Tag: mobile

Article: User Tracking, Sessions and Cookies

dotMobi just published a short article that I wrote that I think can be interesting for many. The article is an overview to navigation sessions and the usage of cookies to achieve it. One important part of sessions is also being able to track users so this is also mentioned in the article.

I think it’s an interesting article and should answer some of the questions that I have seen on wmlprogramming, mobiledesign and dev.mobi recur quite often. Maybe it’s because I wrote it, but I think it should be useful to many.

You can read it here, User Tracking, Sessions and Cookies

SONY BMG Music Entertainment and DADA form joint venture to create a leading U.S. direct-to-consumer digital and mobile entertainment service

My friends at DADA pinged me to share this breaking news, DADA and Sony BMG are partnering in the US and making a new company called DADA Entertainment.

I hope this is a sign that media companies have understood that they can’t keep just selling CD’s. This seems to me like when in the early eighties people thought that TV and VCR would have killed the radio. Then 5-10 years ago many said that internet and free information would have killed the newspapers.
Guess what? All of these media are still around and the winning move is, of course, to put one foot in each media and get the best from every platform!

Full PR on DADA’s company site, SONY BMG Music Entertainment and DADA form joint venture to create a leading U.S. direct-to-consumer digital and mobile entertainment service

MovaMessenger Review

MovaMessenger is a multi-protocol IM client for your mobile, developed using J2ME, which means that it will run on most mobile devices. MovaMessenger was developed by MovaFone, the same company that did MovaMail, so the general layout is very similar.

First off I went on the website, read that it supports most IM-protocols and started wondering about how it works. Is it based on Jabber? Is it using libpurple? I don’t know, unfortunately (maybe I should sniff some TCP connections on the mobile…).
On the site I could decide if I wanted to download directly or subscribe online. I decide to register and this has been a good idea as I could define one service account immediately from the web, much more comfortable than using the phone keyboard. Once defined login, password, my phone number (what do they need it for?) and setting up one account (AIM) I was presented with a URL to type in the phone and download my personalized version.
I would have liked to be able to define all the protocols from the registration. Also, since I provided my phone number (in international format, of course!), I would have liked to receive a wappush to download the JAR and not type it manually. Not a very long URL, but still a wappush would have been nicer.

I downloaded the application, 137KB, it took just a couple of minutes and I was ready to go. After downloading and starting the application I saw a short explanation message and then was asked to create an account… Hmm… I thought I had defined everything from the website. Anyway, I typed in everything and of course it said the account already existed. I chose to go to the main menu and not try to provide new parameters. Once in the main menu I could pick “Login”, account and password were already there and I logged in. Once logged in the AIM account was already there, configured. I added ICQ and MSN profiles. It took a bit to login, but eventually I was online and my buddies started popping up.
Scrolling up and down seems sometimes a bit slow, but I’m not sure it’s MovaMessenger’s fault or rather my W810i’s slow CPU. I should probably test on some other device. Keeping the up or down key pressed jumps to either the top or the bottom of the list. I have to say that I also instinctively tried to scroll pages up and down using “left” and “right” keys as in Opera Mini, but that actually zoomed on the current buddy.

Chatting with friends is as easy as you’d expect it, pick a user from your list, click on “Chat” and start typing. On my W810i, the “chat” button is on the right softkey, I would have expected it to be on the middle button of the phone (the one in the middle of the 4 directional arrows). The chat menu opens a window where you see your last messages and can type new ones (of course!). Standard emoticons are automatically converted into icons, the others are shown as they were typed in. Quite acceptable from a multi-protocol client that also runs on a low-power, slow-network device.
The left softkey lets me access the options menu where I can “set Status”, “invite Buddy”, configure “Services” or make changes on the selected buddy such as renaming.
Clicking the middle button on my W810i opens a popup where I can configure the phone number of the remote buddy. I can either type it manually or pick it up from the addressbook. Once set I can press a button to start a call. I don’t see the use of it, right now, but maybe some day I’ll need it.

Every time I’m idling and I receive a new message, the phone vibrates. Nice.
Users who sent you a message get a little message bubble next to their name. It’s a bit slow to scroll up and down searching for the sender’s name. This could be improved, maybe popping them up or having a quick menu item from the Chat window.

A bit annoying that every time I open a chat with someone, the remote user receives the following “advertisement”:

“Hello, I’m now using MovaMessenger on my mobile phone to talk to you. If you’d like to chat from your mobile phone you can get MovaMessenger for free at http://www.movamessenger.com”

The application seems solid, even if I have used it for only a few hours.
I can’t check my data traffic in real-time, unfortunately, but I’m sure I’ll see a spike in my next bill. IM on the phone is certainly VERY interesting, but I need a flatrate for data, before I can consider it for full time usage.
Also, being a Java app (not MovaFone’s issue, of course) doesn’t make it entirely integrated with my phone in the sense that I either open it and keep it running, OR put it to sleep. Would be great to have it running in the background, maybe Sun and OMA should think about this seriously.

iPhone developers guidelines

Apple has posted the developers’ guidelines for content aimed to the iPhone.

It is good to see that they are telling developers to pay a lot of attention to the fact that the device is not a desktop PC and despite the fact that it supports web standards such as HTML 4.01 and XHTML 1.0, it still has some constraints like missing a mouse and a small screen.
I also appreciate very much the strong suggestion of sticking to the standards, you really want to keep things simple for the iPhone to process and using weird tags or strange constructs in your markup is not a good way to make the browser’s life easy.

Go ahead, get started with the development, as soon as you’re done reading Optimizing Web Applications and Content for iPhone.

ATAC Roma improves the services for mobile users

I can’t really say “I just received” as this e-mail is dated back June, 1st, still I think it’s very good news. My friends at 01design have officially launched the new services for mobile users for ATAC Roma. ATAC Roma is the company that takes care of all public transportation in Rome, quite a good example of how a service should be tailored for the mobile context.

I went to try to service, but apparently you need to have a subscription with ATAC Roma, which I don’t have. This sounds like a big limitation, as I’d be happy to be able to access news and updates even if I’m just a tourist. I hope this is just a limited time closed service and that it will be open to all.

ATAC used to have a WAP site developed on top of WURFL, it sounds like the mobile section of the services have worked out and they decided to go with a more complete service that includes updates, news and so on.

The site is optimized for Opera Mini. Again, too bad I could not test it. I will look for a test account and update, if possible.

Well done!

WURFL PHP tools Version 2.1 released

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. 🙂

iPhone+Safari+Web 2.0+Google=Mobile Widget

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)?