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

e-mails organized in threads

I remember when Opera initially launched the concept in its e-mail client that you did not really need folders to organize your e-mail, but that it was sufficient to group them.
Fairly recently Google reviewed the same concept and defined the labels and a very similar way of organizing your e-mails. Google certainly added a very powerful search engine, but the original concept is very much the same.

Being a Mac user, I have been using Apple’s Mail for a few years now. Mail.app has a standard a hybrid approach to e-mails, the standard folders are available, but since Spotlight became part of the OS, users are also able to create filters and organize e-mails in “dynamic folders“.

I have never been a fan of Opera’s approach and the same applies to Google’s approach and Apple’s dynamic folders.
I really like the threaded view, though. Both GMail and Mail.app offer this feature.
For my normal inbox and for a few folders I use the standard view with e-mails sorted by date descending.
For mailing lists I just love the threaded view. Here are two screenshots of the same mailing list:

And here is another screenshot of the same mailing list with a standard view:

When you read and contribute to a mailing list with a fair amount of traffic and different topics discussed, maybe with a lot of replies to the same topic, the threaded view lets you have e-mails organized very well and lets you follow a full thread even if other e-mails were sent for other threads in the same timeline.

While both Google’s and Apple’s e-mail clients are not exactly perfect when grouping e-mails, it still is very helpful and works smoothly in most cases. I have been using this feature for a couple of years now and liked it. I realized how I’m not used to it when last week I read my e-mails using a web client and found myself lost in the e-mails, losing track and having a hard time identifying the context as I was moving through the list of my e-mails, but were actually about different topics.
Going back to check old threads is also very easy when using this feature as you immediately get all the e-mails together.

Music on your phone

M:Metrics has just made a new press release with some juicy data about mobile phones and the use of these devices as music players: MOBILE MUSIC USAGE IS CLIMBING, BUT NOT ALL MUSICPHONES ARE CREATED EQUAL.

I’m particularly happy about this press release because while I’m not an expert analyst, I was actually involved in the creation of this press release. My contribution was needed because of the issue of identifying the devices that should actually be part of this analysis. We hear every day about music phones, feature phones, smart phones, etc, but what are they? Which are the detailed features or characteristics that make up a music phone?

Internally we discussed a lot about this and everyone provided his own view. The devices taken into account in this analysis are the result of our internal discussion.

Sometimes it is really hard to build a list of devices defining a set of rules. When you first define these rules you will end up including some device that you did not want or miss one that you wanted to be part of the list. An example is the Motorola V3, it can play MP3’s, it can be connected to the PC and you can sideload songs from your computer and you have a tiny music player, but does this make it a music phone? In my opinion it does not. The music player is slow and ugly. You can’t build playlists, you can move to the next or previous song, but you have to go back to the main list. It has a lot of memory, but doesn’t really compare to the 2-4GB of an iPod Nano, it’s nearer to the first versions of the iPod shuffle.
Compared to the Sony Ericsson W810i, the V3 is nothing when you compare music-features.

So what is the difference? When does a mobile phone (that was born as an apparatus to make and receive calls while on the move) turn into a device to also play music? Is it the little walkman button that make it an iPod competitor?
Should we talk about Music-optimized? Music-optimized it means that it had all those features that you would expect from an MP3 player, the appropriate keys to start and stop music, to skip to the next song and then all the interface and features to build a playlist, to see the available songs in an easy and quick manner.

It is all very interesting, because of course the fragmentation that exists in the mobile space makes it really hard to define a single rule that will match all these requirements. Is the iPhone part of this family? It doesn’t really have a key that you can press to start music. Is a blackberry a music-optimized device simply because I could use the rocker to move to the next songs with an appropriate software installed?

Very interesting discussion and collecting very different points of you. If you have your own opinion of what a music-phone and a music-optimized phone is, please let me know.

GAIA Image Transcoder

A few weeks ago I had a nice lunch with two guys from Open Reply, Michele and Patrick. Reply is an italian IT company, very big. Open Reply is a division that is focused on open-source projects.
Our lunch has been a work-lunch, of course, and was centered around the idea of releasing some of their software as open-source.

GAIA Image Transcoder or GIT is a Java library to transcode images. The project was born as part of a bigger project to provide content in many different formats that would be suitable for the web, for WAP browser and more. It is an ambitious project built of a set of modules that allow them to produce the desired layouts.
GIT is part of that and is the part that takes care of reading an image in “any” format and produce, if needed, a new image suitable for the browser requesting the content.

The project is developed on top of standards and de-facto standards like JAI, Apache Commons Discovery and WURFL, of course.
Needless to say that WURFL is the source that is used to understand what size and format is supported by the browser.

What I really like about the release is that it’s a pure open-source project, licensed with the very permissive LGPL license, but has the big shoulders of a big IT company and you can see this by all the documentation and the comments in the source.
This is another good sign of how a company can take good inspiration from the open-source and try to give something back to the community.

Open Reply is not only looking for contributors, but also for comments, bug reports and suggestions of how to improve it. I think they have the best approach and a lot of openness to new ways of making business.
The project is hosted on sourceforge and the files can already be downloaded and tested.

Best wishes to this new product in the big family of the open-source and of WURFL.

Ericsson chooses WURFL as “industry solution”

One of our loyal users of WURFL and wmlprogramming posted on the mailing list a reference to a new developer tool provided by Ericsson (not Sony Ericsson!) to produce mobile-optimized web pages.

a1zydi writes on wmlprogramming “WALL and MobileFaces library” (free subscription to the mailing list is required) to name this new library from Ericsson called Mobile JSF Kit.

Quoting from the site:

The Mobile JSF (JavaServer Faces) Kit consists of the MobileFaces core library, a developer’s guide and sample applications to help Java EE developers to rapidly develop internet mobile applications.

The library comes with a complete documentation describing how to install and use and even an expected timeframe to learn JSF and the toolkit. Very nice.
Modules are also supported and they already released an extra template module for dotMobi compliant pages and CHTML (i-mode).

What I think is a great news for WURFL is that they decided to use our little project as the foundation to build their own implementation.
The documentation goes down into the details of how to download the XML, the Java API, install and configure.

Quoting from Chapter 4.4:

You can determine a lot of device features from the request head. But it is still restricted. For example, you cannot determine the screen size from the request head. Is there any better solution for the device feature source in the industry?

WURFL is such an industry solution for the device feature source.

If you like JSF and want to start a mobile project, this library is probably a good place to go, download and have something already done to use as a foundation.

Open-Source as in “work for free”?

It seems like I really can’t sleep tonight. Too many thoughts rambling in my mind and sleeping is probably the last thing I can do. I will try to tire myself until I fall asleep on this chair writing something here on the blog as I haven’t been really good at writing in the last few weeks.

Coming back to the subject of this post, a few weeks ago I was browsing and for some reason I stumbled upon Ari Jaaksi’s Blog, a Nokia guy that follows the development of the N800 among the other things. Specifically I read about the development on the N800 and Ari gave his Status Report regarding the available software. What strikes me is that the N800 is already on the market (and so was at the time of the article) and Nokia is asking people to do some open-source development to add software and features that were present in the N770, but that Nokia could not make work for the N800 in time for the launch.
I am a big supporter of how Nokia helps developers and I think they are the best in the mobile space, but honestly, this really seems to me like asking the open-source community to take over some development that Nokia could not or did not want to do.

I don’t think this is fair to the developers that will eventually do the work (if any). They are effectively working for free to give some more profit to Nokia. It’s an open call from Nokia to ask for free support.
One thing is to develop a software and open your API (and maybe eventually making some money out of this as Google does) another thing is to ask someone to do the work you did not want to do and also expect it to be free.

Tools that improve productivity

There are many ways to organize your work and depending on what you do and how you feel more comfortable, you might be happy with a Moleskine or you might need something different.

I don’t really have many appointments and my calendar generally lists 3-4 things in a full week. On the other side my daily work is mostly driven by some tasks that I have to regularly work on and, most of all, e-mail (we could call it an event-driven work).

E-mail is really my number one companion and often I send out an e-mail instead of calling. In my mind most people live in front of their computer and will most likely read the e-mail within 10-15 minutes. Sometimes I realize that this is not the reality for many people, but actually for most of the people I work with, this is true.
Today, if you are often away from a computer, you can read your e-mail from your mobile phone or via a Blackberry so you are not really off-line.

In my case, I spend most of the time at my desk. Aside from e-mail I also use other software to communicate such as Skype (do you have an idea of how much money we save when calling overseas?) and AdiumX to cover all the IM networks such as Y! Messenger, MSN Messenger, ICQ, AIM and GTalk.
These clients are very useful and allow me to keep in touch with a lot of people, I can immediately get in touch with colleagues and other developers around the world. It’s really unbeatable.
When I’m traveling it’s good to keep in touch with my girlfriend of course.

Speaking of how I organize my work, I have never been good at keeping a well defined list of things to do, a precise schedule and everything well organized. I tend to have on the back of my mind a list of things I know I need to do and then, according to the e-mails and requests that I receive I “automatically assign” a higher or lower priority to new tasks and add them to my list. In order to get all the notifications immediately I use tools such as Growl or MailTags.
I simply love and am addicted to Growl. I know it’s a Mac-only software, but you should really want it for other systems too. In two words every time there’s an event you will see a message on the screen for a few seconds. You can configure growl as you like and there are many parameters and skins, I actually go for a very basic configuration and have bubbles appearing on the top right of my screen. I receive alerts of messages from AdiumX, Skype, new e-mails and so on.
Any time anything happens I will see a little alert that will also vanish in a few seconds so won’t bother for too long. I have gotten so used to it that I read the notices and don’t even remember I did, it’s like a subliminal message.

Recently, during the 3GSM World Congress, I saw a very nice user interface for Symbian devices and I think that in some way it goes the same way as Growl. It’s been developed as a pilot by Favourite Systems AS and it’s called FLUID. The new UI overrides the normal stand-by screen of your phone and changes it into an empty space where bubbles pop-up when new events happen. If you receive a new SMS a bubble will appear. If you receive 5 SMS messages, the bubble will grow and take more screen space that you should more likely notice it. If you have an appointment or a new e-mail, more bubbles will pop-up. Much like the Apple Dashboard and Konfabulator (now known as Yahoo! Widgets) you may also pick some applications and have a little bubble just for that. Bubbles will not cover each other, but move around as new bubbles appear. You may also move them around manually and zoom in to read the full text.

So, my question is, do these tools really improve my productivity? How much are they improving it and how much are they effectively taking my attention away from my main task?
Applications like AdiumX and Skype are great and let me keep in touch with a lot of people from around the world, but it is probably obvious to anyone that this often mixes up with chatting with friends or being pinged about topics or tasks that you would actually postpone or consider at a later time.
The same happens with the Blackberry (or Crackbeery) as I know people that involuntarily keep their eye on the BB and wait to see the little LED change color to immediately read the new message. How much of their attention and concentration is this taking away?
I am a Growl-addict, but would I work better without it? What would I miss?

Arun’s views on the new HTML Charter

Arun Ranganathan from AOL has come with a public blog post about HTML 5, the status of XHTML2 and why AOL is going to be active in HTML and NOT in XHTML2.
In two words he’s saying that AOL is not going to work in XHMTL2 because they are not browser vendors and so that’s not their field, but that they are going to work in HTML WG (and the development of HTML5) because they are content providers.

XHTML2 is just a draft, it’s a future implementation, so it might make sense to leave it to browser vendors, but then why bother to work in HTML 5? To me, this means that XHTML2 is dead for AOL and that HTML 5 is the way to go.

Isn’t this a HUGE thing?

Read the full article: (Re)birthing Pangs: The HTML Charter Revisited.