Author: atrasatti

Born and raised in Italy, US resident. Innovator with a soft spot for developers. Currently director of developer advocacy @kin_foundation, previously @Samsung_IoT, @Nokia, an advocate of the open Web

iPhone SDK updates

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.

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.

How to miss a flight

I happen to be late, especially in the morning. I just like to lay in bed, who doesn’t? 🙂

I missed a train a few times. I remember being late the first day of school, once. I had never missed an airplane, anyway. In the last few years I had become better and learnt to plan better how long it would take to get somewhere and be ready on time.

This morning, unfortunately, the alarm rang at 4:30, but apparently I turned it off without even opening my eyes. I woke up at 7:20 wondering when I’d have to get up to get the airplane. My flight was scheduled for 7:25 so of course I did not make it. Now I’m stuck in Dublin until tomorrow as the flight in the afternoon was fully booked and I could not find a decent flight today.

Greetings from Ireland, then.

RSS reader and sharing

I am a bit in a middle ground these days jumping from one reader to another and also between sharing my favorite articles between two different services.

I used NetNewsWire (a Mac RSS reader) for almost 2 years now and I’m very happy with it. Joining newsgator also gave me a web (2.0) interface for free that is nicely integrated with the client. Since I really don’t go very far without my notebook, I never used it.

Recently James Pearce brought to my attention the beauties of the mobile version of Google Reader. The mobile version is very simple and effective at the same time. Like most Google products, it does it’s job efficiently. I also enjoyed sharing my favourite articles via Google (and also temporarily embedded them in this blog).

Nevertheless, I could never find myself entirely comfortable in the web interface, especially when I am on an airplane with no connection (if the feed provide the full articles, I can read them even when offline).
Anyway, the reason why I tried Google reader was to be able to access the feed on my mobile. I tried to access the website of newsgator hoping to use it with Opera Mini, but unfortunately their interface is too advanced for a small screen. Browsing around the web site (probably the first time in at least 1 year) I discovered that thanks to the iPhone-wave, they have launched a mobile version. So thank you iPhone!
Now I’m happily back to my Mac-client, have a mobile version and even found a way to share my favourite articles.

But of course there’s always something that’s missing. How do I add to my shared items pages and links that are not in my regular feeds? I still haven’t discovered this. So here’s a news item I wanted to share:
Red Hat and Amazon Team Up for Enterprise-grade Cloud Computing

RSS feed about user-agent strings

A few days ago, thanks to a suggesting from Tim Cleminson @ M:Metrics, I slightly update the query page at http://t.wurfl.com/query/ .

First of all I think there was some confusion about the “last 10 user-agent string”. My intention was to show the last unique strings that were stored. This of course creates some problems to users that might want to check their headers, but actually have a device that was already registered on the system. I split the functionality in two, now and you can choose if you want either the last unique user-agent strings or the last that were recorded. I also raised the limit from 10 to 50.
Please note that user-agent strings and the rest of the headers are registered only if there was something new. If you visited the site and the full headers were already recorded you won’t appear as a new header anyway. It’s a rare combination that will happen almost only if you used the same device, the same gateway and so on, but it could still happen. Storing every single header is out of the scope of the site so I have no plans to add that.

A new feature that I added is the possibility to see these latest recorded headers in a nice RSS feed. I also added the convenient buttons to add to Google reader, My Yahoo or Newsgator.
The feeds are cached for 1 hour to lower the load.

Golden Skate Awards

I had never been a fan of ice skating and I have to admit I still watch it only when some major event happens.
About a month ago I saw a sign on the street mentioning an ice skating event to be held in Milan, the Golden Skate Awards. I was unsure about the quality and who would have joined it, but I thought it would not happen frequently to have another chance in Milan. We went to buy two good tickets. 60 Euro each, not exactly cheap, and all the best (and even more expensive) seats were already taken.

So last week, 20 October 2007, was the day. We arrived just on time, given the high traffic next to the Datch Forum (A.K.A. Forum di Assago). Due to the traffic the show started about 30 minutes late, not a great start, in my opinion. Anyway the stadium was crowded, not sold out, but nearly.
The show started with an Italian couple, very young with a bright future, apparently. As expected, interesting name, but nothing outstanding (sorry guys).
To my great surprise the skaters that followed were of greater and greater importance and quality including the latest Gold Medalist Evgeni Plushenko, Brian Joubert, Stéphane Lambiel (video 1, video 2), Aljona Savchenko and Robin Szolkowi, Arakawa Shizuka, Carolina Kostner (of course) and many more.

I will digress on the specific exhibitions as I would not be able to provide a meaningful technical description and obviously I’m not a professional judge and can’t really say if the performances were perfect or not, but from an average spectator’s point of view I think the show was GREAT! We had a lot of fun. The show lasted about two hours and each skater (or couple) had two performances. Among the other things they also had 2 performances of the Italian team of synchronized skating, was really good fun.

Carolina Kostner was definitely the artist everyone was waiting for. When she entered in the stadium the audience was very excited and clapped for quite a few seconds. In her first exhibition, unfortunately, she fell on two jumps. She had a third jump that she did OK.
When she came in for her second performance, the audience clapped a bit and then has been completely quite waiting for the first jump. When she made it and it was really good, the crowd started cheering and clapping very loudly. It really seemed she had won a gold medal!
It has been amazing how I could feel the tension until the jump and then everyone was relieved and cheerful.

The day after I looked for some links and reviews and with a bit of disappointment I could not find any. It is really a pity that such an event that brought to Italy so many HUGE names did not have any news reports. The event was even sponsored by “La Gazzetta dello Sport”, the major Italian sports newspaper.

Here are the few links I found:
art on ice
http://ita-kotonoha.jugem.jp/?eid=212