Dan’s Blog (2.0)

“By the pricking of my thumbs, something wicked this way comes.” Well, thumb-surfers the world over took a step closer to being able to experience rich Mobile Web applications last week with the release of the Web Integration Compound Document (WICD — pronounced wicked). I wrote about WICD in InformIT almost two years ago. It’s taken that long to shake out the bugs in the specification. In the mean time, a lot has happened on the mobile Web front, but the WICD specification is more important than ever. Why? Because it promises a predictable environment for creating rich Web applications across browser implementations that integrate rich vector-based graphics and animations that can scale to different screen sizes and layouts. It’s like Ajax on SVG steroids. Opera already provides partial support in Opera Mobile (and has committed full support), but in order to truly deliver on that promise, it needs to be deployed across multiple browser platforms. Now that it has gone to “Candidate Recommendation” stage in the W3C, it will have that chance.

Filed by Daniel Appelquist at 16:04 under Mobile Web, W3C
Tags: MobileWeb, OperaMobile, W3C, WICD

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The hard drive on my Powerbook was giving up the ghost. First, it started making a high-pitched squeal. Then it started “sticking” intermittently - the machine would just hang there until I gave it a bit of a shake - very unsettling. Finally it just refused to boot.

Gentlemen, we can rebuild him.

Three weeks ago, I received my Powerbook 12″ back from Daystar technologies.

It left me with a 60 gig hard drive (dead), a 1.33 GHz G4 processor and 768 meg of ram. Having undergone essentially a brain transplant, it has returned to me with a 1.67 GHz G4 processor, a 120gig hard drive and 1.25 gig of ram. Total price including shipping was £437.88. Was it worth it? I only paid £850 or so for the thing off the apple reconditioned store in summer 2004. I could have bought a refurb Macbook for £580 today. So from a price / features perspective it may not have been the most rational choice. However, I really don’t like the Macbook — for one, I can’t see myself getting used to that keyboard and for another the thing’s just too damn heavy! I really like the form factor of my 12″ Powerbook so I was reluctant to give that up. But that was the choice I was faced with.
Well… having used it was three weeks, I have to say that the operation was a complete success.

The only issue is that this thing gets hot. Subjectively, it doesn’t get that much hotter than it used to. I can still comfortably use it on my lap. But the fan is nearly always running at low speeds. Before the upgrade, I only used to hear the fan kick in when I was doing something
comute-intensive (for example, the few times I booted up Second Life, it started to sound like a jet engine). According to my “istat nano” system monitor widget the normal operating (CPU) temperature tends to hover around 131ºF.

One other minor issue I had was with Apple’s backup software. Upon restoring, I found that, when asked to do a “full” backup of my personal folder, it apparently did not back up my iTunes music or my iPhoto photos. Luckily, I had recent copies of both on our home machine so I didn’t lose too much, but I found this rather annoying, to say the least. Something to watch out for.

The speed boost is definitely noticeable, and is probably due to a combination of all three upgraded elements (CPU, memory and disk driver — which is significantly faster than the old drive). The result is a machine which feels new, and which for my uses remains more than adequate.

Am I a happy customer? Definitely. Daystar was also a pleasure to work with. They were friendly and efficient and there was always someone on the end of the line when I wanted to know how things were going. It was only after receiving my Powerbook back, by the way, that I learned that the lead “tech” who had been working on my powerbook and who I had been talking to all this time, Gary Dailey, was the president of the company. Thanks, Gary, and all the rest of the Daystar staff for rescuing and upgrading my Powerbook!

Late-breaking news: there are renewed rumors of a light-and-thin Powerbook making its way into the Apple line-up sometime soon, so I am now doubly sure I made the right choice.

Filed by Daniel Appelquist at 23:44 under Technology
Tags: daystar, powerbook

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On my recent trip to Greece with my wife to celebrate our 10th wedding anniversary, I made myself one promise: I would not use the Web for the whole week. By and large, I kept this promise, however I was not completely off the grid. While we were island hopping, I was snapping pictures with my N73 and using Zonetag to send them up to FlickR. The results are available here.

ZoneTag is a nifty downloadable application and service, developed by Yahoo! Research, which allows you to (among other things) upload images directly to FlickR from your camera phone. Of course, there are plenty of applications that allow you to do this, but the ZoneTag difference is that by using the CellID, and cross-referencing this against a database of CellIDs that they maintain, ZoneTag can accurately geotag your photos even if your device doesn’t have a a GPS built in. ZoneTag also learns CellID locations through users using the system and telling it their location. It’s “leveraging collective intelligence.”

Anyway, apart from being a bit of geeky fun, there was a method to this madness. Publishing these photos allowed our kids (being looked after by my saintly mother and sister) to keep track of our travels. It was like being able to send postcards instantaneously. And unlike MMS, sending an image with Zonetag does not compress / reduce the images to the Nth degree - the original images with their original detail are sent up. Now, granted this is the Greek islands and you can pretty much just wave a camera around snapping randomly and get great pictures, but I actually think these turned out pretty well. My only complaint (a Nokia complaint, not a Zonetag one) is the high level of compression (which I’ve complained about before) and some softness in the corners (which to a certain extent can’t be avoided with small lenses, but I would have expected more from a “Carl Zeiss” lens. (Carl must be spinning in his grave.)

I was also trying out a new product from Yahoo’s Berkeley labs - Zurfer. Zurfer is a Java application that allows you to browse FlickR images. The Yahoo! labs guys call it Zonetag’s “little brother.” It’s got a slick and responsive user interface that’s simple but also powerful in its task: enabling you to browse photos. You can browse your own photos, your contacts’ photos or (more interestingly) photos around you.

What would I like to see more of from these guys? For starters, I’d like to be able to upload pictures after the fact, and in batch, instead of having to go through the process for each and every photo I take when that photo is taken. I’d also like the ZoneTag UI to be built more into the camera/viewer functions (send to ZoneTag should be another option under “send” when I’m viewing images). As for Zurfer, I really like the concept, and it was fun to use, but I wonder if this couldn’t be built inside Nokia’s Series-60 browser as a Web App and thereby spare people the hassle of downloading yet another app to their phone. Then again, if it were inside the browser I wouldn’t have been able to keep my promise.

Filed by Daniel Appelquist at 20:50 under Travel, mobile 2.0
Tags: Greece, N73, Nokia, Yahoo!Labs, ZoneTag, Zurfer

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James Pearce (CTO of dotMobi) wrote a great article yesterday about the impact of the iPhone on the industry and what it means for them. Of course, he’s right. What the iPhone is doing is helping the Web along to become a mobile medium. Does this make dotMobi or efforts like the W3C Mobile Web Initiative obsolete?

Let me pose the question another way. In 5 years’ time, when the majority of Web usage is from mobile devices, will we all be using the browsers on these devices to pan, scan and zoom around pages that were designed for large screen desktop PCs? I think we can agree that this would be a kind of dystopian vision of the future of the Web. Apple certainly agrees. That’s why they released a set of guidelines on ptimizing Web Applications and Content for iPhone. These guidelines, while developed by Apple in house specifically to match the capabilities of the iPhone browser, bear a striking resemblance to the W3C Mobile Web Best Practices and the dotMobi Developer Guide in their approach, language and purpose. All these documents are trying to change the mind-set of developers to get them to think about both the technical differences between mobile devices and PCs (for example, Apple saying “a touch-screen is not a mouse”) and also the differences in usage and behavior that need to be taken into account in designing for mobile use.

The main difference between the Apple guidelines and the dotMobi and W3C documents are the level of browser technology assumed. Because the dotMobi and W3C guidelines are targeting a wide range of form factors, devices and browsers (some of which are fairly bare-bones) they encourage the developer to not rely on scripting, advanced CSS or other technologies that are usually not well supported in these devices (while encouraging developers to use these capabilities when they do know that the device/browser in question supports them). Apple’s guidelines are targeting only one browser on only one device, so they can afford to tell developers to use Web technologies like CSS, scripting and AJAX.

In two weeks’ time, however, the W3C Mobile Web Best Practices working group (which I chair and which includes dotMobi as a member) will be meeting in London. This meeting will be the kick off of a new phase of work for the group. We will be working on a successor document to the basic guidelines document issued earlier this year. The new document will provide guidelines to developers targeting more advanced devices, like the iPhone; devices where you can assume a higher level of capability. I have called on Apple to contribute their developer guidelines into this effort. Why? Because it’s in their best interest to make sure that Web sites and applications developed for the iPhone also work across a range of other devices, and that mobile Web applications designed according to industry standard guidelines work seamlessly on their devices.

The iPhone will herald a whole generation of advanced Web-capable mobile devices. In this context, a converged set of Web developer guidelines for such devices will be a boon to the developer community and will help create the necessary conditions for the evolution of the Web into the Mobile space, an evolution which Alan Moore, in a very thoughtful essay, calls the dawn of the 7th Mass Medium.

It’s the Web. But not as we know it.

Filed by Daniel Appelquist at 16:37 under Mobile Web
Tags: AlanMoore, dotMobi, iPhone, MobileWeb, MWI, W3C

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I posted a brief review of Jaiku’s mobile site at Mobile Web Review. Hop over to Betavine to check it out.

Filed by Daniel Appelquist at 16:55 under Mobile Web, mobile 2.0
Tags: Betavine, jaiku, mobile2.0

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How did it happen that Europe is looking on longingly as 700,000 U.S. consumers are experiencing the mobile technology equivalent of sliced bread? Only one week ago, we were hearing about how Apple’s unreasonable demands were making it impossible for European operators to even think about doing business with them. Now mobile operators are falling over each-other to offer iPhone exclusively in their territories. We are truly through the looking glass.

Filed by Daniel Appelquist at 23:41 under Mobility
Tags: iPhone

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