Mobiles and different cultures

The Data Mining blog makes a good point about how different cultures can produce different opportunities for mobile applications. The comparison is between Japan and the US but this would also apply to Europe. This is definately something to consider when designing applications for different mobile environments and a good reason not to have a fixed resolution website or mobile application.

Best Platform for Mobile Development

Vivek Jishtu provides a review of 8 different platforms for client side mobile development. He looks at SDKs, languages, cost and ease of use from the perspective of a hobbiest programmer.

http://vivekjishtu.blogspot.com/2007/09/best-platform-for-mobile-development.html

Mosh by Nokia

Forum Nokia is currently trialing MOSH (“MObilize and SHare”). Regardless of your mobile device’s manufacturer or make, MOSH enables you to create, collect and share your content and applications in a community setting. Create, upload, collect and share applications (like games, software mashups, videos, blogs, music and photos) all from your mobile.

http://mosh.nokia.com/

Open Source Goes Mobile workshop

Forum Nokia, is hosting the Open Source Goes Mobile workshop at the Nokia offices in San Francisco, Calif., on Thursday, August 9, 2007. This half-day event will instruct you on how to port your existing open source applications to the Nokia S60 smartphone platform using the Open C SDK. Speakers will include experts from the Nokia S60, Forum Nokia and Symbian OS teams. The recently-released Open C plug-in provides familiar, standard C function libraries on the S60 platform, enhancing developer productivity and reducing the time it takes to bring an application to market. With Open C, developers can reuse existing code and focus on maximizing the unique mobility aspects of their applications. Prizes will be given out during the event, including Nokia S60 3rd Edition smartphones.

Ubuntu Mobile

The Ubuntu Developer Summit in Seville discussed the first release of a mobile edition of Ubunto ,to work on the new low power Intel platform. The edition will be in October with Ubuntu 7.10

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/6634195.stm
http://www.ubuntu.com/

Ubuntu is an African word meaning 'Humanity to others', or 'I am what I am because of who we all are'. The Ubuntu distribution brings the spirit of Ubuntu to the software world.

Blogger Mobile

For US Bloggers there's a new Mobile Service from Google's Blogger.

Without needing any computer, a user can simple send pictures to blogger with a caption and they will be posted on a brand new blog. People with existing blogs can have their pictures delivered there instead. Potential uses could include amateur journalism, holiday reporting or just sharing your views of the world.

http://help.blogger.com/bin/answer.py?answer=42448

For us in the UK we will have to wait till this is supported and in the meantime those with txt to email gateways can use the Mail to Blogger functionality to post text based blogs. Blogger also had an audio blog function but this has been discontinued, Gabcast and Hibcast are commercial services that replace that functionality.

Web 2.0 on Mobiles

Spencer Kelly from the BBC's Click show discusses how Web 2.0 is being brought to Mobiles for example Vodafone will be allowing customers to access their MySpace pages and upload videos to YouTube.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/click_online/6389469.stm

Vodafone has already been providing users with picture sharing via their Vodafone live! studio product and video from Sky.

Link Rel=Alternative Media=Handheld

A tip, I gleaned via the Google Webmaster help pages.

You may request that a redirect for the user to an alternate page for handheld media.
In the section of HTML add a link

<link rel="alternate" media="handheld" href="alternate_page.htm" />

The alternate page can then be adjusted for use on mobiles.

A similar link can be done to have an alternative stylesheet for mobile pages.

More details on the Link element at That Standards Guy

This technique can also be used to help make your pages more accessible to your users.

Winder in Helsinki

Award winning journalistm, Davey Winder has been visiting F-Secure in Helsinki to learn about all kinds of Malware including mobile phone viruses and trojans. Read more about this in the Jan 2007 edition of PCPro, available on your news stands now.

A simple Motorola Phone

Well there would be little point in looking for this phone in your web logs. Motorola's latest creation has 8 hours of talk time and a massive 12 days of standby time but no internet access. It manages this feat with some clever technology and by removing all of the gadgets that are becoming common on phones. It's truly a mobile phone not a mobile TV station/science lab/recording studio.

Its unlikely to be available in the UK, as Motorola is aiming this phone at the growing Indian mobile telephone market
http://www.technologyreview.com/read_article.aspx?id=17663&ch=nanotech&sc=

Ringing The Changes - The Then, Now And Wow! Of Seamless Mobility

An IET London Lecture

IET London, The 2006 Mountbatten Memorial Lecture
Date: 1st November 2006
"Ringing The Changes - The Then, Now And Wow! Of Seamless Mobility"
Lecture by Sir David Brown, Chairman of Motorola

Both Institution members and non-members are invited
Venue: The IET, Savoy Place, London, WC2R 0BL

IET London Branch will be hosting an informal networking event with cash bar immediately following the lecture, in the Kelvin Bar.

In the 2006 Mountbatten Lecture, Sir David Brown, Chairman of Motorola Ltd and a former President of the IEE, will tell the story of mobile communications from the beginning of the 20th century to the future choices made possible by the unprecedented degrees of seamlessness of communications that are in prospect.He will discuss the implications of seamless mobility for engineers, and focus on some of the disruptive technologies likely to change the mobilecommunications landscape. He will illustrate the seamlessly mobile future from a range of userperspectives, and will dwell on the potential socioeconomic benefits. Both Institution members and non-members are invited to join us. Please indicate your attendance on the registration form.

Lecture: The 2006 Mountbatten Memorial Lecture
Date & Time: 1st November 2006,
Networking and refreshments 17:30 - 18:30.
Lecture 18:30 - 20:00
Cost: Free
Venue: The IET, Savoy Place, London, WC2R 0BL

Registration: see http://www.theiet.org/events/mountbatten/

Tools for Mobile Development - Emulators

Unless you have a free phone then to develop a mobile site its best to develop things from the desktop.

One useful tool is an emulator this allows you to confirm that your pages conform to standard and also view what they look like on a small screen.

There is a simple emulator online from the .mobi people.
http://emulator.mtld.mobi/emulator.php

I am also trying out the OpenWave simulator and the nokia simulator.
http://developer.openwave.com/dvl/
http://forum.nokia.com/ (requires registration)

When a mobile phone accesses an internet site it is doing this via a gateway. The gateway is provided by your mobile operator or ISP and converts the WAP commands from the phone into HTTP commands for the web server. The simulator may also need a WAP gateway (also called WAP Proxy)


In the Openwave software this is built in, for the Nokia emulator you will also need to install proxy software.

PHP-Nuke and HawHaw

I wanted to quickly mobile enable a site based on PHP Nuke so I created the following index.wml file:

  require_once("mainfile.php");
  require("hawhaw.inc.php");
  $myPage = new HAW_deck("PSTOIC - The Alumi Association of the Student Television of Imperial College");

  $myTitle = new HAW_text("Latest news from PSTOIC", HAW_TEXTFORMAT_BOLD);
  $myTitle->set_br(1);
  $myPage->add_text($myTitle);

  //Example from news/index.php
  $result = $db->sql_query("SELECT sid, catid, aid, title, time, hometext, bodytext, comments, counter, topic, informant, notes, acomm, score, ratings FROM ".$prefix."_stories $qdb $querylang ORDER BY sid DESC limit 5");
  while ($row = $db->sql_fetchrow($result)) {

  $title = filter($row['title'], "nohtml");
  $time = $row['time'];
  $mobitext = substr(filter($row['hometext'], "nohtml"),0,50);
  $myText1 = new HAW_text("* " . $title . " - " . $mobitext );
  $myText1->set_br(1);
  $myPage->add_text($myText1);

 }

  $myText1 = new HAW_text("---");
  $myText1->set_br(1);
  $myPage->add_text($myText1);
  $myPage->create_page();

Using HawHaw as a redirect

HawHaw is a toolkit to create universal mobile applications using PHP libraries. It's very good at simplifying the creation of mobile pages for multiple platforms and allows you to preview those pages via your desktop browser which can simplifies testing. For details see www.hawhaw.de

However if you are providing your sites from the same server and want to havesignificantly different sites for your mobile vs. wired users then you don'twant to be limited by the HawHaw emulator for the desktop clients. The following simple approach allows a switch between pages to be made dependanton the client's capabilities. It does not rely on BrowseCap.ini or GetBrowserfunction to work. Thanks to Norbert Huffschmid for explaining what I was doing wrong with my experiments.

1) Create a page for HTML (in my case it was simply the old Index.html) and rename it to index2.html. You can't use index.htm as that would be used first.

2) Create a page for mobiles clients, either manually or via HawHaw. In this case it's called index.wml.php

3) Create a page index.wml as below. This will be the page that all clients will be routed through. It will do a simple detection of the facilities of your browser and switch to the appropriate pages. (see separate article for setting up the index page correctly)

require_once("hawhaw.inc.php");
$myPage = new HAW_deck("Test desk");
if $myPage->ml == HAW_HTML & & $myPage->pureHTML)
{
header("Location: /index2.html");
die;
}
else
{
include "index.wml.php";
}
?>

Nokia6100 and the Unknown file type

It would appear that the earlier Nokia versions, i.e. my 6100 are not so clever when it comes to detecting what the Web server is sending it. If you give it a .php file then even if Apache is telling you it's of type "text/vnd.wap.wml" then it will error with a cryptic "Unknown file type" message. You need to send .wml files for the phone to be happy.

The work around for this issue is not too complex:

In the .htaccess file you need to add a few lines. The first adds an extra option for the index file.

DirectoryIndex index.wml index.php index.html index.htm

Then we add some code to tell apache to use php to process the index.wml


AddType text/vnd.wap.wml .wml
AddHandler application/x-httpd-php .wml


Finally in the .wml file we put the relavent php code to generate the .wml code for the WAP clients.