so I think NetNewsWire should spend time on this.

Newsgator mobile (with the iPhone browser) and NetNewsWire for the iPhone, have almost the same interface and responsiveness. Hopefully they will improve the client a bit because I LOVE reading the news offline. Overall rating is positive, but of course you need to be a newsgator user. I look forward to see improvements to the client, because it's definitely worth!

Final note: I have no way to really measure this, but it seems like running the client eats up a lot of battery. I have no grounds to base this except for a "feeling".

M:Metrics has been sold, eventually. When Nielsen acquired Telephia, some thought it would be over for M:Metrics, but I think M:Metrics has proven the great quality of their products and services, they kept going and leading the market and now they are joining comScore.

I think this is great news for all my former colleagues in London and Seattle. Hopefully the products will keep growing and leading the market.

I look forward to the future of M:Metrics' products.

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

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:

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!).

I posted a few days ago about Twitter. Now James has set up an account for dev.mobi so that you can follow.

Just in case you did not care about Twitter, but have an RSS reader you should also check out this blog post by Daniel Hunt that explains a few little secrets about dev.mobi: 10 things about dev.mobi, RSS Feeds, Subscriptions and Tracking.

Nokia always named their mobile devices with numbers. Most of the times 4 numbers, sometimes 3. In the last few years they started also using letters such as N and E.

Many have tried to find some reasoning behind the numbers, but no real rule was ever found (at least that I know of). Anyway, it looks like Nokia might have run out of numbers. Today, while checking on Forum Nokia I noticed a device that was advertised as new, but did not sound so, to me. A little research on the Forum itself shows that the "new" device is the 3120 classic, but there's also an older 3120! So why is the new one called "classic"? Shouldn't it be called "new" or something?

Well, for all of us (OK, I'm the only one) trying to remember all model names, it's going to be harder now.

PLUG: luckily you'll find both in DeviceAtlas (Nokia 3120 classic and Nokia 3120).

Barcode readers for mobile device displays are growing and is an interesting market, I think. In short, it's hard to read from a tiny LCD screen, but the technology is catching up and a few solutions have appeared on the market.

Here is a video of an Italian company called Gear srl.

A similar technology is already deployed by Spanair on their spanair.mobi. The service is active only in limited number of airports, but gives an idea of how useful it can be. If successful it will be extended, of course.