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

Flash Lite as a theme on the phone

It all started from a Google Alerts, I found a post about a small DB like WURFL, but specific for Flash Lite, the author called it “Flash Lite UAProfile“. From there I got on a blog that linked to a video on YouTube, of course, that shows how you can use Flash Lite to personalize your mobile phone. Flash Lite is used to make the animations and I have to say that while I generally stick to the default themes on the phone, these are really interesting. Simple animations that can make your phone a little bit more “alive”.

NOTICE: While the database has ‘UAProfile’ in the name it’s not a UAProf; while the author names WURFL, it’s not compatible with WURFL.

If you are a content provider you should start considering a bit more the Themes topic. Themes have been available on mobile phones for a long time, but not many content providers sell them. It’s because all the phones user their own standard, all the phones have a different screen size and probably don’t seem so attractive as ringtones.
I can understand that today, with the integrated cameras, most users prefer to take a picture and use it as a wallpaper, but they can’t make animations and of course can’t make a theme out of an image. This is a good example of something else that can be done to make a mobile phone unique.

See the latest mobile phones

Last night I was literally hypnotized by a very simple script (AJAX?) that refreshes every few seconds. I was browsing around and got on AdMob‘s site and immediately was captured but the device names on the right. I kept reading device names, countries and mobile operators for quite a few minutes… Yes, I know, I’m sick! 🙂

I just love these features, I can’t get away from them.

In a similar effort and only for the happiness of my eyes, I recently added a feature that is totally useless, but makes me giggle every time I see it.
Every time someone visits t.wurfl.com the user-agent is recorded in a database. It is possible to query the user-agents and see the values captured through another webpage. Well, I have added device thumbnails just to entertain myself, of course. If you wanted to see the last 10 Sony Ericsson devices that visited the site, for example, you will see the nice thumbnails.

All this was developed using free software, of course. WURFL, Tera-WURFL and the device pictures that the community has collected. Device thumbnails were developed this Sunday, instead of going out, seeing people and having some real relationship with human beings…

“best Java game for the new Samsung D900” contest

Samsung has launched a new contest for the development of the best Java/J2ME game for the new D900.

Prizes are actually very interesting, with a Grand prize of 20,000 USD.

You are required to subscribe to Sharewire, upload your game and then the final winner will be calculated summing the number of downloads and the votes casted by a number of “selected experts” evaluating innovation, fun, usability, graphics and sound quality.

Considering the high prize it is certainly interesting for new and young developers.

This is also a demonstration of how hard it can be for a developer or a small company to reach large audiences. Appearing in a big site or in an operator’s portal is not easy and often the top listed games are developed and distributed by large firms. Smaller companies generally don’t get the same visibility.
Not very different from the music and movie industries where big names are always highly visible and the less famous, but maybe as good (or better), are relegated in the back of shops or rarely aired by radios.
On one side I’m glad this could give a boost to someone and maybe provide some fresh money, on the other side it’s disappointing to think they have to give away a fresh and good idea (a game in this case) for free. This is a tough topic, I could write for hours and no one would reach the end of the post, so I won’t go down to the details of my thinking, but I’m sure I’m not alone. Internet gives you the possibility to reach anyone anywhere, but what you really need is a high position on a big site or on a search engine, otherwise it’s so crowded that nobody will see you.

Samsung Developers Club

The Developers Club is Samsung’s developers site. It’s been around for a few years now. It was on my list of sites to be reviewed here, but I’ll wait a little more. The overall vote would have been negative. There are some decent resources for J2ME development, but there is nothing about all the rest. Also, the site is accessible only using MSIE, not because it’s particularly complex, it’s very basic with a really bad forum and a list of downloadable file, but because the login page only works with MSIE. Firefox seems to login, but then you’re not.

I am going to wait for my reivew because I just received a newsletter that describes an overall rebuild. Here’s the original text, I’m sorry I can’t link to a web version of the newsletter, but I could not find it.

The renewal process of the Samsung Developers Club is nearing completion.

The new site features a comprehensive device information database and an enhanced forum in which you can create your own message-boards.The design of the site is based on the new Samsung Fun Club look and feel which is much more in keeping with the current brand guidelines and corporate image of Samsung mobile.

Further improvements include direct access to the device information from the front page. The database also allows users to compare different models as well as exporting data to Excel. This is surely a first for any developer support site. We hope to have ironed out any bugs before launch but ask you to bear with us in the first weeks as some glitches may take some time to be uncovered and resolved

new CTO for .mobi

Rumors and news run very quickly on the net. I was about to send an email to James to say congratulations and realized that all I have is his “now old address” at ArgoGroup.

So here’s my congratulations message, broadcast directly on the web.

Congratulations to James Pearce (Tripleodeon is his blog), who has just become the new CTO of mTLD.

I have known James for 5 years, I’d say. We had the pleasure (or at least *I* did) of exchanging e-mails both privately and on wmlprogramming for a long time. While his company, Argogroup, has had a device database for years and they had their own testing house, WURFL and mobile development has always been an open argument of discussion.
We met in person about 1 year ago, I’d say. Meeting in person with someone you have “talked” to for years, but only through internet is always strange. Meeting with James has been a pleasure. We often found ourselves thinking the same way so I have a very good feeling about his new position and I am confident that mTLD has chosen a very experienced person who has been around since day 0 of mobiles.

Botanicalls

I read this from Tom Hume, but was too odd not to repost it here.
I know at least 3 people who would need it, if only I had known it a month ago, I would have had a much easier time with the Christmas presents.

Check out Botanicalls, the hardware and software to let you plants call you when they want to be watered!

Premus update!

A little bit of publicity and links are worth much more than bare money.

I wrote a short Premus review here the other day and now David has updated the online demo to the latest development version that includes the validator, better source view and syntax highlighting.

He also squashed a few bugs here and there.

Bookmarking has been disabled due to spammers immediately using it to publicize their sites. The current version shows how bookmarks can be used, but you are not allowed to create new ones. If you make a local install you will be able to use them, of course.

See the updated Premus live, or read the CHANGELOG for a few more details about the changes.

Message to David: you need to practice your communication skills, the changelog is too short! 😛

Premus

“The name Premus comes from PRoxying EMUlator Service. It is a mobile browser emulator that converts WML, XHTML MP, cHTML and Vodafone’s PML (c. 2004) into standard HTML that you can browse in your normal web browser.”

This is what David Johansson says on the site as a short description of the software. David has been developing mobile services for many years now and he was among the early supporters of WURFL.

Premus was born from the need of testing mobile sites, WML in WAP 1 in the beginning and later many more markups. I would not call it exacly an “emulator” as David does, but rather a testing tool. In two words, Premus lets you pick a user-agent (from WURFL, of course!), define a URL and specify extra headers, if you’d like. The software makes the request and reformats the markup so that it renders well in your web browser. It’s not a Java application or applet, it’s not a real emulation engine or and SDK. It’s a web-based tool that lets you easily test your sites and make sure that all the links work and the pages look as you expect.
You should not expect a faithful representation of how it will look on the mobile device; it does not show alerts if you picked the user-agent of a WML device/browser and the remote site returns XHTML. It is intended for programmers and authors that have developed a site or a complex service and need to check that everything is OK.

Since real device testing is ALWAYS suggested, this is the perfect light-weight tool to make a general test before going with the mobile.

More in detail, while browsing with Premus, you always see the general page layout, but you can also see the original source, you see, edit and force cookies and headers. By default you have a some input fields on the top of the page for the user-agent, URL and manage all the proxy features and see the page in a dedicated box. De-activating the “frame” checkbox you can see the page layout in a window on its own, more similar to the mobile browsing.
A very helpful feature is actually on the bottom of the page. It shows a list of external resources (normally images) and the size of each. Also provides the time needed to download the markup and all external contents. The time is calculated on the fast internet connection of the server, not calculating the mobile networks latency, but will be useful to compare different pages and sites.

Premus will help you save a lot of time.

Premus is now released as open-source so you are free to download and adapt it to your needs.
If you look at the version in development you will see some new features that are not in the online demo, yet. These are features that I have strongly suggested to David and actually it really took him a few hours to implement them, but I think they will make a big difference.
Syntax highlighting has been added for the source view, very useful when you need to check your markup. Also the spacing has been changed for better readability.
Even more important to me is the markup validation. It’s disappointing when you build a big site, get ready to test with your mobile (take it from the drawer, put the correct SIM card, check the WAP profile, go online) and discover there’s a typo in the XML declaration. Checking that your markup is validated will certainly guarantee the best interoperability with all browsers. When you want the best possible support you really want this. Well-formedness is the first thing! Look what happens if you validate http://m.gmail.com/ :

Premus validation resulf for mobile Gmail
All the code is Python and should be easy to install on most modern Linux disto’s.

Some other minor things could be cleaned up and improved. Nevertheless this is a very good testing tool. If you are a mobile sites developer, I suggest you try it out, especially the development version that adds those 2-3 features that will actually ease your work a lot.