The Ladscape document has been published!
This is a first draft, comments are very welcome on public mailing list.
Also linked from the main page of the DDWG, of course.
This document might sound obvious to most mobile developers, but it’s a great document to explain to people not so used to the mobile space where the gaps are and give a hint of how they could be filled.
I haven’t committed changes to CVS for a while now. The last update is 5 weeks old, Tue Dec 27 17:34:25 2005 UTC, according to SourceForge’s CVS.
That is a long time for WURFL. If you were used to check the CVS regularly, you will know that I often committed about twice a week.
I just wanted to let you know that work hasn’t stopped AT ALL. I have a TON of updates in the works. Many are already considered trusted, in my opinion, but I have a few things that are stopping me from committing. While CVS should be a place to upload things “in development” I know that many companies use the CVS version in production.
The current XML is not safe for production and has some information that could be entirely wrong. Why? I received a few contributions that I need to check and, as we all know, it is often hard to find information about some devices and from some brands.
Don’t worry, A BIG update will soon come.
A few days ago I wrote about Wesnoth and I wrote about how cool it is.
Well, I’m addicted.
I seriously play most of my free time. I don’t turn TV on anymore, there is nothing that could be more interesting than the game. I admit that SKY in Italy doesn’t offer much, but the game is simply too good.
I should be at the end of the first campaign. After that I think I will try the multiplayer version online… And get knocked a few times!
On the other side I tried to promote the game to a few friends, but basically they are all already sucked into WoW.
The only one who is probably even more addicted than me is Greta. She has lost any kind of “real life” since she started to play the game.
Should I feel guilty? My colleague “Cicci”, when I told him about Greta playing, started saying “oh, congratulations! You’re so lucky! I wish my girlfriend started playing WoW with me!”. 🙂
Subito SMS is a web based service that lets customers buy blocks of SMS messages, import their address book (and manage it) and send SMS messages at lower rates. The service is all in Italian and is aimed at Italian customers, so sorry if you won’t be able to read the explanation on the site.
The important part of the service is, anyway, that you can buy SMS bundles at discount rates and send them from a web interface. This is specifically comfortable for people and companies that need to deliver many SMS messages, maybe the same text to many numbers. The web interface is all built around this concept: send many messages quickly.
We know that the success of the web is about being accessible from everywhere, but what if you’re on the move? Yes, you can use your Nokia Communicator, get on the web page, login and send the messages typing on your qwerty keyboard, but what if you want to do it quickly and easily as you do it on the web?
The answer is simple: a J2ME client!
SubitoSMS developed a J2ME client that connects using HTTP to their server, logs you in and lets you send your messages simply dialling the number and text.
If your phone or mobile device is MIDP 2.0 it also integrates with your internal addressbook which makes it really easy to add recipients. You may also specify a recipient that you have on your “web addressbook” which makes it really easy to send the same text to trillions of people.
When typing the text you may use T9 or iTap if your J2ME client supports it.
How do you install the midlet? Well, of course you get on a WAP site and download the midlet. How does the server recognize the device and decides if you are on the list of supported devices? It uses WURFL, OF COURSE!
The bottom line is that this application is really simple. 2 screens, login (you see it only the first time!) and the form to send a message. THAT’S IT!
Isn’t it perfect?
Oh, a little marketing add-on. They also have a FREE version that lets you send a limited number of messages for free (except for the internet connection costs) and you see a little tagline after you send the message. Something like “This message was sponsored by WURFL”.
Another tiny feature that adds a lot of value.
Good job guys!
This is a real life story. There will be no names, but I can assure you it has really happened.
There is a lot of people that I have met through internet, that I often see online and chat with or occasionally chat with. A is one of the “occasional” chats. We had a chance to chat a lot when J2ME had just started. When we met he was an experienced games developer and knew just a little about mobile devices while on the other side I didn’t know much about games (except as a player) and already knew a lot about mobile devices, fragmentation and related problems. We helped each other and kept in touch from that time on with occasional messages and updates about our professional life.
I recently heard that he had changed occupation and move to work for a company that wanted to develop innovative multiplayer games for mobile devices. Company B is a small company that is supposed to have some really interesting ideas and new concept for mobile gaming.
I ask A if I can get some information as some company in Italy might be interested to resell their games. He gives me the email of the CEO.
On Oct, 28th 2005 I write an email to the CEO and to A in CC.
I get my reply on Dec, 1st. That is A MONTH to reply to an email. The reply does not come from the CEO, but from a “marketing assistant” that suggests to look at their website. Do you think I hadn’t looked at the website? I spend 20 hours a day online…
I reply to his email the day after. Let’s call him C.
Jan, 13th 2006 (!!!) I get a reply from C who says he’s sorry he could not reply my emails earlier.
I reply the same day providing a possible date (Jan, 17th) in which we could talk on the phone to clear things up quickly.
The day that I was supposed to receive the call, I get an email (late evening) saying that he could not call me, that they already have a partner in Italy and wonder if the proposed company could provide them an equal or better visibility. Not mention that I had already provided them with information about the company and the fact that it’s a leader in Italy and already present in 3-5 other countries around the world.
At that point I got really disappointed, not only he did not call me not provide the NDA I asked for to be able to know more about their games and application server, but he did not even call me, nor probably look at the websites I pointed him to.
I replied the same day with an email in which I explained all my bad feelings about how he managed the contact and how after 2 months I did not have anything in my hands.
It was “nice” to receive a reply from C saying that it wasn’t his fault, it was originally the CEO who forwarded the email to him late and that he had been busy with other business stuff. He apologies and wonders if I’m still interested in hearing more about their products.
Jan 25th (!!!) I received an email which could probably be compared to 2-3 powerpoint slides or maybe less saying that their games are compelling, they have a powerful user management application server and make the games more compelling with tournaments.
Not to mention the “powerful branding” that he names and, sorry, but… the only game you mention has a name that is totally unknown to me, so that’s not such a powerful branding.. Maybe in your home country, but I would not compare it to “Ferrari”, “FIFA”, “Tiger Woods” and so on…
Do you think they are going to sell any games? EVER?
I am not writing company names and people names just because I respect my friend A and I would never want him to get in trouble because of a “marketing assistant”. If this is the assistance that he provides, I hope I will never need it!
Technorati Tags: J2ME, mobile_games, sales_forces
I have always loved strategy games since the very old times. I think I played all of them.
Recently (actually 1-2 months ago I think) I stumbled upon “Battle for Wesnoth”.
Wesnoth is an open-source, multiplatform, multiplayer strategy game. Yeah, it DOES have all these features.
First of all it’s open-source, so you can get the sources and modify the game, if you’d like. There is an active community and while I’m playing with the stable version, development versions already include a few changes in the gameplay and balance.
It’s multiplatform, which means you can play on a Wintel, on a Mac and on Linux. This is great, because I can run it on my PowerBook!
Being a strategy game is not very resource intensive and I could play it on the train for a couple of hours without any problem. It was really great even if I didn’t have space for the mouse so I had to use the trackpad.
So the game is really addictive, I have played only in single player as I need to learn all the strategies and I can’t wait to go online. I have played I think 15-20 hours until now. I started the first campaign (there are 5, I think) and I’m leading the Elves. Later I’ll be able to also lead the Orcs, the Undead and more.
It’s really a classic game, you have a map divided into hexagons, each unit have different movement characteristics, so it may walk a lot or just a little, it may have bonuses when crossing a mountain or may not be able to do so. Each character has its own abilities like using a crossbow, a blade, magic, healing, etc.
The great thing about this game is the simplicity in the attacks and defenses, but at the same time it’s really addictive because you have to slowly consider your attack and movement strategy to protect your units and heal them and make sure to reach your objective.
I don’t want to write for hours about how cool this game is, but I just wanted to say how impressed I am by the quality of this game…. And I haven’t played online or against someone else, yet!!!
You can check it out for free, of course:
wesnoth.org
Technorati Tags: Wesnoth, multiplayer, strategy, opensource
Lately many services are appearing on the web to rate your fame on the internet, how known you are and so on.
Sites such as “Googlism” will tell you what Google “thinks” of you. Which is not what Google as a company thinks of you, but rather will tell what Google found about you, your occupation and so on.
This is another one that will tell you how big is your ego on internet: egoSurf.
This is mine.
Technorati Tags: ego
Update: fixed my egoSurf link!
This the second article about how a W3C group works. It’s been a while since my last post about this topic, but I really did not have time for this.
I know I should be more regular and try to keep my topics focused and so on, but .. basically .. I’m not a pro-blogger!
So here come some more information about how all the magic at the W3C happens.
The group is always in contact, there is always communication among the members and the community outside. While some members are more active and some others are less, there is a good amount of communication, in my opinion.
The preferred medium is the email, of course. Every group has a member-only mailing list. Every member can write an email any time he feels like there’s something to say to the group or a question to ask.
Everything starts from the face-2-face meetings, members get to talk and decide many things. As a consequence, members get some actions assigned. For example I get to write a paragraph about “forms”. When I have the passage ready I write an email to the member-list with the proposed text. The discussion begins. Other members send their comments. Comments can be both about the contents of the passage or about how it is written. Sometimes you get long discussions, some other times people mostly agrees. When the group seems to have reached consensus about the text it gets to the editor. The editors are those members that not only take part to the group, but are also responsible for taking the proposed texts and add them to the main document that will become a recommendation. Editors get A LOT of extra work because they get to review the texts (make sure there are no syntax errors, etc) and also work really hard on the first draft of the document writing down the first index trying to understand what the group meant during the first meetings.
Email is a really good medium, because you get the time to read what other members posted and think about a reply. For example you can take the time to get on internet and search for other resources, go check a book and more. In my case, not being English, it also offers the time to review my own comments slowly to make sure that my idea is explained clearly. No resolutions are taken in emails.
At the first face-2-face meeting of the group (at the end of June 2005 for my groups) members decide when is a good time to meet on the phone on a weekly basis. Telecoferences are 1 hour long, more or less.
Teleconferences are reached dialling a US number (ouch!). An electronic voice answers and asks you to dial the group name, in my case BPWG (2794) or DDWG (3394) and ‘#’. You join the call. Teleconferences have a moderator that may mute some members if needed (it never happened in none of my groups if not because of background noises) and should make sure that the agenda for the meeting is followed. The agenda is the result of the discussion during the week on the mailing lists. Generally the chair of the group is also the moderator. In some rare occasions in which the chair is not available another chair is picked. Teleconferences are really important because actions get assigned to members, issues are open if needed and most of all the group takes resolutions about the topics discussed in the previous days. When a resolution is taken it means that the group has agreed on something and an issue (if any) should be closed or a text is approved to get into the document. Sometimes the group resolves that a new text is needed and a new action is assigned. Resolutions can be complex or very simple, such as rename a paragraph.
During the teleconference is often useful to post a URL or to paste some text that you want to show to the other members. For this there is an IRC channel. Every group has its own channel.
In the channel there is always a bot called Zakim. Zakim has a few nice features, the most interesting is that it’s integrated with the teleconference software. From the IRC you can mute people. For example I am always in a noisy room, I simply write “Zakim, mute me” on the IRC and it mutes me on the phone. Zakim also helps the chair and the members to keep the queue of people who wants to say something.
Example:
The chair names the new topic, the first/next on the agenda. He will generally summarize the topic to remind what we are going to talk about and then pass the word to the person who rose the problem or proposed the text. If I want to comment on that I will write on IRC “q+” and Zakim will add me to the queue. At any time members can check who’s on the queue. When you get to speak you are removed from the queue with another command.
There is also another bot that takes care of writing the minutes in an HTML form so that you can read them in a decent way on the web. The minutes, how do they get written? At the beginning of the call the group decides who will be the scribe. The scribe writes what people says on the phone so that it will get registered. Members will later receive a copy of the minutes, this is useful as a reminder and is also useful for members who could not attend the call.
During teleconferences the group decides if, for example the proposed texts were satisfactory and if issues were resolved. There is an automatic system that again, with some keywords such as “ISSUE:” or “ACTION:“, automatically adds informations to the members-only pages. For example if during the call someone raises a topic and I volunteer to write a passage about it for the document, I get an ACTION assigned. There is a tracking system on the W3C’s site where I can check my open actions and issues. Writing an email on the list with a topic that starts with ACTION 69 will associate the text of the email (thus the thread) to that action that you can later visualize on the web.
This is all really nice and often when you get to write a text it’s really useful to be able to go back to the minutes and to the previous emails that were exchanged.
These are more or less the tools that are given to the members of the group.
There is also a public mailing list where anyone can read and write. The group members try to respond to people who writes on the list.
When I was outside of the working groups and wrote to the public lists I always thought that the public mailing list would not be kept so much into consideration. I discovered that the public mailing list gets A LOT of attention and the members always try to find a solution to what people says on the public list. This is always reflected in the drafts and later in the recommendations.
Technorati tags:W3C, WURFL, Mobile Web
I have a little update about something cool in Gmail mobile. When you receive a link in an e-mail that leads to a web page, you can click on it with your mobile and passing through the google proxy you will be able to see the page on your mobile. The layout is adapted, of course, but at least you can see it.
This is really a nice feature that I haven’t seen elsewhere.
I have had a PSP for about 3 months now (from the first week it was sold in Italy, which was September 2005). I played, I think, a good number of games such as Ridge Racer, Wipeout Pure, Burn Out Legends, NFS, Lumines and now I’m playing with Pro Evolution Soccer a.k.a. Winning Eleven.
I received PES5 as a Christmas present and I was really happy about it. I have been playing it for about a week now and I have a problem… I can’t play more than about half an hour at a time because my left hand hurts! It’s not my problem, IMO, but rather a design flaw of the PSP. Unfortunately this is not the only one!
The analog stick is really a pain and this is the biggest problem in the PSP design, IMHO. It is too low on the left, to play PES5 you NEED to use it and my hand simply hurts after a few minutes.
The digital joystick, on the other side, is positioned perfectly for my left thumb. There is not much space for buttons and joysticks, of course and Sony must have decided that the digital stick was more important than the analog one. Obviously, while playing with the analog stick, you will have more problems reaching the L key than normally.
Next in my list of flaws are load times. In most games I have to say that load times are acceptable, when playing PES5 they are seriously too long. The UMD is slow and noisy, every time you end a match you go back to the main menu (and loads) during games when you substitute a player you see a short animation, and the UMD loads the animation and then loads when the game restarts. It is really too slow. It might be a problem of PES5 you might say, since other games don’t seem so slow, but to me, future games will simply present the same problem as PES5 as developers add animations, make the graphics more complex and so on. Sony put the beautiful MemoryStick in the PSP, why not release games on it? Wouldn’t it be faster when loading? I think so.
Power key and led. I haven’t experienced the problem myself, but I heard a few friends turning the PSP off (or on hold) while playing. This is a SERIOUS problem, most of all if you turn it off! Aside from this, the power led is really cute, little green light, too bad that while I’m playing I have my finger on it and don’t see when it starts blinking to notify that the battery is running out. I happened to finish the battery while playing more than once! Why not put the very same led on the upper left or right? It would have been in plain site.
The style of the PSP design is simply great. When you look at it you can’t do anything but say that it’s beautiful. Like many things that look beautiful, you can’t touch it! Fingerprints will appear on your entire PSP after 5-6 seconds that you started using it. Most notably, in certain light environment you can see your face on the display. This happened to me often.
Probably the last point is not really THAT bad, but the previous ones seem really important to me. It is really a shame that the analog stick is SO uncomfortable that it makes it almost unusable. When playing Wipeout or Ridge Racer I always used the digital stick and it was ok, but with PES5 and BurnOut Legends you really need the analog one. NFS is simply a bad game so I didn’t spend so much time on it. Got bored in a couple of days.
I am considering the Nintendo DS as an alternative, but I have to admit that the number of games available is a little bit a show stopper to me. I really like Mario Kart DS and would love to play online with other people, but there aren’t really many other games attracting me at this time (as I don’t play Mario DS).
By the way, when is a PSP game going to support internet games?
Update: I forgot to mention this link about Sony knowing of design flaws. Thanks to GameSpot.
Technorati tags: PSP
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