Category: Software

Premus update!

A little bit of publicity and links are worth much more than bare money.

I wrote a short Premus review here the other day and now David has updated the online demo to the latest development version that includes the validator, better source view and syntax highlighting.

He also squashed a few bugs here and there.

Bookmarking has been disabled due to spammers immediately using it to publicize their sites. The current version shows how bookmarks can be used, but you are not allowed to create new ones. If you make a local install you will be able to use them, of course.

See the updated Premus live, or read the CHANGELOG for a few more details about the changes.

Message to David: you need to practice your communication skills, the changelog is too short! 😛

Premus

“The name Premus comes from PRoxying EMUlator Service. It is a mobile browser emulator that converts WML, XHTML MP, cHTML and Vodafone’s PML (c. 2004) into standard HTML that you can browse in your normal web browser.”

This is what David Johansson says on the site as a short description of the software. David has been developing mobile services for many years now and he was among the early supporters of WURFL.

Premus was born from the need of testing mobile sites, WML in WAP 1 in the beginning and later many more markups. I would not call it exacly an “emulator” as David does, but rather a testing tool. In two words, Premus lets you pick a user-agent (from WURFL, of course!), define a URL and specify extra headers, if you’d like. The software makes the request and reformats the markup so that it renders well in your web browser. It’s not a Java application or applet, it’s not a real emulation engine or and SDK. It’s a web-based tool that lets you easily test your sites and make sure that all the links work and the pages look as you expect.
You should not expect a faithful representation of how it will look on the mobile device; it does not show alerts if you picked the user-agent of a WML device/browser and the remote site returns XHTML. It is intended for programmers and authors that have developed a site or a complex service and need to check that everything is OK.

Since real device testing is ALWAYS suggested, this is the perfect light-weight tool to make a general test before going with the mobile.

More in detail, while browsing with Premus, you always see the general page layout, but you can also see the original source, you see, edit and force cookies and headers. By default you have a some input fields on the top of the page for the user-agent, URL and manage all the proxy features and see the page in a dedicated box. De-activating the “frame” checkbox you can see the page layout in a window on its own, more similar to the mobile browsing.
A very helpful feature is actually on the bottom of the page. It shows a list of external resources (normally images) and the size of each. Also provides the time needed to download the markup and all external contents. The time is calculated on the fast internet connection of the server, not calculating the mobile networks latency, but will be useful to compare different pages and sites.

Premus will help you save a lot of time.

Premus is now released as open-source so you are free to download and adapt it to your needs.
If you look at the version in development you will see some new features that are not in the online demo, yet. These are features that I have strongly suggested to David and actually it really took him a few hours to implement them, but I think they will make a big difference.
Syntax highlighting has been added for the source view, very useful when you need to check your markup. Also the spacing has been changed for better readability.
Even more important to me is the markup validation. It’s disappointing when you build a big site, get ready to test with your mobile (take it from the drawer, put the correct SIM card, check the WAP profile, go online) and discover there’s a typo in the XML declaration. Checking that your markup is validated will certainly guarantee the best interoperability with all browsers. When you want the best possible support you really want this. Well-formedness is the first thing! Look what happens if you validate http://m.gmail.com/ :

Premus validation resulf for mobile Gmail
All the code is Python and should be easy to install on most modern Linux disto’s.

Some other minor things could be cleaned up and improved. Nevertheless this is a very good testing tool. If you are a mobile sites developer, I suggest you try it out, especially the development version that adds those 2-3 features that will actually ease your work a lot.

MOTODEV, useless?

In the last couple of months I wrote posts about developers’ sites around the planet. I mostly wrote of updates or new sites that I found. Today I’m talking about a developers’ site that has been around for quite a few years, at least 3 or 4, I’d say. The site I’m going to talk today is MOTODEV, by Motorola.

While it’s been around for a long time and I have known it for a long time, I hadn’t felt like talking about it, yet. Why? Because there’s not much to say. Why? Because there’s nothing interesting to read or download!

Info about WAP capabilities is reduced to the VERY minimum and by minimum I mean that on most device spec pages (and files) you get something like “WAP 1.0” or “WAP 2.0”. Links generally target to OMA’s homepage or even the WAPForum’s.
Multimedia is sometimes described with very generic terms such as MP3-support, but nothing about other formats.
In general you can’t find accessory information about e-mail client, MMS (other than “supported”), messaging, IM.

The site in general is very poor.

Many devices are missing.

Downloadable spec files are generally a PDF version of the web page you were reading. 99% useless considering that you could save-to-file the page you’re reading.

Only thing that is decent on the site are specifications about J2ME capabilities, API’s and so on. This is decent, but not all devices have the documents available.

My overall vote to the site 4 out of ten and only because there’s J2ME information, otherwise it would have been a 2.

Something that clearly demonstrates the quality of the site. I tried to update my profile as it’s outdates, this is the result:

While writing this post I browsed the site looking for examples and re-check what exactly is available. The site has slightly changed the layout and some extra information has appeared. Looking at the device spec of the Motorola RAZR V3 we can now see the browser vendor that was not available in the past. As pointed out before, resources about J2ME are decent. The rest is mostly very similar to the end-user site, information about the generic support of SMS, EMS, MMS and IM. What IM, for example? OMA’s? AIM? ICQ? I have a V3 and I know it’s OMA IMPS (or Wireless Village), but data is still lacking.
I can see for example another V3 with CLDC 1.1, how do I distinguish the two models?

What I find disappointing in general is that all around the site there are very few details and it seems like the Motorola devices are 100% adherent to the standards and all the links are to the official documentation, while we all know that this is not entirely true, that all devices and implementations have their own peculiarities and in most cases this will not even put in evidence extra features the devices might have. Something you should actually put in the spotlight if you want developers and content providers to be able to provide the best for your devices.

I have to admit I have seen a slight improvement in the site and see new filters to search for devices that were not available 10-15 days ago when I had to do some research on them. Two weeks ago, in the handsets page there was a filter only by year. Now that filter is gone and new ones, more detailed and more interesting for a developer are present.

Related links:

What if Google entered the Music downloads biz?

I found a very interesting article on Blog Maverick. The blog, in case you did not know, is maintained by Mark Cuban, the owner of the basketball team and a number of companies related to internet (read more on Wikipedia at the link above).

The post is entitled Googlenomics , Itunes and Zune and describes a few reasons why Google might enter the Music downloads business, how much it would cost and what it could bring to them.

It makes some sense, but I don’t think it’s going to happen, or at least not as it is described. I can hardly believe that the music labels would be happy to give away the music for free. The first billion songs for free is A LOT and would cost them A LOT (Mark says about 575M USD). That would mean a really low price per song and the music labels are already fighting with Apple to raise the 99c per song.

While Google and Apple are friends, I doubt the service would be compatible with the iPod and Google and Microsoft are not so much friends, so I hardly think it’ll be compatible with Zune. What’s left? Something that maybe is not in Mark Cuban’s article, you home-media-center. An all-in-one tiny computer (as big as your VCR) that connects to internet, lets you watch TV shows, listen to music and read news online. Wouldn’t that make more sense for Google?

Motorola open-source

I wanted to make this post about fifteen days ago, but then other things took over and this was left behind.

While doing my daily news-reading and “siteseeing”, I found a site that seems to mean that Motorola is into the open-source. Reading more deeply it is clear that they have open-sourced some parts of their J2ME implementation for mobile devices and the full software for some linux-based devices!

opensource.motorola.com offers a number of downloads. The most active, according to the published statistics are JSR’s in general and more specifically JSR 271 (Motorola ‘s JSR 271 implementation or the JCP JSR 271 specification).

Even more interestingly, there are links to access parts of device kernel, drivers and applications that are developed as open-source. You can access kernel and packages for the ROKR E2, A1200 or A780 and E680.
This is very cool.
The community is not very active also because it’s a very specific topic, but still it’s an initial effort. It’s incredible how much traction Linksys got after they released the full firmware of their WRT54g and later.

As a test I downloaded the firmware of the A780/E680, 72MB! It’s all RPM. There are many packages included and other packages are stored outside of the “firmware package”. It seems like there’s everything.

Why should I buy a greenphone, now that I have discovered this?
Hackers wanted to test these files and play around.

opensource.motorola.com announcement to the press.

bluepulse 2.0 – review

A few days ago Bluepulse v2 was launched. I had given it a first try with V1, but honestly, with the RAZR V3 I had more problems than other, so I gave up almost immediately.
I don’t think it was a problem to the bluepulse itself, but rather to the poor capabilities of the V3 (not really a good phone for anything other than being slick, thin and cool).

Now that I have a cool and shiny Sony Ericsson W810i I can give a try to all these nice applications.

First things first; installation was fast and smooth. I got on their site with my mobile phone (http://get.bluepulse.com) and downloaded the MIDlet. Tech note: the download consisted of only a jar file, no jad.
In 2 minutes I was up and running. I already had an account from my first try with the RAZR V3, so I simply configured the login and password and I was in.

My Place
bluepulse is first of all a community. “My place” is basically a guided menu that lets users describe themselves, their interests and so on. This is obvsiously central to the community. When searching for friends you can see their profile, read about them, see pictures and videos. None of the fields is required, but if you use bluepulse for chatting and meeting people you will certainly want to fill these fields. Available fields range from Age/Sex/Location to free text fields, pictures, video. You can pick an icon from a list of available images or get one assigned automatically. Details go down to your e-mail address and phone number.
I have browsed a few people in the community. Most users wrote a good amount of text and provided their A/S/L. Very few provided images or videos. If the MIDlet allowed users to use the camera to take a picture or record a video it would have been easier in some cases; on the other side you have to specify a URL and the application will download and store it. Considering that this application also relies a lot on Web 2.0 concepts, it’s should be noted that it also provides the ability to use Flickr.
I am not a usability authority, but I am certainly a user, so I have a remark here: Age/Sex/Location is all menu-driven, so much menu driven, that I think it would be easier to dial in my birth date rather than pick it from multiple menus (first select a year range, then year, then select month, then day all using the joystick).

Community
To start you need to find people. Search is easy, pick age/sex/location, SEARCH. Would be nice to have an automatic suggestion of the same age and location as my profile (if set) and then pick the sex. If wanted, change the other settings. We all know why people use this to kind of tools. 😉
Search my nickname or e-mail is also available.
After searching you may see the user’s profile, add as a friend, browse his/her friends. While most users have written a lot about themselves and their interests, I often could not find pictures or videos. The menu items were always present and often resulted in a “user did not upload an image”. A bit disappointing. It would have been nicer to only list items that contain something. It would also save time (and money).
Exchanging messages is quite easy. You should first add someone as a friend (you send the request and the user is allowed to accept of reject). Once the remote user has accepted your request to become a friend you can send him/her a message. When logging in the application you get an alert if new messages are available. All common mailboxes such as “inbox” and “sent” are available. Messages can be stored or deleted. Sending a message is much like an SMS, so anyone can do it quite easily.
I tried the online chatroom, but they were empty, so I can’t say much. Looked like an IRC channel.

Widgets
Bluepulse can be seen as a container of plug-ins or widgets. Its power layes in the ability to add a lot of custom widgets according to your needs and pleasure. Pre-installed you can find a feed reader and the full messaging and chat system that is part of the “community feature-set”.

Add a widget
Managing Widgets is certainly a major functionality of bluepulse and installing a new one is quite easy. Search among the available plug-ins selecting by category, popularity or more recent. Click, read a short description and install.
Installing a new widget really takes a minute. Once installed you find a new icon in the starting page. A breeze.

RSS feeds
I tried to add my own feeds to see how they would look on BP. I thought it would be better to check feeds I know. Unfortunately I had to type the exact URL of the feed, quite uncomfortable while on the move. During the tests, anyway, I was near my computer and could get them. Once gotten the exact URL (not always very short to type on a mobile) it worked as expcted. I encountered some problems, anyway. I tried the atom feed from Mobile web planet, at first it seemed to work and showed me all the headlines, but then I could not see any contents.
I tried the pre-defined Flickr feed and this time it worked, but I could not see any of the images of the 3 different posts I tried (3 random posts from the first page).
Another pre-difined feed was Yahoo! sports. News were OK and contents were present. I was not able to see any images, again. I guess this is a rescaling problem. The W810i should be able to display most image formats. I think the server-side application (of bluepulse) should convert the files into a supported format, anyway.
Overall results were a bit disappointing. It’s OK if some remote feed does not work, but you would expect the pre-defined feeds to be widely tested.

IM
I installed MSN as a test. Installation was smooth as with other widgets. I looged in at my first try and all the online buddies were downloaded and shown in a list. I hadn’t thought it would have been so easy. 😉
I could exchange messages with a friend easily. The page looked like a standard chat or IRC, all text, not buddy icons. It worked well. The page is refreshed every 30 seconds or so, a good time considering that it’s a mobile application. Sometimes the refresh seemed a bit annoying, maybe because it’s a page refresh and was very visible. Quite acceptable, anyway.

Overall results
The client in general works smoothly. I received an SMS and later a call while playing around; in one case the application kept going without a glitch, after the call I saw an error message (something on the lines of “connection error, try later”), reloaded and everything worked fine. This is certainly a demonstration of solidity.

While Opera Mini was born as a browser, it has a few features such as the RSS feed reader that are in direct competition with bluepulse. I have to say that Opera is much more advanced in this field and that I was a bit disappointed by the results that I obtained in the tests I made with bluepulse.
Opera also takes advantage of the left and right joystick moves to scroll quickly. I think bluepulse should take the suggestion and do the same to make the scrolling of long lists of widgets and contacts faster.
Last one thing is the use of the camera. Opera was really smart to integrate it. If you want a real 2.0 experience, the camera must be part of that.

Pageloading was in generally a big issue that I noticed, as a user. Every time I wanted to do something “Loading 0%” appeared, then jumped to “Loading 100%” and eventually displayed the page. It’s useless to see a “0-100” excursion and it’s annoying to keep re-loading every page. Opera Mini seemed to be faster, I don’t know why. Maybe Opera Mini uses sockets and bluepulse uses HTTP?

The application is very solid, the basic features such as messaging and chatting are good and work smoothly. Installing a widget is very easy and fast and the developers’ community provided a ton of plug-ins aside from the ones developed by bluepulse. The overall result is certainly positive, but not an A. It certainly still has some rough edges and should make the general navigation smoother. It’s a bit frustrating to use it and I think it will make some users walk away due to this.

Related topics:
Opera Mini 3.0 – review, by me
bluepulse website
Bluepulse 2.0 is Bigger, Slicker, Broader and Deeper (and may be the ultimate mobile media platform) on MobileCrunch

3 music store

While browsing on 3’s site in UK I noticed a nice banner that invites the visitors to enter a new online shop.

3MusicStore is now open and already has 500,000 titles. What is so interesting? Is that the site sells everything for 99p, about 1.4 Euro. It’s a little bit higher than services such as iTunes, that sells songs for 99 eurocent (and 79p in UK), but 3MusicStore adds something. Something that seems very interesting to me. All songs purchased on the site can be downloaded both on the mobile phone AND on the PC. This service clearly opens the gates to MP3 phones such as the latest Sony Ericsson devices (W810i, W850i, W950i, etc).

So how is this different from iTunes? Well, I have it on my phone, I can be on the move, hear a song I like on the radio, open the site on my phone and buy it.
Later I will go home and also download it on my PC.

This is certainly a big hit in the iTunes+iPod concept that Apple has. Sony Ericsson is certainly scoring a point here.
I wonder if the iPhone will turn into reality and if Apple will sign a deal with 3. Wouldn’t it be a perfect couple?

On the other side, Italy shows that while we are ahead on the TV matters, we’re behind about music. 3 in Italy offers a service that only shares the name, 3MusicStore, unfortunately songs cost 2.5 Euro each and videoclips cost 3 Euro each. Dual-download (phone and PC) is not available. There are selected songs that cost only 1 Euro, but it’s a limited offer for a limited time (this week there are 8 songs from Jamiroquai). Hopefully the Italian site will soon follow the UK path!

Mobile Linux, ever taking off?

I was reading this not-so-new post on Mobile Open Source entitled Mobile Linux going up the stack with Trolltech Greensuite.

The Greensuite Initiative should ease the development of linux-based devices. This should speed-up the development and lower the costs. Fabrizio Capobianco is very confident that this is the way to go and that Linux will eventually win the race against Symbian and Microsoft.

I think this is a very optimistic view. I have been looking for a linux device to be successful for quite a few years now and all those devices have been selling very low numbers to a very tiny slice of the market (think of the Zaurus, so cool, but so little devices sold).
Seeing Linux become a player in this space would be really great, but I think that it needs a lot of money and the development costs of a mobile device, today, are still too high to open the doors to this. I am always amazed at how Apple could take freeBSD and Mach kernel and build such as great GUI on top of it, while the open-source community has been developing X11 and other Window managers for so many years with so little success.

I really hope that someone puts some serious money and development time on Linux for mobile devices and make it real. I am just not sure that this is the event (or initiative) that will change things drastically.

Motorola has launched quite a few devices running Linux, but actually the latest smartphone/PDA that was lunched with lots of commercials and hype is the Q and is Windows-based, not Linux.

Opera Mini 3.0 – review

I did not even have the time to test Opera Mini 3.0 Beta that the full release is ready.
I have felt bad for complaining about the HTTP headers and not even give a shot to the full features. So here comes a little review.

Installation was smooth. I downloaded the MIDlet and installed. During the installation the client checked my internet connection and automatically picked the best one. It also generated keys for security.

Test #1: HTTP headers
I visited my test site at http://t.wurfl.com/ to grab some headers. I STRONGLY suggest the download from WAP, because as Mike Rowehl pointed out, the default browser’s user-agent will be store in an HTTP header.
These are the custom headers:

  • X-OperaMini-Features: advanced, download, camera, folding, inputhints
  • X-OperaMini-Phone-UA: SonyEricssonW810i/R4EA Browser/NetFront/3.3 Profile/MIDP-2.0 Configuration/CLDC-1.1
  • X-OperaMini-Phone: SonyEricsson # W810i

Test #2: Photo Blog
I wanted to upload a test image. Entered the Photo Blog link from the main page, took a picture of a nice flower… And discovered that the only supported blog is Opera’s! What a bad surprise. Reading from Opera Mini’s site: Now you can take images with your phone camera and upload them to any of your blogs, forums or e-mail blog right from Opera Mini.
Looking at the screenshots it’s clear they are uploading to Opera’s blogsite, but I thought that was just an example. I could not find any preference in the settings menu.
Reading on Opera Watch, they say you can post to myspace or other blogs. I am sorry I really could not find how to do it!

Test #3: my blog
The page looks very good. On top there’s a link to subscribe to the feed (read more to know about feeds support). All my articles are well readable and the ability to scroll up and down quickly with left and right joystick makes it very usable. Scrolling is smooth.
Images are rescaled and respect the proportions from the original layout. Just like on my desktop I can click on an image and zoom. Initially it fits the screen (little bit of vertical scrolling on big images, but that’s OK) and then I can zoom more to see the real image. I can also download the image.
All the right column of the blog is moved on the bottom of the articles. So I first need to scroll all the articles and then reach the right column. Not perfect, but probably the only possible solution on a small screen. Going through the “label cloud” and previous posts list is OK considering the high number of links. Again the ability to scroll up and down of one page is very helpful.

Test #3 bis: Tom Hume’s blog
Tom Hume‘s blog has a left column with links and images and then the articles on the right column. I wanted to see how Opera Mini would handle it.
The approach is very smart as I see Tom’s picture, a couple of other links and then all the articles. Links to Flikr and previous posts have been skipped totally. I don’t know if this is a feature or a bug, but works very well. I think it’s a feature! 😀

Test #4: slashdot
Slashdot works smoothly. I would add “as expected”. It provides a CSS for handhelds and the content is reduced to the minimum. There’s a form to login and then the articles.
I personally don’t like the layout, you can’t really understand that the title are not part of the article as they are rendered as normal links. A bit of background color would have made it much better on Opera Mini, but I guess the CSS is made to work on any mobile browser.
Reading an article means also loading all the comments. It gets very long. I think slashdot should have made it more efficient for a mobile device. Again, not Opera’s fault!

Test #5: searching with Google
Smooth and effective. Works like a charm.
I followed some random links and all worked nicely.

Test #6: Gmail
I went on http://www.gmail.com and logged in pretending to be a desktop computer. A big alert was on top of each page reminding me that standard HTML was being used. A link to move to the advanced AJAX version was available. Clicking would simply reload the same page.
The entire site was barely usable. Each page started with the left column of gmail, so mailboxes and labels. No contacts. Then the e-mails. It was crowded and mostly hard to read. I guess the mixture of the standard HTML interface and the small screen caused this. To read emails I had to scroll down about 3 pages.

Test #6 bis: Gmail mobile
When logging on the standard gmail I tagged the “remember me on this computer”. When accessing http://m.gmail.com I was logged in automatically.
The layout was much cleaner and simpler, of course. Navigating around was pretty easy and fast, of course.
Should be noted that I could not make the accesskeys work. Is this something that I need to discover in the online documentation?
Lists of links were all folded. Clicking on the + sign would open the list and I could pick the desired link. Quite nice feature. I am not convinced this is a usability advantage, but was nice to see it. Interesting. I will need more time using it to give a final judgment on this.

Text #7: RSS feeds
I tested my blog’s feed, of course. Clicking on the feed (always presented as the first link on top of the page) loads a page where you can see a first link that says “subscribe” and below the contents of the feed.
Subscribing brings you to the Feeds page. Feeds can be sorted alphabetically or by time.
In the Feeds page you see your subscriptions with a tiny icon, a title, and the number of unread news. Once you visit a feed all news are marked as read.

Overall results
The general user-experience is very good. I browsed a lot of sites and I could access all the information I needed very easily.
It is clear that some sites are more friendly and some others are harder to render.
No objects such as flash were rendered by the browser, but that’s OK too.
Browsing is fast and smooth and I really, really like the ability to scroll up and down quickly. Ebay is really ugly, but works. PlayDeep, an e-commerce site, works and I could place an order. Too bad that all the simple javascript in the page did not work at all. Every time a javascript event was supposed to happen I saw a big error message and the phone vibrated.
Sites that are providing a good CSS for handhelds clearly work better than other sites so thumbs up for the authors that took the time to draw a good stylesheet for small devices.
Memory does not seem to be an issue as it used to happen with old WAP browsers and sometimes still happens with some modern browsers.
Pop-up windows are managed OK. It is probably not clear to the user the difference between a normal link and a pop-up, but I also don’t see much advantage in notifying it as the browser only shows one page at a time.
I did not like that when picking something from a list (select element), the list is shown as a new page and when I pick the element the browser goes back to the web page. I would have liked the standard dropdown list like in all browsers. This is a feature that has also been present in the Openwave browsers for years. According to openwave this is a usability feature that helps the user pick the desired element more easily. I personally don’t like it and always feel strange when I click on a list and see an effect similar to opening a new page.

As an end-user I like the ability to automatically detect the best connection, but as a geek I would have liked to have a menu in the settings to change it and not a button to re-test. I want to be in control. 🙂
When loading pages a tag “Processing” appears at the bottom and then changes into “Loading” and shows the KB that are being downloaded. I know that “Processing” means that the Opera Mini-Proxy is downloading, analyzing and adapting the page, but it’s odd to see it on the client. It feels like the client is processing the page before having downloaded it. Just a small comment, this does NOT mean that the client is bad! Not at all!

Last thing is I would like to know what the “features” in the HTTP header are. I can guess that “camera” means I can take picutes and that download means I can download images. Is DRM supported? “inputhints” means that my phone supports T9 or does it mean that sites can use the format attribute? “advanced” means what?

How I did it
Tested with a Sony Ericsson W810i, running Opera Mini 3.0.
Mobile Operator is TIM, in Italy and using EDGE connectivity.
I will check my next bill to see how much this test costed me. Unfortunately the online service provided by TIM does not provide the detailed traffic.

Download from web: http://www.operamini.com/
Strongly suggested wireless download: http://mini.opera.com/

Want to see how it will look on your mobile? Look at the Opera Mini simulator.

Other Reviews:
Dan Appelquist: New Opera Mini Integrates Photo Blogging
Dominique Hazaël-Massieux: Off-line browsing on a mobile device
Helicoid’s mmm: Opera Mini 3
Mike Rowehl: Bloglines Mobile and Opera Mini 3