HTC naming madness

The other day I was trying to do some house-cleaning of HTC device names, clones and HTTP request headers for DeviceAtlas.

The result was that I was one step from going crazy. All those devices have names that are almost the same, UAProf or user-agent string refer to slightly different names, different network operators re-brand with *other* different names.

Just to give you an idea, I found a couple of useful sites that talk about HTC devices, platforms, and model names:

All HTC models – PocketPC and Smartphones @ gsmarena

Smartphone Guides @ htcwiki

One of my favorites is the T-Mobile Atlas, a.k.a T-Mobile Wing, a.k.a. HTC Herald, a.k.a. HTC P4350 and probably some more names. The saint had less alternative identities!

I think it’s almost impossible to keep up with all those names and re-branding. If you know a good way or you work for HTC and want to help me, *please* contact me.

Unexpected questions

My English has improved a lot in the last two years and in most cases I can manage a normal conversation. Speaking to people with slightly different accents can be a problem sometimes, but it seems like after a few minutes I get used to it, and handle it OK.

There is something funny that is still happening to me, from time to time. The other day I went to my bank for a money transfer. I was thinking about the amount of money, the recipient full name and so on. The cashier, who has now seen me a few times in the last month or so, started the conversation with something like “Hello Andrea, how has it been in Ireland so far?”. This was not exactly the type of question I expected. Not the type of conversation you normally have in a bank with a cashier. Well, even if the question was quite simple and was very nice of her to ask me, she caught me by surprised with an unexpected question about an unrelated topic. I was baffled and for a moment had to “rewind the tape”, think and then prepare a reply.

Nothing bad happened and a few other times I simply asked to repeat the question, still it’s funny that if a topic that is not normally discussed in a certain context it appears that I can be caught by surprise and not understand it, even if the vocabulary is simple enough for me to understand every single word of the sentence.

Anyway, life in Ireland has been OK so far, everyone I met have always been very nice and helpful. +1 to the Irish.

Blog layout update

I have not been able to change the layout of my blogger site for quite a long time. All I could do was download the template, manually edit, re-upload. All the nice AJAXy interface did not work at all.

Today I had a few spare minutes, I went in edit mode and when clicking on preview blogger told me it could not show me the new page because of a (blogger) widget in the head portion of the page. I cut it and magically everything is working! I can now edit the layout again!! woohoo!

I’m glad they added this new error message.

I now replaced the old widget with a cleaner code so that I can get the page titles as I like them. Slightly changed the widgets on the right-hand side of the page (if you are not reading from RSS, of course). Minor link updates.

Now on to work on a couple of posts I’ve been thinking about in the last few days.

m.newsgator.com vs netnewswire for iPhone

I have been a happy NetNewsWire user for years now. As I posted in the past, I understand a lot of users have moved to Google Reader, but I still like my NetNewsWire client for the Mac and especially the ability to read articles offline.

NetNewsWire was acquired and integrated with Newsgator a few years ago and now it’s all free (this is free publicity for the newsgator guys!). This means that I can read my news on both web and client interfaces and get everything synchronized. I’ve started using the mobile version more or less a year ago and while I still don’t understand why they don’t use their .mobi extension, I think they have made a good effort. They started with an iPhone version only and quickly had to make it at least XHTML Basic so that other mobile users could access it (the full web version, for example, is too AJAXy even for clients like Opera Mini).

I have recently upgraded my iPhone to version 2.0 and immediately installed the free NetNewsWire for iPhone client (this is more free publicity for you guys). The interface is very similar to the Mac version, adapted to the small screen, of course. Every time you load the main page it tries to update the feeds. Only feeds with unread items are displayed. This is very reasonable as on the mobile device you’d rather want to quickly go to new items (while on the Mac client you can also see feeds with old items and read them again). Nothing particularly fancy happens, you select the feed, get a full list of news items, read them. You can make the entire feed as read.
This is, all in all, everything you would expect from a mobile feed-reader.

I have to say that I’m surprised that some of the good features of the mobile web version haven’t been translated into the iPhone-client. The mobile web client has a minimalistic approach, in fact news items in a feed are split into pages of 10 or so items. The iPhone client lists all the items in one big page. Scrolling to the oldest news is of course much quicker than on the mobile web version, but at the same time, if you have a very active feed and haven’t kept up for a few days you’ll find yourself with 100+ items in one long page. In the mobile web version you may mark all the items in one page as read, but on the iPhone client you may only mark all the feed as read. Imagine I have a feed with 100 items; I start from the oldest (that’s what I normally do) I go up; as I read articles they are marked as read, but of course I will not read them all. If I have to close the application, when I come back I will only see the unread items of that same news feed, but since I could not mark “as read” items that I did not want to specifically read, I will still find them there. This means that I have to go back to the bottom and go through the same articles again. I will be quicker, of course, but if I could mark groups of items as I can do in the mobile web version, that would be much easier.

Another feature that is present in the mobile web version and not in the iPhone-client is the ability to mark a single item as “read” without opening it. Again, in the iPhone client you either really open it, or you’ll have to mark the entire feed as read.

For some reason in the iPhone client is possible to mark items as “clippings”, but you are not able to see the “Clippings” folder. Clippings are the same as “starring” an item on Google Reader, news items that you want to store for some reason, they will appear in a special folder and not go away even if they have disappeared from the feed.

While it’s obvious that the mobile web version is synchronized in real time as you are in fact connected directly with the newsgator site, it’s unclear how synchronization happens on the iPhone client. You may at any time force the feed update, but you have no way to force synchronization and there is no preference pane. Using the Mac client almost at the same time gave me the feeling like the two were a bit out of sync. On the iPhone I am often offline (I only use Wifi) thus the ability to force-sync would be much appreciated and I think it’s something that is particularly useful for a mobile client in general. You never know if and how the user is really online and actually the advantage (maybe the ONLY one) of the NewNewsWire client is that you can read news offline.

The browser and some, but not all applications in the iPhone let you use it either in landscape or portrait mode. I got used to it and I like it. Why can’t I read my news in landscape mode? This is definitely a needed feature for the NetNewsWire client.

Overall I think that feed-readers show how thin is the list of advantages of using an online/web-based feed reader as opposed to a specific client. Offline reading is probably the only consistent advantage, so I think NetNewsWire should spend time on this.

Newsgator mobile (with the iPhone browser) and NetNewsWire for the iPhone, have almost the same interface and responsiveness. Hopefully they will improve the client a bit because I LOVE reading the news offline. Overall rating is positive, but of course you need to be a newsgator user. I look forward to see improvements to the client, because it’s definitely worth!

Final note: I have no way to really measure this, but it seems like running the client eats up a lot of battery. I have no grounds to base this except for a “feeling”.

I am still here

I have been quite for more than 2 months and I have to admit I wanted to write this post for a few days now, but never got to do it. You would think that when a lot of incredible and great things happen in your life you’d have a lot to blog about. The reality is, in my case, that blogging went way down in the list. This is unfortunate, on one hand my blog did not get any consistent and interesting updates in quite a while, on the other hand it makes me wonder how important it is. In May, for example, I’ve been using Twitter regularly, then went on holiday and did not use it and when I came back I did not miss it at all. Now it’s been closed for weeks and still don’t miss it. Should I restart using? Yes? No?

I liked blogging so far, so I definitely plan on picking up again. It is hard sometimes to find interesting stuff to blog about and I certainly do not want to start simply re-blogging or writing about things I don’t think are worth. Also, it’s hard to keep up two blogs at the same time, especially since I wanted this one to be a technical one and now I’m also writing more or less regularly on dev.mobi.

So, don’t give up on reading this blog, I’ll write more! 🙂

comScore acquires M:Metrics

M:Metrics has been sold, eventually. When Nielsen acquired Telephia, some thought it would be over for M:Metrics, but I think M:Metrics has proven the great quality of their products and services, they kept going and leading the market and now they are joining comScore.

I think this is great news for all my former colleagues in London and Seattle. Hopefully the products will keep growing and leading the market.

I look forward to the future of M:Metrics’ products.

US Smartphone users browse twice the British ones

According to M:Metrics US owners of smartphones (can someone tell me exactly what a smartphone is?) browse the web twice as much as British users.

It is obvious that users who bought a smartphone will make a use that is different from users who bought a cheap mobile device. I always thought Britain was one of the most active countries in this space, anyway.

Interesting how the only site in common is Facebook. No wonder they did an iPhone UI and are getting more active in the mobile space.
No Google? Only live.com? No eBay in Britain?

These are the numbers coming straight from M:Metrics.

Top Domains by Time Spent Browsing per Month: United Kingdom

Domain	Company	Total
Total	Total	2:24:58
facebook.com	TheFacebook, Inc	1:44:47
three.co.uk	Hutchison Whampoa Limited	1:30:51
sky.com	British Sky Broadcasting Group Plc	1:15:28
live.com	Microsoft Corporation	1:11:06
bbc.co.uk	British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC)	0:48:10

Top Domains by Time Spent Browsing per Month: United States

Domain	Company	Total
Total	Total	4:37:48
craigslist.org	Craigslist, Inc.	1:38:51
ebay.com	eBay Inc.	1:25:41
myspace.com	News Corporation	1:25:13
facebook.com	TheFacebook, Inc	1:24:09
go.com	The Walt Disney Company	1:07:04

Also, Mark Donovan, senior analyst, says:

People are becoming increasingly engaged in the mobile medium. Among smartphone users in the United States, mobile browsing has increased 89 percent year over year, and pageviews have increased 127 percent. Consumption is quickly evolving from brief transactions, such as checking the weather or flight status, to time-intensive interaction with mobile Web sites—even without an iPhone.

And Paul Goode, senior analyst, adds:

A primary factor in the discrepancy in the duration of time spent browsing between British and American smartphone users is the relative popularity of flat-rate data plans in the United States, where 10.9 percent of users have an unlimited data plan versus only 2.3 percent in Britain. Other factors to consider are the popularity of devices with QWERTY keyboards in the United States—where nine of the ten top smartphones are QWERTY, while the inverse is true in the UK–and the greater penetration of smartphones in the British market.

My MacBook Pro doesn’t feel good

About half of my applications suddenly started “beachballing”, when trying to shut them down they did not. I killed them and could not restart them. Looking at the logs I saw this:

May 20 11:51:47 TwinPower diskarbitrationd[146]: iCal [8351]:26247 not responding.
May 20 11:51:47 TwinPower diskarbitrationd[146]: RescueTime [29391]:34011 not responding.
May 20 11:51:47 TwinPower diskarbitrationd[146]: Safari [29406]:23663 not responding.
May 20 11:51:47 TwinPower diskarbitrationd[146]: Quicksilver [302]:24079 not responding.
May 20 11:51:47 TwinPower diskarbitrationd[146]: Groupcal Daemon [308]:23043 not responding.

It doesn’t look like a good sign…

Open-source marketing?

When you think open-source you think free. It turns out that while many still think that open-source happens mostly during the night and created by bored developers looking for fame, there is also money in it. There are quite a few companies now trying to have a healthy open-source environment and at the same time make money.

I’m excited to refer to Roberto Galoppini (pure Italian) has earnt great respect in the open-source world and is now joining InitMarketing to help them.

Testing DropBox

Thanks to Mark Ng I got an invitation to DropBox (I think I have some to share, now) and went through the privacy policy and Terms & Conditions and I think they are reasonable, considering the type of service they offer (you are copying your files to their servers, so they will get them, but won’t disclose to people you do not want to, more or less).

Still, installing a plug-in to Finder that will automatically synchronize files on a remote server is a bit scary. They say I entitle them to see and copy any files from my harddisk to their servers every time I copy them into the “DropBox” and that’s basically THE service, but of course it’s scary to think they have this application sitting on my Mac waiting to copy files remotely.

Also, I wonder if I should use it to exchange files with friends and family or as a remote safe storage for backups? Is it safer than an external HD? I still keep that harddisk in the same house where my computer normally is, so how safe is that? An external HD saves from hardware failures on my Mac, but not from calamities, storing files in a remote site is a better solution, I would think.

On the technical side, instead, I wonder why I need the dropbox software, when I could use webdav.