I committed to CVS the latest update of WURFL. It’s a big update, it includes many devices that I added myself, many UAProfs imported, contribution from Alejandro Guerrieri about South American devices and contribution from Pau to fix devices without actual_device_root or without brand and model.
We also changed a few user agents removing for example /1.0 in the “default user agent” to make it easier to match firmware revisions against the user agents that we have in WURFL.
This change might break your patches, if you use any.
Please, download and try it and let me know of any problem.
According to the CVS, changes are something like 4567 new lines and 978 removed lines, that is to say, about 1000 lines updated and 3500 added!
actual_device_root are 1293 now!!!
As soon as we are done with possible errors in this update I would like to release 2.0.2 and then we can continue to add new devices.
Let me know about problems that you encounter.
I haven’t committed changes to CVS for a while now. The last update is 5 weeks old, Tue Dec 27 17:34:25 2005 UTC, according to SourceForge’s CVS.
That is a long time for WURFL. If you were used to check the CVS regularly, you will know that I often committed about twice a week.
I just wanted to let you know that work hasn’t stopped AT ALL. I have a TON of updates in the works. Many are already considered trusted, in my opinion, but I have a few things that are stopping me from committing. While CVS should be a place to upload things “in development” I know that many companies use the CVS version in production.
The current XML is not safe for production and has some information that could be entirely wrong. Why? I received a few contributions that I need to check and, as we all know, it is often hard to find information about some devices and from some brands.
Don’t worry, A BIG update will soon come.
We have just released the latest update of WURFL.
It includes three months or more of updates, many MANY corrections and new devices added or enriched.
Download and install immediately if you want the latest version on your sites.
Thank you to all the contributors, I have worked hard to include all the contributions that I have received, I know I have left some behind, but we had to release it sometime! Waiting to include every single contribution or comment would have meant waiting even more to release a new version and I don’t think it would have been a good idea. I received many inquiries of when a new version would have come out. We could not wait anymore.
In WURFL we have two capabilities that define the make and model of a device. They are brand_name and model_name in the product_info group. These capabilities are not very useful from a software development point of view, but are VERY useful when you want to make some statistics about your visitors for example.
Another capability that can be used in combination with the brand and model is actual_device_root=”true”, it’s not a capabilities actually, but an attribute of the device tag. If you cycle all the WURFL device definitions and pick only the ones with the actual_device_root attribute set to true (this attribute is not inherited by children devices) you will basically get a list of real devices. By real devices I mean devices that you can go and buy in a shop, not the subversions or virtual devices. Example: Motorola V3. This is a really useful function that you can use to build lists of devices. If you need your users to pick their device, they will hardly tell you the user agent and firmware subversion, but they can certainly look at it and pick the brand and model from a list (using thumbnails might help too).
Going back to what I was saying above, this can eventually be very useful. The device name must be correct, though!
A few days ago I was updating some Sprint devices. I have downloaded the really nice and complete Sprint_PCS_Vision_Device_Specifications.pdf and started searching for the devices I needed, my colleague provided a short list. One of the devices was, for example, the VI600.
I open the PDF and search for VI600, and I read: “3.4 Sprint PCS Vision Phone VI600” (Page 10). There’s a nice table with all the information about the device screen, images, J2ME, ringtones, etc. First row says:
Vendor: Audiovox
Model: CDM-8450
Another device, the VM4500. “3.46 Sprint PCS Vision Video Phone VM4500 by Sanyo®”, page 52.
Vendor: Sanyo
Model: SCP-5500
Now I wonder, how am I supposed to configure this device? Is it a Sanyo SCP-5500 or a VM4500? It makes a big difference! This happens with most devices on the Sprint network.
UAProfiles produced by Sprint says the device is the “SCP-5500”, for example. On the box you see “VM4500”, but then on the side it says “Sanyo SCP-5500”. Is this just confuse us?
Thanks to Jim McLachlan a new tool to access information in WURFL is available.
He kindly sent us an email a few days ago with a new version, but also improved it a lot in just a few days.
The tool is a Java GUI that lets you read data from WURFL. There is a lot of data to read so the interface might look a little crowded, but you really get access to everything in WURFL. What is so cool about it? That you can read a single device’s capabilities OR you might search for devices that have specific characteristics. I really can’t remember how many times I heard the question:”How many devices can play MIDI ringtones?” or “I have this list of devices that do this and that, is it complete?”.
Well if you happened to hear the same quesiton a 100 times, mDevInf is for you. Get it from the homepage on sourceforge where you will also be able to read help and see some nice screenshots:
http://mdevinf.sourceforge.net/
While exchanging a few emails I said that I was going to install it on a few clients and the day after he came up with an update that lets you use JAva WebStart so you can install it on a server and all clients will download and use that centralized version. Why is this cool? Because when you need to update it with a new WURFL version all you need to do is update the file on the server! Jim also provided a test version from java.net.
Give it a try and you’ll love him!
Reading Chris DiBona’s blog I found this interesting post on another blog.
Reduce the risk, hire from open source (Loud Thinking)
I think it makes some very interesting points.
Working on the WURFL project has taken a lot of my time, both working time and spare time. Sometimes most of my spare time and none of my working time.
I am sure this witnesses my passion into the project itself, programming and the mobile world.
Working in the WURFL project brought me some really interesting contacts, of course and hopefully this will be reflected in more opportunities in the future.
My current contract and the last 2 years of my working time have happened thanks to WURFL and the contacts that it generated.
Often the interview was really a few minutes and something like “We want to do this and that, can you do it?”.
Sometimes I was surprised by how quickly this happened and how people wasn’t really much interested in my CV. I think this also confirms how CV’s can sometimes not mean much (both on the good and the bad side).
I wonder how could you understand if someone is good at programming or has good analisys qualities in a 30 minutes interview.
I originally started this blog to post freshnews about WURFL.
I understand that many people visit our website on sourceforge (http://wurfl.sf.net/), but I think that not as many read the wmlprogramming mailing list.
I thought that writing a blog might keep more people up-to-date.
On the other side there aren’t that many updates. I always work on WURFL, but there are not sensational updates. It’s a hard work and very time consuming, but I understand we don’t have anything sensational to write every single week.
I ended up writing posts about FireFox, my Apple-passion and so on. I wonder how many are really interested in that (and I also always wondered why should people be interested in blogs in general, but it looks like I’m one of the few thinking this). You will now ask yourself why would I write a blog if I think that most people from around the world will not give a damn about it. The answer is simple: testing. See how it works and how it comes out. How much interest is generated.
But now let’s get back to WURFL. If you are not updating directly from CVS regularly you are not very up-to-date about the changes. Thanks to Pau, one of our regular contributors, we are adding a TON of updated max_deck_size’s. This is done thanks to a script he prepared that checks values passed by the Openwave gateway (MAX_PDU_SIZE) that in general refers to the max_deck_size.
On the same topic, someone asked on the mailing list (1-2 days ago) if max_deck_size could be applied to xHTML and i-mode pages too.
For i-mode, as always, the answer is pretty simple: YES. To avoid adding a new capability we decided to recycle the one we already had.
For xHTML(-MP), as always, the answer is not so simple. There are some browsers, from Nokia and other manufacturers that may load pages of different size if it’s xHTML or WML. So the answer is basically “no”. When importing data I always try to keep the smaller (and safer) value.
We are now evaluating if we should add a new capability.
If you are interested and think it’s valuable you might consider promoting it and maybe become a mentor (work to keep it updated).
I also keep working to bring more and more user agents into the XML and parse UAProf’s to add the basic data. UAProf is very useful for us to determine and import basic information such as brand, model, screen size, j2me basic capabilities, MMS and more, but we do need developers’ support to update all the other more detailed (and valuable) info.
Please, keep your emails coming.
Some other things are happening in the underground, but I really can’t talk about them yet and also don’t want to make them public until they are real.
Stay tuned.
RSS feeds have been available for quite a while now.
As an old timer Opera user, I have always believed that setting a number (5-7) of homepages would bring me to the sites I visit most often. Then I would browse from there.
Lately RSS feeds are more and more common so I eventually decided to give it a try. I downloaded NetNewsWire (for Mac, of course!) and this was the beginning of the end. The software (unfortunately) includes a HIGH number of feeds. Of course I subscribed to a bunch of them PLUS all the pages I regularly visit. Now I have about 100 news to read every day and if I don’t read them regularly they GROW UP!
Now I’m addicted.
I have to say it’s pretty cool. Some sites offer the full news through the RSS, some other will give you a short description and then you may read the full news on their site. Both solution are cool to me.
It looks like many people likes this new way of staying informed… And probably I’m one of the last geeks to discover this “new technology”.
Anyway, going back to the wireless business, a couple of people already started to port this “new technology” to the people on the move.
Here are the links:
pixs.jp
www.ifeedyou.com
In my previous post I talked about Marcus. He’s the author of pics.jp.
Jérôme Chevillat is the author of Ifeedyou and uses wurfl for the multimarkup rendering.
Both services let you read the news title and the short descriptions, the problem arises when you need to read the full article. Maybe while you’re on the move you don’t need to read the entire article. Too lengthy texts might not be so comfortable to read on a normal device like my V3.
I just got an e-mail from Erik, with a link to this page:
http://www.dagbladet.no/kultur/2005/09/01/442083.html
I don’t speak Norwegian, so I can’t translate, but basically dagbladet is an important newspaper and news-site. They also provide WAP access to their site.
The news announces the full support of the PSP by their site and guess what? They use WURFL for the markup and image rescaling.
I am really glad to see this, thank you Erik.
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