A very good press release, as always, from M:Metrics. This month it’s focused around the iPhone and how Americans and British have perceived the phone, features and how they are considering to buy it and maybe switch to AT&T.
Read the full article here, M:Metrics: high awareness, strong demand for iPhone among British and American mobile phone users.
Dear WURFL users I am here announcing the release of the PHP library version 2.1 Final (changelog). This release has been sitting there for quite a few months, it includes the patches I received, includes the new debug feature that was introduced in Beta 3 and a few more tweaks.
browser_is_wap has been there from day 1, but in the last year or so has proved to be outdated. The property is still there, but I strongly suggest that you use the WURFL capabilities (is_wireless_device and device_claims_web_support). The property now gets values from the WURFL capability is_wireless_device when available, just like Tera-WURFL. If you want real web/mobile distinction, I suggest you get the web patch.
The only major issue that I fixed is the exact matching that sometimes did not happen in specific circumstances.
I know I had promised to add the multiple patch support, but it never arrived. If you want to implement it should really take something between 5 and 10 lines of code.
This is my last release of the library, as you know I will not be active in the WURFL project anymore. At the same time I don’t see much space of evolution for this library. If you are unhappy with the speed of this release, you should probably give a try to Tera-WURFL, if you are unhappy with PHP 4 and want PHP 5, you should probably re-write it from scratch. For these reasons, I believe this is the last release. If anyone has an issue and wants to contact me, feel free, if you want to pick it up, I’ll be happy to see it keep living. MPL 1.1 gives you the freedom of picking it, just play nice with the license rules.
Hopefully there will not be release-time bugs. 🙂
I was reading Zec’s blog and his latest post is titled “Google widgets on iPhone?” and you know what? I totally agree! He must have been reading my mind because in the last couple of days I have been thinking just that.
Apple announced that you can develop Web 2.0 apps for the iPhone.
Google has had Widgets for a while and recently launched Gears.
This sounds to me like a perfect match. You can’t really develop applications (yet), which is a shame, but at least you can develop tiny web 2.0 apps and Widgets and maybe with Google Gears you can add some off-line browsing. I can imaging getting online, using your favorite social network or whatever, get offline (in the subway, on an airplane, in a cave or in a dungeon), start up the Gears Mobile Widget, read your inbox, write some new messages or something like that, get back online, upload the updates.
The iPhone connectivity is certainly meant for a fulltime online usage, as much as broaband is today and personally I can’t wait for that day, but until the day you will have a REAL flat (that is also cheap enough), you can’t think of that. Once we have it, we’ll have the (i)phone always connected and the offline periods will be only limited. I just wonder how long will the battery would last, if you’re always online. Not very long, I guess. Where is a new battery technology? UMTS is certainly not sucking battery that GPRS and EDGE, so this is an issue!
Anyway, Google Gadgets, Gears and iPhone sound like a perfect match. Google and Apple and getting nearer every day. When are they going to share code between the WebKit and Mozilla (and maybe have full support for Safari in the many Google sites such as Blogger)?
Ericsson (NASDAQ:ERIC) announces it has signed an agreement to acquire 100 percent of the shares of Drutt Corporation, a world leading provider of Service Delivery Platform (SDP) solutions. This deal represents yet another step in Ericsson’s ambition to become the leader in multimedia.
Read the full article here: http://www.lightreading.com/document.asp?doc_id=125967
I have been working on WURFL since 2002. It has taken a lot of my work and off-work time and I put in a lot of energy in it.
The project has grown from 6 devices into more than a thousand and a few thousands user-agents, from 20 capabilities to almost 500.
We started as 5 people from around Europe with the same problem and we ended with hundreds of developers from all over the world contributing and thanking us.
The W3C invited me to join (as an invited expert, a quite rare thing) the Mobile Web Initiative thanks to my experience with WURFL and mobile site development.
During these years I worked for small companies, developed small sites, but also worked on big on-portal services, worked on off-portal sites, delivered ringtones, SMS’s, MMS, java midlets. I would say almost everything that is related to mobiles.
WURFL has achieved great results and worldwide fame and I like to think also thanks to my contribution and the time I spent regularly on it and in the mailing list.
Now has arrived a time for me to move ahead a look for something new. It is time for new challenges, put on the table what I learnt so far and see what I can do.
WURFL has been a HUGE success, being able to do something as good can be scary, but should be a lot of fun, not to mention the personal achievement!
Stay tuned for an update about what I’m going to do in the years coming. It’s going to be BIIIG.
If you are a WURFL fan, have no fear, the project will stay alive and I actually hope it will grow better every day, Luca is still committed to keep WURFL alive. If you want to make your voice heard in the project and are willing to share some of your time, this is a good time. Get on wmlprogramming and make your voice heard.
According to Lukas Hasik, Sun’s Mobility Pack 6.0 now uses WURFL to determine device capabilities. Lukas wrote about the new release of Mobility Pack citing that many developers wanted to get more information about devices. Thanks to WURFL they are now able to dig in and see device information.
Mobility Pack 6.0 is still under development, there’s a page to read the updates, Mobility Pack New and Noteworthy.
Mobility Pack is part of NetBeans.
Nokia recently (May 29, 2007) released Version 1.0 of a document describing the guidelines to develop Mobile Web sites specific for their devices, of course. The document is specifically aimed to developers and authors that want to target the most recent and advanced mobile browsers, based on Apple’s Webkit. The document is called “Nokia Web Browser Design Guide” and you can download it for free (after registering) from Forum Nokia.
It is good to see another big company, shortly after Ericsson, to suggest WURFL.
I thought I had posted about this, but apparently I did not.
Steve has started a blog a few months ago about video streaming on the mobile. It has a very noble scope, share his experience, exchange views with other developers and eventually provide to the WURFL project the information collected.
Steve did a very good job describing his test environment, encoding configurations and server configuration explanations. He worked hard on this and certainly needs some more attention. Hopefully this post can bring some more attention.
Check out mvstreaming.
Thanks to Nacho I just found out that there’s a case study [PDF] published by dotMobi about the creation of a mobile site for 3 using WURFL.
The site was created by Future Platforms and I had even read a post by Tom Hume about this, but did not realize they used WURFL (and that it was named in the document).
Giogio Natili of mobile.actionscript.it pointed out these upcoming seminars:
Andrea Trasatti's tech notes and more 