Category: Software

Community resources for the mobile

I wanted to recap a few valuable resources that developers can find on the web to help them start or improve their skills to produce sites for mobile devices.

My favourite, of course, is The Wireless FAQ, simply because of the time it took to bring it to a Wiki. I think it has done a big step ahead since that day and thanks to the wiki approach we have been able to add a number of resources about very important topics such as DRM, Video downloads, multimedia content delivery and more.

On the same track you might also want to check out the Techniques for the Best Practices, originally developed and maintained by the W3C. It’s another Wiki site and it’s about the Mobile Web Best Practices 1.0 that the group has produced. The Wiki was chosen because the group is looking for user contributions. If you are interested you should go, read, ask questions and add content, if you feel like willing to share with the W3C community.

A more specialized site, maintained by Barbara Ballard of little spring design inc, is Mobile User Interface Design Patterns. The title says it all, Barbara is a super-expert of User Interfaces for the mobile. She has already created a lot of valuable content and while it’s less technical from a certain point of view as compared to the other two sites, it actually provides great guidance about the general UI and presentation that you should use in your mobile site. Barbara’s Wiki is certainly something to read and put in practice in your mobile sites, maybe using some techniques suggested in the other 2 sites previously named.

The last site I wanted to remind to the community is mTLD‘s developers site. The site does not have a Wiki, but rather a forum, blogs and a few selected articles, all about the mobile. The site is relatively new and the administrators are working hard to provide more and more resources every day. It is obviously a different approach, the site aims to provide all the guidance and help to develop mobile sites, also linking to external resources, of course. It’s another great place to start from and to ask questions if there’s something you can’t do or is not clear. You can reach it at dev.mobi. The site can be visited both from your desktop computer or on the move.

Telefonica launches Opera browser

It must be clear to everyone that today I have more spare time. Meetings are done for today, all I need to do is go to eat and then I have a few hours free.

I took a chance to clear a bit of my backlog of things I wanted to post on the blog, then.

Via Marco Casario I found out the Telefónica Móviles has partenered with Opera to provide to their users a custom version of Opera and Opera Mini.
They are not the first ones and to me is another demonstration of the quality of the Opera browser and that a better user experience will lead more users on internet using their phone.

There’s a full Press release, of course: Telefónica selects Opera Mini and Opera Mobile to deliver the mobile Web.

Blogger pains

Mike Rowehl has commented negatively about Blogger (and my blog being here) more than once. Anyway he’s not the only one, of course.

I have noticed myself more than once, lately, that the site is very often slow and sometimes returns an internal error. Reloading solves the thing most of the times. It seems like some server clusters might have some problems.

The commenting system is not so very well designed. I found myself more than once not being able to publish a comment because there was an error in my message, but the alert was so tiny that I hadn’t even noticed it.

I had to hack some widgets and take inspiration from other programmers that built their own widgets such as the tag-blob and the comments widget.

I have considered moving to WordPress, but when the tags were added to the Blogger, I did not feel the need so much. I think the skins are too limited in their variety (they are mostly color variations), but I can leave with that.

Playing around with RSS has sometimes generated some problems to RSS readers and yesterday has been the latest demonstration of these problems. I added some tags here and there on old posts. Their date has remained 2005 or 2006, but they appear in the RSS as very recent posts (while they are not).

I’m sorry about this, and if you have any formal complaints, please, direct them to the blogger dev-team. 🙂

iPhone “unique” motion sensor

There have been many posts about the iPhone announced by Apple. Some are saying that it’s the beginning of a revolution, some are saying that it is very stylish, but will not resist falling on the floor or getting hit. Some others are saying that Jobs is a great entertainer and made the iPhone look like something new while it is not.

My own opinion, being one of the few millions that saw the presentation, but never had a chance to hold the phone and use it for real, is that it will actually be a device for a niche market. It will most likely fall in the same space as PDA‘s and smartphones and not be really a mass-market device.
That’s also how the iPod was born. A device for music enthusiasts. The mass-market was reached with a lot of good commercial, good design and a bit of luck. It became mass-market when everyone thought it was cool to have it no matter how big and heavy it was compared to the tiny flash-based devices.
The iPhone will be the same in the beginning, with the exception that Apple is in a very good position right now. The future will tell us if it can be a real revolution.

It is obvious that the 2 year contract with Cingular, the delayed distribution for Europe and the high price will actually keep it away from the hands of many of us.

But going back to what is nearer to my experience (which is not marketing or sales), while cleaning up my inbox I noticed a newsletter from Nokia promoting the newly released SDK to access the motion sensor API’s of the 5500 Sport.
It doesn’t look so much different from Apple’s system with the advantage of being on the market today and with an SDK ready to use. Visit the Forum Nokia to know more, there’s a page for it, of course: Nokia 5500 Sport.

More WURFL jobs

I have written in the past about a job posting in which WURFL was a reason of preference (you can read about it in WURFL means real money).

Now James Pearce, the new CTO of mTLD, has posted a message on the developers’ site blog. .mobi is seeking developers that know WURFL, that have experience with adaptation, mobile sites and have done something outstanding.

If you think you fit or are interested in working with .mobi, you should check out this post, Technical genius sought.

Flash Lite as a theme on the phone

It all started from a Google Alerts, I found a post about a small DB like WURFL, but specific for Flash Lite, the author called it “Flash Lite UAProfile“. From there I got on a blog that linked to a video on YouTube, of course, that shows how you can use Flash Lite to personalize your mobile phone. Flash Lite is used to make the animations and I have to say that while I generally stick to the default themes on the phone, these are really interesting. Simple animations that can make your phone a little bit more “alive”.

NOTICE: While the database has ‘UAProfile’ in the name it’s not a UAProf; while the author names WURFL, it’s not compatible with WURFL.

If you are a content provider you should start considering a bit more the Themes topic. Themes have been available on mobile phones for a long time, but not many content providers sell them. It’s because all the phones user their own standard, all the phones have a different screen size and probably don’t seem so attractive as ringtones.
I can understand that today, with the integrated cameras, most users prefer to take a picture and use it as a wallpaper, but they can’t make animations and of course can’t make a theme out of an image. This is a good example of something else that can be done to make a mobile phone unique.

See the latest mobile phones

Last night I was literally hypnotized by a very simple script (AJAX?) that refreshes every few seconds. I was browsing around and got on AdMob‘s site and immediately was captured but the device names on the right. I kept reading device names, countries and mobile operators for quite a few minutes… Yes, I know, I’m sick! 🙂

I just love these features, I can’t get away from them.

In a similar effort and only for the happiness of my eyes, I recently added a feature that is totally useless, but makes me giggle every time I see it.
Every time someone visits t.wurfl.com the user-agent is recorded in a database. It is possible to query the user-agents and see the values captured through another webpage. Well, I have added device thumbnails just to entertain myself, of course. If you wanted to see the last 10 Sony Ericsson devices that visited the site, for example, you will see the nice thumbnails.

All this was developed using free software, of course. WURFL, Tera-WURFL and the device pictures that the community has collected. Device thumbnails were developed this Sunday, instead of going out, seeing people and having some real relationship with human beings…

“best Java game for the new Samsung D900” contest

Samsung has launched a new contest for the development of the best Java/J2ME game for the new D900.

Prizes are actually very interesting, with a Grand prize of 20,000 USD.

You are required to subscribe to Sharewire, upload your game and then the final winner will be calculated summing the number of downloads and the votes casted by a number of “selected experts” evaluating innovation, fun, usability, graphics and sound quality.

Considering the high prize it is certainly interesting for new and young developers.

This is also a demonstration of how hard it can be for a developer or a small company to reach large audiences. Appearing in a big site or in an operator’s portal is not easy and often the top listed games are developed and distributed by large firms. Smaller companies generally don’t get the same visibility.
Not very different from the music and movie industries where big names are always highly visible and the less famous, but maybe as good (or better), are relegated in the back of shops or rarely aired by radios.
On one side I’m glad this could give a boost to someone and maybe provide some fresh money, on the other side it’s disappointing to think they have to give away a fresh and good idea (a game in this case) for free. This is a tough topic, I could write for hours and no one would reach the end of the post, so I won’t go down to the details of my thinking, but I’m sure I’m not alone. Internet gives you the possibility to reach anyone anywhere, but what you really need is a high position on a big site or on a search engine, otherwise it’s so crowded that nobody will see you.

Samsung Developers Club

The Developers Club is Samsung’s developers site. It’s been around for a few years now. It was on my list of sites to be reviewed here, but I’ll wait a little more. The overall vote would have been negative. There are some decent resources for J2ME development, but there is nothing about all the rest. Also, the site is accessible only using MSIE, not because it’s particularly complex, it’s very basic with a really bad forum and a list of downloadable file, but because the login page only works with MSIE. Firefox seems to login, but then you’re not.

I am going to wait for my reivew because I just received a newsletter that describes an overall rebuild. Here’s the original text, I’m sorry I can’t link to a web version of the newsletter, but I could not find it.

The renewal process of the Samsung Developers Club is nearing completion.

The new site features a comprehensive device information database and an enhanced forum in which you can create your own message-boards.The design of the site is based on the new Samsung Fun Club look and feel which is much more in keeping with the current brand guidelines and corporate image of Samsung mobile.

Further improvements include direct access to the device information from the front page. The database also allows users to compare different models as well as exporting data to Excel. This is surely a first for any developer support site. We hope to have ironed out any bugs before launch but ask you to bear with us in the first weeks as some glitches may take some time to be uncovered and resolved