Category: Software

.mobi developers’ site

mTLD (.mobi global registry) has quietly launched the developers’ site.

I have been waiting for this for a long time. I have been talking and chatting with Ronan Cremin and Jo Rabin (not to mention the activity in the W3C’s Mobile Web Initiative) for quite a few months. I kept hearing of features and contents they were developing for the developers. They made me dream about all the cool contents, but never let me put my hands on them.

And here it comes, it’s alive! (listen to the sound from Young Frankenstein). The site is free to use, this means that developers can benefit from all the contents they put (and will continue putting) on the site even if they don’t own a .mobi domain.

dev.mobi is now real. Feel free to register, browse, lurk and use the forums, of course.

Congratulations to Martin Kindler, a wmlprogramming member for the very good article on typo3 made mobile-friendly.

Microsoft first to bat with direct-to-television movie downloads

Via AppleInsider: “The Redmond, Wash.-based software giant said it plans to offer over 1,000 hours of content by the end of the year“.
And then “Microsoft’s Xbox live will only offer film downloads for rent. Customers will have a window period of two weeks from the time they first purchase films to they expire. However, once a customer begins watching a flick, they’ll have only 24 hours to finish.“

I bet this is for US residents only.

This is also supposed to be the plan of Sony and the PS3.

Buying games online or renting them online can be very powerful. You’re home, bored, turn your Xbox on, pick a game and buy it within 2-3 clicks. Super!

I bet this will work with Movies too.

New features in the SonyEricsson developers site

I happily noticed that SonyEricsson has started to publish guidelines and tutorials on their developers site.

Recent posts include tutorials about music (Part 1 and Part 2) and videos [PDF], Flash and more.

Not to mention the new “Phones” section in which you can go see lists of devices, pictures, features.
Would be great to have something more in detail about the technical specifications of each single device, but this is already a big step ahead.

The work certainly took a few months as features and sections appeared slowly but constantly.

This is EXACTLY what you’d expect from a good developers site. Good job!

Apple’s iTV

Interesting article from Roughly Drafted about Apple’s iTV and specifically about the fact that strangely enough Apple has pre-announced a product that will be available in 4 to 6 months from now.

I agree with the idea that 802.11n is probably needed for the iTV to be successful, but I also think that it’s another way to let the majors know that Apple is serious about video downloads. It’s another way to say “Hey, you should join iTMS, because we’re going to broadcast your movies directly on TV, so call us if you want to be there”.

PHP 5 penetration

A couple of days ago I met with Julien. We talked about many things, among which, PHP. I remember talking with him about PHP 5 about a year ago, so I asked if he has started doing any work with it as I haven’t even tried it since it came out. He told me that he hasn’t ever used it for a real project.

Not that I read hardcore PHP developers forums, but I have heard of very few developers using it. We started wondering about the success of PHP 5 and why developers should move from version 4.

The conclusion was that probably PHP 5 did not introduce those features that make a developer move from a major version to another.

Today Julien sent me a report about PHP 4 and 5 usage, installed versions and so on. Take a look and you will see that servers running PHP 5 are still a big minority even if it has been released in July 2004!.

Seems like a big failure.

Any Widget?

It seems like Widgets have become really popular, something we can’t live without!

I was reading some news yesterday and got on Google’s Gadget. The funny thing is that I opened it in a window that I left in the background… Later I came back to that window and stood there a for few seconds wondering how I got there… And wondering what the heck it was. I looked at all the little icons and names and then realized they are widgets (Google Desktop required!).

Konfabulator has been around for years, for the Mac initially and later for Windows. Then Apple launched the Dashbord, I remember the disappointment from the guys behind Konfabulator. Apple released, for free, included in the default install, a software that was just like their little pet. I would have been disappointed myself!
Soon Yahoo! released a Widget for Apple’s Dashboard.
Suprisingly Yahoo! purchased Konfabulator and renamed it to Yahoo! Widgets. They probably thought it was a good business.

Now comes Google. (Has it been there for a long time?)

I have used Konfabulator, before Dashboard was released. Really nice graphics, TONS of Widgets, but… useless.
Later I tried Apple’s Dashboard, it is SO damn slow that, even if there was anything useful, I would not use it. Not to mention that Widgets most of the times are little boxes of services that you can get on the web or with an RSS reader. Tell me something you can do in a Widget that you can’t do with a browser.

As a user… I don’t see the use.

Also good to read, a comparison between Dashboard and Konfabulator.

“Detecting Enhanced Devices” according to Cingular

I was reading an old email from devCentral and found a link that was supposed to described how to detect enhanced devices. It seemed quite interesting.

The passage (seemed more like an FAQ) was pretty disappointing.

I think that parsing the accept headers is not enough, unless you think that a device that supports XHTML is an enhanced device. To me, an enhanced device is a device that supports images, colors and has a big screen. A stylus is a big plus, of course.

WURFL is certainly a much better starting point than simply HTTP headers.

What does it take to write a FAQ entry?

Writing a FAQ entry is not hard at all. Well, first of all you need to have a question, of course and then you need to search for an answer.

It’s not that hard and you certainly know a lot of answers that other people doesn’t know. I think this is the basic principle on which is based Google Answers.

In this case, anyway, I’m thinking about The Wireless FAQ. We brought back the site to life, but if we want it to shine as it used to, we need to collect questions and answers.
I am sure that you know a lot of things about mobile, all you have to do is think to something that sounds interesting or particular, and write a question and its answer.
You know all about downloads? Then maybe you can write something about download methods (OMA DD, Openwave’s DownloadFun, direct downloads, OMA DRM, more), maybe you know all about images, so you might write something about wallpapers and screensavers or about iamge resizing both for downloads and for browsing.
Maybe you know a lot about messaging, we have a section for SMS and another one for MMS.
Are you CSS expert? Well, we need to feed a lot of contents about XHTML, XHTML-MP, WCSS and CSS in general!

First of all you will need to create an account, I’ll give you write access and then you can write everything.
If you’re lazy and don’t want credit for writing, don’t worry, send me the text and I’ll publish it.

Seriously, there is no reason why you should not contribute!