Tag: Mobile Web

Building a mobile device test suite – blog post

When I wrote my first blog post about joining dotMobi and launching a new device database I cross–posted on my blog and on dev.mobi’s blog. That seemed OK as I thought the announcement was big, was about work and personal life, from now on, I will try to keep posts that are dotMobi oriented on dev.mobi and other posts (technical and personal) here.

Anyway, since dotMobi, mobile devices and programming in general are so much part of my life, I think it’s OK to post a trackback to the blog posts I make on dev.mobi.

This week I wrote an article about building a test suite for mobile devices. WURFL had one, I later started to build a new one for WURFL, again, but never got to complete it. dotMobi will develop a test suite along with the device database, so this blog post is about that.

Building a mobile device test suite

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

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!

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)?