Tag: mobile

Drupal + Nokia templates = GREAT mobile theme

Nokia has always had great resources for developers and designers and I am very pleased to note that they keep being ahead of the competition. Forum Nokia recently released some nice templates to help inspire designers and also make it easier for new comers to get started. This is all great, but what about the site owners? Creating a mobile presentation for their sites isn’t THAT easy. So, which are the most popular Open Source CMS platforms? Easily said, Drupal and WordPress.

Here I am today showing you a fully functional preview of a nice mobile theme that I designed based on the official Nokia templates. It comes with two design implementations one for low-end devices (will work on all Nokia devices, but should be good for any XHTML-capable browser) and one for high-end devices such a Series 60 (Symbian) and Maemo, but also iPhone, Palm Pre and Android – all running webKit!
Also, we have provided buttons and images in 4 different colours so you can personalise your design easily via the standard theme configuration menus.

The theme relies on an existing Drupal module called Mobile Plugin, so you will need to isntall that along with the plugin.

What should you do with this theme? Well, if you are lazy and all you want is to turn your Drupal site into a mobile-friendly site, just install the plugin and the theme and all your mobile visitors should be very pleased. On the other hand, if you agree with me that mobile is the future and that it’s the most exciting thing happening in technology today, what you should do is download the templates and see how you can further extend the theme and make it better and more the way you like it.

The project is Open Source and should very soon appear on drupal.org, so you are more than welcome to send feedback and improvements. In the meantime you can download a preview.

PS: If you use WordPress you might want to take a look at the WordPress Mobile Pack that has just implemented the same templates!

DISCLAIMER: This project was kindly sponsored by Forum Nokia

UPDATE: link to the preview has been removed, see the official project page for the final release.

Maps and navigation innovation

For quite a few years in-car navigation has been a very good business. Companies kept improving their hardware and selling every other year (if not within a year) a new device to their customers. I am talking about the navigation systems like TomTom and Garmin, not those that you buy integrated in your car, of course.

The interface had, over the years, small improvements and refinements, but hardly any major change. While Garmin was the leader up to 5 or 6 years ago, at least in Europe TomTom has taken a clear lead both in pricing and UI. Some might argue Garmin has better accuracy, but it’s not SOO much better, in my opinion. Companies like Navigon have tried some innovation, but they haven’t conquered enough market share, at least until now.

Then mobile devices entered the game. It happened in various small steps like the introduction of GPS chips and Nokia’s acquisition of NAVTEQ.
Also, Apple has proven that people LOVE maps on their phones and need something that is not necessarily a navigation system while driving. See for example slides 5 and 11 from this great presentation by Skyhook (the technology providers for location services on iPhones and other devices).

Nokia has come with some interesting application, service and business model, see the Ovi Maps and these 2 demo videos. It is very interesting, it is definitely going to hit Garmin and TomTom, but it’s still a paid service, so it will not kill the other businesses.

Apple has quitely acquired a company called Placebase. This confirms the interest of mobile device makers in location and maps services (and probably also adds to the current Google-Apple competition). Obviously, relying on Google’s Maps wasn’t good enough for Apple, hence expect some innovation here. It will have to be seen what they can achieve when competing with Nokia’s technology acquired from NAVTEQ and Google, it cannot be just eyecandy.

Now comes in Google with Android 2 and the new maps service. There’s a good quick look from TechCrunch, Google Redefines GPS Navigation Landscape: Google Maps Navigation For Android 2.0. Google’s service is going to be free to use and comes in an Open Source OS. Not only, it comes with some very interesting innovation in the UI and service such as the use of Street View, the ability to search for Points of Interest on your route and traffic alerts. Yes, points of interest have been there for a while, but how good are they? It doesn’t seem to me like they can be compared with Google Maps on the web. I expect this on-device service to be as good.

OpenStreetMap proves that you can create a good map with crowd sourcing and if Google is going to be in millions of phones within next year, it will not be hard to add a small button that makes you share “anonymous” data to Google so that they can track a lot of information with minimal effort (it’s not hard to guess there’s a motorway when you’re traveling at 150km/h on a straight line).

What is the future of companies like TomTom, Garmin, or even those that sold maps? Who can provide the level of detail that Google will have?

Nokia Mobile Web templates competition

For some reason I must have missed that there was yet another competition at Forum Nokia. The guys are really working hard on helping the community and giving good reasons to developers and designers to create great content for Nokia devices.

It’s almost over, but if you know how to do it, you might still make it before the deadline on Oct, 31st. See the details of the competition on their Wiki, Wiki mobile web templates contest instructions.

Best of luck!

Life is a great adventure

My last blog post was almost 3 months ago, I would not be surprised if no one is reading this any more. Before that I have been blogging very little. Twitter is taking a lot of inspiration, I admit, but also most of my “writing energies” have been focusing on mobiForge. Writing for mobiForge, as part of my dotMobi duties, has been great and offered great visibility, of course. My adventure with dotMobi is about to end, anyway, after more than 2 years it is time to move on. With that, I expect some more time for this blog.

A few ideas are already taking shape, but the reality is that I am going back to the white board and start thinking about new ideas and new projects. They might be in mobile or they might be somewhere else. Of course I think the future is ubiquitous, so mobile will have some space in any plan I will make, but the bottom line is that I will have some time for myself. Some time to think about what is exciting on the Internet today and maybe what is not quite as I would like it to be. From this, I expect some new exciting project will come.

Do you have a cool idea? Do you want to share thoughts? Let me know!

Sorry, your HTTP headers are incomplete

You might know by now that over the years I have developed a little fetish for HTTP request headers of mobile devices. At dotMobi this is a common reason to make fun of me, they let me discuss them for a little while and then either all walk away or just point out that I’m the only one who cares. Obviously, this is not helping very much my mental issues, so I’m here telling the world.

We all know how Apple is sometimes evil and how they tell everyone that the iPhone has a “full web browser” and is not mobile and bla, bla, bla. We know this is not really the case, but we certainly don’t want to ruin the only one thing in 10 years that might be making the mobile web take off!
The headers the iPhone sends do not provide a UAProf URL and all iPhones (2G, 3G and who knows next) all send the same User-Agent string where the only difference is the firmware revision. It is good if you want to know if it’s OS 1 or 2, useless if you want to know if it’s 3G, has GPS and so on.

Unfortunately it looks like Android is following the same path and not really helping developers. The G1 was the very first GooglePhone and everyone implemented a G1-specific UI or site. Hopefully more Android-based devices will come in the next few months and we will see much more activity on our websites, now, if this is true, be prepared for a new device detection nightmare. See these two User-Agents that we recorded in DeviceAtlas:

Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; U; Android 1.5; de-de; HTC Magic Build/CRA86) AppleWebKit/528.5+ (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/3.1.2 Mobile Safari/525.20.1
Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; U; Android 1.5; en-gb; HTC Magic Build/CRA71C) AppleWebKit/528.5+ (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/3.1.2 Mobile Safari/525.20.1

You might have guessed they come from an HTC Magic, the device that Vodafone should be releasing any day now. If you know how most device detection algorithms work you will know that they normally just walk the User-Agent string from left to right and try to match it with known strings. Notice how “de-de” and “en-gb” are before the string “HTC Magic” this will either break that search algorithm or make us record all possible combinations of languages.
But don’t panic, YET, the User-Agent string is not the only HTTP header that a browser will send when requesting some content. Since this is a mobile device (it IS a mobile device, right?) you might expect a UAProf URL. Even though UAProf has not solved all our issues, it was still one of the very few things we KNEW every mobile device would provide since probably year 2002 or so. It was not the case for the iPhone and the G1 and you will not be so surprised to discover that it is also missing with the HTC Magic.

I am sure I can thank HTC for this, not sure how much Google is responsible, surely they haven’t done much NOT to make it happen. I guess we’ll have to wait for some other vendor to come up with an Android-based device.

One last bit of my rant is about a NEW header that is added, instead of the Referrer, the browser sends a header called Origin, which is EXACTLY like the referrer, but with a different name! Good idea, isn’t it?

Google crawls and converts WML pages

I knew the Googlebot Mobile visited and stored results for XHTML-MP and WML pages and I assumed they would be used as results to mobile users.

It looks like not only mobile users get “desktop” results, but also the other way around.

I was searching, as usual, for some strange User-Agent string and I found this result:

The converted page looks OK in my browser, of course, but I have no clue what it says! 🙂

Swedish Beers @ MWC 2009

In the last two years, when going to the 3GSM first and MWC last year, I always joined Swedish Beers. While it is a very informal event it is actually very well populated and it’s a very good opportunity to have a good beer, if you like and to meet good guys in the mobile space.

This year I am definitely planning to join the event once again and I look forward to meet lots of mobilists there!

Thanks to Helen for arranging everything, of course!

PS: Yes, dotMobi is a sponsor, but we sponsor because it’s a great event!

WordPress Mobile Plugin by Andy Moore does dirty things

Last week I wanted to take a look at the recently released WordPress 2.7 and of course wanted to give it a go on a mobile. As you might have noticed I’m on Google’s blogger and there is, unfortunately, no mobile version, so a proper mobile plugin would be a big plus for me and a good reason to move away.

I download the tiny zip from the official site, opened the readme.txt file. The file itself did not tell much if not that it would make my blog mobile. Fair enough, I took the php file and copied it in wp-content/plugins. That is all that was apparently required to install and in fact in the admin interface I had a new plugin available, I selected it and enabled on my Mac. The site URL was a local one, of course, wordpress.local (and added to my hosts file to access it).

Looking for some further information I went back to the official site (that I won’t link) and notice that in homepage there’s a nice link mentioning that my wordpress.local is the latest site which installed the plugin! A bit surprised I opened the small PHP file and noticed that there are two calls, one on plugin activation and one on deactivation. Being PHP it was not so hard to find what it does and I was very disappointed with the discovery. On both events the plugin calls a remote API AND send an e-mail to Andy Moore mentioning the site name, URL, and the admin’t email, YES, YOUR E-MAIL address.
In my case, the SMTP server was down, so the e-mail did not get delivered, but to my great disappointment the API was reached and that is why my local install was mentioned on the website.

Nothing wrong has happened, in fact I’m pretty sure if Andy wanted to contact me he would definitely find a way, but it was very disturbing to discover that this happens without letting the user know. If I had been a bit smarter I would have looked at the code and I would have discovered it, the problem is that the average wordpress user will not bother to look at the code and will probably not even be capable of understanding what’s going on. We are not all developers and my impression is that Andy is relying exactly on the inability of his users to disable the feature. The software is GPL and everyone is welcome to look at and change it and that is exactly why I did not even bother to look at it, I took it granted that nothing bad would happen.

In case you wanted to disable this functionality (but it’s probably too late now, I admit), what you should do is open wordpress-mobile.php, find the function wordpress_mobile_plugin_activate (it’s at line 1664 in version 1.3), go to the first line of the function and just add the following line:
return true;

Do the same for the function wordpress_mobile_plugin_deactivate (line 1673 in version 1.3).

Andy has definitely spent time to get this plugin working and maintaing it and I think it’s perfectly fair for him to ask for money and ask his users to provide usage details, but asking and taking are different operations, I my opinion.