PHP 5 penetration

A couple of days ago I met with Julien. We talked about many things, among which, PHP. I remember talking with him about PHP 5 about a year ago, so I asked if he has started doing any work with it as I haven’t even tried it since it came out. He told me that he hasn’t ever used it for a real project.

Not that I read hardcore PHP developers forums, but I have heard of very few developers using it. We started wondering about the success of PHP 5 and why developers should move from version 4.

The conclusion was that probably PHP 5 did not introduce those features that make a developer move from a major version to another.

Today Julien sent me a report about PHP 4 and 5 usage, installed versions and so on. Take a look and you will see that servers running PHP 5 are still a big minority even if it has been released in July 2004!.

Seems like a big failure.

Cingular’s Firefly

Cingular’s Firefly is a mobile phone for kids.

I had seen it a couple of months ago, while browsing around their developer’s site. It really surprised me. I was looking at the picture wondering where the keyboard is. I later talked about it with Charles, my colleague at M:Metrics and it actually turned out that the device sells well, considering its niche market. In two words, this is a phone for kids with a small addressbook where parents store important numbers. It doesn’t have a keyboard, but just a few buttons to answer calls, access the addressbook. It also features three special buttons, on the front 2 buttons to call Mom or Dad and on the side a special “911” number (look at the 360° view).

Now that I look at it I wonder how you will set the numbers in the addressbook. Maybe connecting to a PC?

Any Widget?

It seems like Widgets have become really popular, something we can’t live without!

I was reading some news yesterday and got on Google’s Gadget. The funny thing is that I opened it in a window that I left in the background… Later I came back to that window and stood there a for few seconds wondering how I got there… And wondering what the heck it was. I looked at all the little icons and names and then realized they are widgets (Google Desktop required!).

Konfabulator has been around for years, for the Mac initially and later for Windows. Then Apple launched the Dashbord, I remember the disappointment from the guys behind Konfabulator. Apple released, for free, included in the default install, a software that was just like their little pet. I would have been disappointed myself!
Soon Yahoo! released a Widget for Apple’s Dashboard.
Suprisingly Yahoo! purchased Konfabulator and renamed it to Yahoo! Widgets. They probably thought it was a good business.

Now comes Google. (Has it been there for a long time?)

I have used Konfabulator, before Dashboard was released. Really nice graphics, TONS of Widgets, but… useless.
Later I tried Apple’s Dashboard, it is SO damn slow that, even if there was anything useful, I would not use it. Not to mention that Widgets most of the times are little boxes of services that you can get on the web or with an RSS reader. Tell me something you can do in a Widget that you can’t do with a browser.

As a user… I don’t see the use.

Also good to read, a comparison between Dashboard and Konfabulator.

WURFL survey

Wether you are a WURFL user or not you should take 5 minutes to answer to a survey that we prepared.

We are looking for some feedback about the usage of WURFL or, if you don’t use it, why and what you use as an alternative.

There could have been tens of questions, but we don’t want the survey to take too long. It should be something quick and not stressful. So, please, take it!

“Detecting Enhanced Devices” according to Cingular

I was reading an old email from devCentral and found a link that was supposed to described how to detect enhanced devices. It seemed quite interesting.

The passage (seemed more like an FAQ) was pretty disappointing.

I think that parsing the accept headers is not enough, unless you think that a device that supports XHTML is an enhanced device. To me, an enhanced device is a device that supports images, colors and has a big screen. A stylus is a big plus, of course.

WURFL is certainly a much better starting point than simply HTTP headers.

Blogger Beta wounds

I’m pretty happy of the move to the new Beta of Blogger. Nothing to regret.

It’s just sad that my Safari browser crashes when visiting the articles. First time I got a javascript error, when reloaded the same article that was supposed to have a new comment, Safari crashed. 😦

I’m still waiting for the editing aids for Safari. It should not be so hard to add the bold and italic buttons for Safari. That’s plain javascript, isn’t it?

Anyway, I just love the ability of moving blocks up and down dragging blocks within the browser. Sometimes this makes me think of when we used to write pages with notepad with HTML 3.2, gray backgrounds, <hr> to separate sections and that was it.
Very nice the ability to edit links to external pages with a guided menu.
All these features were really needed!

Labels are added manually, filling an text field. After you have at least once, while typing you get suggestions. Very useful to avoid typos!
How much do I love suggestions while typing? A LOT!

Blogger Beta

Recently Google/Blogger launched a new Beta version.

All long due update, IMHO, infact I was considering to move to WordPress. After a few tests (a smooth import of the contents) a little customization and a chat with my girlfriend… I decided to stay here.
It looks like Google was scared to lose me and all the hits that I bring, because they added most of the features that I was looking for, such as labels and better templates.
I am still missing some statistics. Would be good to know who reads what and so on, but anyway this is already a big step ahead and hopefully more features will come soon.
Would also be good to have a better integration with other sites such as Technorati and Company, but maybe the Google guys are not so keen at integrating with competing engines… Can you blame them?

So this is my first post with a label.

Firefox user panel

I’m back from my short holidays (less than 2 weeks!) and of course I am reading TONS of emails and catching back with everything.

I also took some time to read news, of course.
A couple of weeks ago I took a survey. Actually now I discover they are a number of mini surveys, anyway they take about 5 minutes to answer so it’s not a problem. The survey is about Firefox and the usage of browsers in general.

The results of the first survey are now online. As expected most of the respondents were geeks, computer professionals and so on. It was good to see that most of them use Firefox (not a big surprise since the survay was mostly publicized on the mozilla sites). I am surprised, anyway, that almost 3% use Safari, which means that 3% of the geeks and nerds use a Macintosh.

Also, it was a relief reading that most respondents use their computer about 7 days a week and for AT LEAST 40 hours. I am not the only one then! 😀

So, go ahead and answer the next survey questions!

What does it take to write a FAQ entry?

Writing a FAQ entry is not hard at all. Well, first of all you need to have a question, of course and then you need to search for an answer.

It’s not that hard and you certainly know a lot of answers that other people doesn’t know. I think this is the basic principle on which is based Google Answers.

In this case, anyway, I’m thinking about The Wireless FAQ. We brought back the site to life, but if we want it to shine as it used to, we need to collect questions and answers.
I am sure that you know a lot of things about mobile, all you have to do is think to something that sounds interesting or particular, and write a question and its answer.
You know all about downloads? Then maybe you can write something about download methods (OMA DD, Openwave’s DownloadFun, direct downloads, OMA DRM, more), maybe you know all about images, so you might write something about wallpapers and screensavers or about iamge resizing both for downloads and for browsing.
Maybe you know a lot about messaging, we have a section for SMS and another one for MMS.
Are you CSS expert? Well, we need to feed a lot of contents about XHTML, XHTML-MP, WCSS and CSS in general!

First of all you will need to create an account, I’ll give you write access and then you can write everything.
If you’re lazy and don’t want credit for writing, don’t worry, send me the text and I’ll publish it.

Seriously, there is no reason why you should not contribute!

Sony Mylo

Thanks to Paul for pointing me to a new site called Pocket Picks. There’s a news item about a new Sony device called Mylo.

More info about it directly from Sony. In short, it’s a pocket device that can get attached to Wi-Fi networks. Once you’re attached you can get on Internet with the Opera browser pre-installed, chat over Yahoo! Messenger or GTalk and listen to music streamed from online or your desktop computer.

Seems a lot like the Nokia 770, very nice gadget, but it is worth anything serious? Am I going to sit on the couch and chat on Yahoo! Messenger? Is that the whole point?

I still don’t see the real use of this kind of devices. MAYBE with Wi-MAX when I’ll be able to walk around and ALWAYS be connected.

The device is supposed to arrive in USA first for “only” 350$!
We’ll see.