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

WURFL 2.0.3 is ready

I just pushed on sourceforge and on the main WURFL site a new wurfl.xml.

The new file is ready to download. It took a few months to have an update, but it was worth the wait. We added a lot of new user-agents and device descriptions.

Notably I did a lot of work with my friends from DADA to add a lot of information about Verizon devices. We now list all the approved mobiles have real user-agents for most of them and also list the unique id’s that Verizon assigned to them. This means that we also list those strings that Verizon uses with its MM7 gateway!

A new capability is also available that will tell you if an XHTML device also supports file upload via WAP. Very useful, isn’t it?

WURFL 2.0.3 can be downloaded. Take it while it’s fresh!

mobile web, make your own standards

Two days ago I posted about MS IEMobile and commented about the features they promote that are not based on any standard, but only on their own ideas and technologies.

Thanks to Jérôme, I found a link on Six Apart that promotes an alternative way to advertize mobile versions of sites. Specifically of blogs (as that’s their very own business).

If you read the article down to the bottom of the page, you will discover that actually this “technology” was already agreed to become a standard!
So 5 guys get together, agree on something and HEY, that’s a standard!

I didn’t think it would be so easy to make a standard. I wonder what the W3C (I know they don’t make standards but recommendations, but what’s the difference?), IETF, ETSI and other organizations are here to do. 🙂

Orange Partner site

While doing my normal research for new device descriptions resources I discovered this new developers’ site. New to me, at least.

Orange Partner sounds a lot like a site that will provide info only if you sign strict NDA’s or pay something to Orange. All this is not true! What a good news! 😀

Orange partner requires a registration, but it’s free and takes just a couple of minutes.
Once registered you can access a lot of valuable information about devices distributed by Orange all over Europe. The great thing is that it also lists devices that were customized for Orange. Descriptions are fairly well detailed and list most of the information that you will need about a device.

Lists of devices can be accessed in various ways, depending on the device type, country or Java platform. Not bad at all.

Here’s an example, the Motorola V3. Gives a fair description of the browser markups, messaging features, ringtones, etc. Also provides a sample user-agent and a UAProf URL.
Could go in more detail about J2ME features, but still it’s a lot of good information.

The site also features articles, an online FAQ and forums.

As you would expect from the site name (“partner”) there is a number of services to get your applications and services certified and be served on the Orange network.
Technical support request is also available.

The site is really well promising and already provides a lot of valuable information.

I am always surprised when I see a good site for mobile develoeprs, but maybe, eventually, big corporations have understood that the better support for third parties, the more services for their devices and customers (see my other posts about SonyEricsson, for example).

new MS IEMobile user-agents

A couple of weeks ago there was a post on wmlprogramming about the user-agent for the new MSIE Mobile.

MSIE Mobile has always been hard to detect for server-side software. All mobile devices running Windows present the same user-agent.
user-agents changed when new OS versions or browser versions were released, but there is no way to detect the device model from the user-agent. You will never know if the device hitting your site is an HP, HTC or another device.

Manufacturers are free to customize the user-agent. O2 does this most of the times, examples are the SPV C500 and SPV C600.
Unfortunately most manufacturers don’t do this.

So how do you understand that a user-agent that looks a lot like MSIE is actually IEMobile?

  1. the user-agent is not EXACTLY like MSIE for desktop windows
  2. there are some extra headers that you can use

Extra headers set by IEMobile (all versions):

  • UA-pixels: {i.e. 240×320}
  • UA-color: {mono2 | mono4 | color8 | color16 | color24 | color32}
  • UA-OS: {Windows CE (POCKET PC) – Version 3.0}
  • UA-CPU = {i.e. ARM SA1110}
  • UA-Voice = {TRUE | FALSE}

As you can see, from the above data you can probably get some extra information about the current device.
Too bad that this is in perfect Microsoft-style, which is NON STANDARD. If you want to support Microsoft devices you need to do ad-hoc development.

Jumping back to the original reason why I wrote this post, IEMobile is now going to have a new user-agent:
Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows CE; IEMobile m.n)

‘m’ is going to be the major version;
‘n’ is going to be the minor version.

Not a big step forward in device recognition, you will have to admit!

Anyway, we can clearly see how Microsoft is working towards standardization and making the developers’ lifes much easier. Here is their idea of making mobile sites accessible. When you tailor your page for mobile devices, use this brand new meta tag and IEMobile will not adapt the page:
<meta name=”MobileOptimized” content=”width”>

It goes by itself that this is not standard; that Microsoft made it up on its own and that no other browser on the market supports this.
So forgive me for being so ironic in the text above. I know I gave you the illusion that something good might happen and then it was a lie. Sorry.

If you really want, you can read the full article here:
http://blogs.msdn.com/iemobile/archive/2006/08/03/Detecting_IE_Mobile.aspx

It is sad to see so many comments from the readers excited about the new features… These are not new cool features, IMHO.

Tera-WURFL

More than 4 years ago I developed the first library to parse WURFL. Initially it was only a PHP file that parsed the XML and created an associative array.

Later I added a class to also search a device given a user-agent and get capability values for the user-agent. With the growth of WURFL, caching was needed to try to speed up the search and retrival of data.

My WURFL PHP library has a very minimal set of requirements, PHP and XML support compiled in. This is something that I never wanted to change during these years to make sure that ANYONE could download and use it.

I am happy to announce that more development has been done on top of my original library and that Steve Kamerman, the author, has achieved great performance results with his new library.
The new library uses MySQL, so a new requirement is added. For this reason I will keep my library as-is, but still, if you have a database available and want some good performances, then I suggest you take a look at Tera-WURFL.

It’s worth visiting the links presented below to see it in action.
There is a test page that lets you see how user-agents are matched and some speed test.
Also, since Tera-WURFL uses a database you will need to update it when a new XML comes. Steve provides a nice admin panel to manage the script and data (don’t mess up with it too much!).

So, once again, congratulations to Steve for his huge work and great new library.

Cingular allStar program

In August 2006 Cingular launched a new program for its develpers’ site called Cingular allStar.

I sent an email and quickly received a reply that they would be happy to list me as an allStar. I received a list of questions and you can now see the replies on the allStar program homepage.

Cingular is a very important operator in USA, we want to give better support to US devices and carriers in WURFL. This is certainly a first step towards that (not to mention all devices that we already list).

The developers site has changed a lot in the last year or so, demonstrating that the company wants to provide better support to developers. Many articles about browsing have popped on the site. This is a great for new developers approaching the mobile space.

Keep it up!

M:Metrics first Quarterly Web Briefing

A few days ago I posted about the two Web Briefiengs that my colleagues from M:Metrics would have made this week.

If you missed any of the two and are interested in listening to them, they are now freely available online. We have two formats provided, Windows Media and Macromedia Flash. This should make them usable on any platform.

The two briefings cover mostly the same topics which are MMS, video, mobile TV and mobile VAS in general. The EU briefing is about EU too and provides more numbers about the 5 major countries that we cover (Italy, UK, France, Spain and Germany). The US briefing is quite interesting because compares many figures between US and EU and gives some hints of what should happen in the next few months.

If you are interested, here is the M:Metrics Q3 Web Briefing EU Focus and here is the M:Metrics Q3 Web Briefing US Focus.

“flashlite_integration” mailing list

My friends from mobile|actionscript.it have launched a new mailing list dedicated to the flashlite integration in other environments such as J2ME and Symbian.

If you’re serious about flashlite you should definitely check flashlite_integration on Yahoo! Groups.

Group description from the homepage: “This group is dedicated to all the J2ME, Flash Lite and c++ developers that believe in the mobile market.
The group proposal is to give a support to the developers that are working in mobile project that runs above one of this technology or that integrate two or more of these.“

.mobi developers’ site

mTLD (.mobi global registry) has quietly launched the developers’ site.

I have been waiting for this for a long time. I have been talking and chatting with Ronan Cremin and Jo Rabin (not to mention the activity in the W3C’s Mobile Web Initiative) for quite a few months. I kept hearing of features and contents they were developing for the developers. They made me dream about all the cool contents, but never let me put my hands on them.

And here it comes, it’s alive! (listen to the sound from Young Frankenstein). The site is free to use, this means that developers can benefit from all the contents they put (and will continue putting) on the site even if they don’t own a .mobi domain.

dev.mobi is now real. Feel free to register, browse, lurk and use the forums, of course.

Congratulations to Martin Kindler, a wmlprogramming member for the very good article on typo3 made mobile-friendly.