Category: Software

Is transcoding a crime?

I was reading my RSS feed and of course this news item from TechCrunch caught my eye, Transcoding Is Not A Crime, Says Court In Veoh Porn Case (includes longer excerpt from the ruling and a video).

I was initially surprised that TechCrunch spoke about transcoders for mobile sites (remember Novarra, InfoGin, Openweb, etc?) and in fact they are talking about video and flash. The ruling is interesting and here is how it starts:

Here, Veoh has simply established a system whereby software automatically processes user-submitted content and recasts it in a format that is readily accessible to its users. Veoh preselects the software parameters for the process from a range of default values set by the thirdparty software.

The topic is very different, but if you read this text and applied it word-by-word to what proxy transcoders do, it would still make sense. So I wonder (and I’m not a lawyer by far), will this ruling also apply to mobile proxies?

DISCLAIMER: I agree this is extreme, but not entirely impossible.

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”.

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.

Flash, Flashlite, SVG and Java

Flash is a huge success on the web. It’s been like that for a long time now.

SVG is a recommendation (read standard) by the W3C that should address some of the functionalities of Flash.

While Flash Lite has been very successful in Japan for many years (and I think simply because DoCoMo decided it would be the default on all devices), it has struggled in the rest of the world.

In the last couple of years Nokia, Sony Ericsson and other top vendors have more or less quietly implemented SVG Tiny (a subset of SVG for mobile devices). From my perspective it seemed like SVG would take over Flash (Lite) in the mobile space, but it looks Adobe is moving to make sure this does not happen.

A few news that I’ve read in the last couple of weeks, all within just a few days:

New WURFL Java API will be GPL?

DISCLAIMER: I run DeviceAtlas for dotMobi.

A thread about making the next version of the Java API of WURFL more OO, something that Java developers are certainly fond of, has spun in a thread about licensing.
I think a few developers have been caught by surprise. In short Luca wants to make the new API GPL, instead of the current MPL. It is still not clear which version of GPL and I think it is not yet definitive.
The problem that was raised is, of course, that changing the licence to GPL will compel all developers selling their software based on the WURFL API to open-source it and use the same version of GPL. Luca mentioned how mysql does not have this problem and how big companies like Google can use open-source softwares, but not release back to the community. This is of course a different case from mysql, because the API would be tightly embedded in the software and the licensing issue would affect mostly consultants, not companies doing internal development (like Google, in Luca’s example). If you think that WALL might be licensed in the same way, it might be even worse as WALL will certainly be a core part of any mobile application.

There is a solution to this, of course, a dual-licence. Also, special discounts are announced for companies buying consultancy.

I am curious to see how this will end. I hope the community will be able to find a feasible solution that will keep everyone happy.

References:

Chat with John Puterbaugh of Nellymoser

Last week in Las Vegas Nellymoser announced a version 3.5 of their platform. Reading from the press release:

New Mobile Services Extended With Rich, Interactive Widgets And Microsites, Accessed Across Multiple Platforms And Supported By In-Application Advertising

Following the press release, Nellymoser got in touch with me to have a talk about their announcement. I thought they must have contacted the wrong person as I’m not a journalist, but they explained they wanted to talk to me specifically because this is a product for developers. I have to admit this made me curious.

So this Monday I had a chat over the phone with John Puterbaugh, Founder and Chief Strategist and Betsy Zikakis, VP of Marketing. We skipped all the marketing stuff that is not exactly my business and John went straight to the point of why this product is interesting for developers.
Nellymoser has a number of agreements with US operators, premium messaging companies and media companies. They already have their services provided via operator decks (portals). Why not open the platform to other companies that might have interesting services? Well this sounds like a great plan to me. Nellymoser now gives access to media provided by their big partners, a chance to be listed (via their software) on big operator portals and, if you want it, also manage payments via their gateways.

Nellymoser is specialized in media provision so all the device detection and media adaptation happens on their side. What developers should care about is create compelling services and mix the media Nellymoser provides with their own, if they want to.
The pricing also seems interesting as you will have a chance to either pay a fixed fee (if you know the size of your business) or pay per transaction. It is not exactly a revenue sharing, but rather a fee per active user. This made me think of i-mode, I have to say. We have not talked about the details of the pricing so I just do not know, yet.

So what’s in for me? Why should it be interesting for me (I live in Italy, just FYI)?
Well the plan is to extend the platform over the summer and not only to let developers build sites for operator decks, but also for the open internet. They call them microsite, a name that I do not like very much, these will build the web of tomorrow! Still it’s good they are looking out of the window and I’m sure they are already seeing the potential.

After about 30 minutes of talk including some business and technical perspectives, I think this is a very good initiative and I look forward to see how it works and what are the tools available. I should be getting access to it in a few weeks. I’ll post more once I get that (and maybe after a few hundred dollars sold over the US operators. 😉 )

See a flash demo called VIP Access of sites will look like.

I also reviewed a similar service in the past, called Mobispirit, but I think Nellymoser is a step further.

“Over the Air” event in London

Make sure you note these dates on your calendar. On April 4-5 there will be a very exciting event in London called “Over the Air“. We are all mobile mammals (read fans and addicts) and this event is really the place to be: the topics will be anything that has to do with services provided over the air. It will not be limited to browsing, one of the most common topics of dotMobi, there will also be Android, iPhone web apps and native apps, J2ME and more.

If you are in London it’s a must, if you are not, it’s probably worth to start looking for a flight and a hotel.

I will be talking about DeviceAtlas, of course.

See you there.