Andrea Trasatti's tech notes and more

WordPress on Mobile at WordCamp Ireland

2010-03-08T12:39:00.000Z

This weekend I traveled to the beautiful Kilkenny to talk with developers and designers about mobile. Of course mobile is my bread and butter, but I thought it would be a good challenge to talk about it to people that have never worked on it or maybe still see it as a niche and something that is not SO interesting.
It took me quite a bit of time to collect all the information I needed and I wanted to be sure I was prepared to the questions that would come up. The event was about blogging and WordPress, so I thought some metrics about mobile in general and then some specific about blogs would help (thank you to PercentMobile!) me set the stage and then I dived into WordPress and plugins. In a nutshell there are a number of good plugins to create basic mobile blogs, but there is still way too little good design and there is a lot of space for innovation. Check out my presentation embedded here or on slideshare and let me know what you think.

WordPress on Mobile

Don't forget to check out the WordPress Mobile Pack, of course!

WordCamp Ireland report

2010-03-07T18:32:00.003Z

I am just back from WordCamp Ireland, a two-day conference about WordPress and blogging in general. Have you ever been to a WordCamp? Are you interested in blogging, or more in general about writing content on Internet? Then you SHOULD be going to a WordCamp!

I don't know if it was this one that was particularly good, but there are so many positive things that I've experienced at this event, that I strongly recommend you to go as soon as you can. You have gone already? Then go again! ;)

If you don't know what happens in a WordCamp, then here's a quick list of things you can expect. To start off, it's not a conference for geeks only, it's about blogging and writing good content to publish on Internet. I admit you will likely meet a bunch of geeks, but you will also meet a lot of "normal people" that are passionate about Internet and want to get their ideas online. The general attire is very relaxed and equally the socialization is very easy going.

I have been to a number of conferences and this was easily one of the best and I'm saying so because I have a long list of things I have learnt and things I've heard and that now I was to learn better. This is probably the best outcome that you can get from a conference.

Small disclaimer: I was one of the speaker and not surprisingly I was talking about mobile, but for once, not to mobile nerds. Presentation coming to the Internet very soon.

Nokia mobile theme for Drupal released

2010-01-15T13:52:00.003Z

After many hours of work spread over a couple of months, I have finally released the first version of the Nokia Mobile Theme on drupal.org.

The theme is really a theme on steroids! While normally it should just deal with printing out to screen a few tags and content, in my case I had to add a number of functions for device detection. We wanted to be able to distinguish between a basic mobile device and a high-end one, plus we laid down the foundations for a mid-end presentation. Since the Mobile Plugin did not provide the level of detail that I needed, I had to create my own functions that at this stage are mostly overriding what the plugin does. A lot of the experience made with the WordPress Mobile Pack was put to good use, fortunately.

You can check out the official project page to download the files. Also, check out the handbook page for installation details and if you feel too lazy to read, why not look at the video tutorial?

The work is not over, the plugin is good, but I think it could do better and for this reason I've teamed up with the author, Teemu, and we will release some interesting updates such as a new light detection and some extra extensibility that should allow template designers to have more freedom.

Feedback is very welcome, of course, either here or on the Drupal site.

Nokia mobile theme for Drupal demo

2009-12-21T17:50:00.004Z

In an effort to show what you can achieve with the nokia_mobile theme that (hopefully) will be released shortly, I set up a small demo site with some dummy content. You can visit the site with your mobile device at dtest.dreamhosters.com. Don't hold your breath, it's dummy content, but the device detection and how the theme adapts based on the device capabilities should be evident.

The Mobile Plugin normally uses a PHP implementation of the WURFL API, unfortunately on a cheap hosting service (I bought dreamhost's CHEAPEST possible offer on purpose) this crashes the server. So for this demo I started implementing what is in my view the next step, a very basic device detection that will enable site owners to decide what they want to do. If they have a lot of content optimised for different devices, they should pick WURFL and use the advanced rules settings available in the plugin, on the other hand, if they want a basic detetion and provide just two or three layouts, a simple detection should be more than enough. With the current demo version, no cache files are generated and the detection is instant. I would like to make this part of Mobile Plugin, eventually and better integrate the device classification that I built in the nokia_mobile theme.

More on device classification in the next days.

Drupal + Nokia templates = GREAT mobile theme

2009-12-18T11:20:00.006Z

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.

Apple headphones are crap

2009-11-12T18:11:00.003Z

I got my first iPod many years ago (even if I was not an early adopter at all!) and the headphones that came with it were crap. They were the classic plastic headphones that you can buy anywhere for 2 Euro. I don't know about you, but when I use them for more than 1 hour they hurt my ears.

Later I bought the first generation of Apple in-ear headphones and while they never hurt my ears they actually never worked properly. I expect them to remain in my ear for more than 10-20 minutes without having to keep pushing back in. Yes, I tried the other plugs that came with it and no big change.

Following a friend's recommendation I bought some really expensive Shure in-ear headphones. While the Apple's in-ears costed me about 50 Euro, that was money thrown down the drain, while the Shure have been rocking for more than 2 years now and I am really satisfied.

When I got the 3GS a couple of weeks ago it came with the original plastic-headphones. I had seen some presentation that explained how better they were, so I gave them another opportunity and the result is, I'm afraid, that they still hurt. :(

If you are planning on buying headphones, please, consider buying some good ones, Shure, Sennheiser, Atomic Floyd all make great ones. It will seem like you are spending way more, initially, but if you use them regularly it's a well worth expense.

Maps and navigation innovation

2009-10-28T14:17:00.007Z

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

2009-10-28T12:09:00.003Z

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

2009-09-19T16:55:00.003+01:00

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!

Google Street View in Dublin

2009-06-23T10:53:00.002+01:00

This morning while walking to the bus stop I saw the Google street view car, it was black with a little Google logo on the side.

If I got the timing right, you might see me waving. In the worst case you will see me waving to the bus that was arriving. ;)

Peculiar device recognition by Disney

2009-05-20T18:06:00.003+01:00

Earlier today I followed a link on mocoNews about Disney announcing record visits on their mobile site. I remembered Disney has a nice disney.mobi address, so when I read that the article talked about visitors to "disney.com" I was a bit surprised and wondered if it was a mistake. With my Sony Ericsson V640i I went straight to the .com and to my great surprised I saw a nice mobile site. My curiosity immediately grew from 0 to 100!

I opened a nice xterm and started playing with curl and headers. Here are a few discoveries:

disney.go.com is the real address, no matter what you use, you are always using the .go.com domain

device detection happens in the very first page, once you're on disney.go.com you are going to get the desktop site with flash, javascript, etc

the real mobile site is at m.disney.go.com, once you're there you will always get the mobile site

the iPhone seems to go to the desktop site, but then gets a special layout

no matter what headers you set, if you go to .mobi you will get the mobile site

the desktop site is served with a Windows server, so I assume developed in .NET

the mobile site is served from a Coyote linux, using Tomcat

if you only provide the User-Agent string of a mobile device you will NOT be detected as mobile

in order to be detected as mobile you will have to provide a valid UAProf URI, and that's actually enough by itself

the iPhone on disney.mobi gets the same presentation as all other devices, i.e. not the same as if you visited disney.com in the first place

There is definitely some broken flow here, although I think the mobile experience is very good and the detection at the root is a very good move. Now, will someone from Disney tell me how many visits they get from mobile compared to desktop? I'd love that. ;)

Some nerdy stuff if you wanted to replicate my tests.

Basic request (and then follow the redirects):

curl -D - http://disney.com

Basic request with mobile User-Agent:

curl -D - -A "Mozilla/4.0 SonyEricssonV640iv/R1EA Browser/NetFront/3.4 Profile/MIDP-2.1 Configuration/CLDC-1.1" http://disney.com/

And with UAProf:

curl -D - -A "Mozilla/4.0 SonyEricssonV640iv/R1EA Browser/NetFront/3.4 Profile/MIDP-2.1 Configuration/CLDC-1.1" -H 'X-Wap-Profile: http://wap.sonyericsson.com/UAprof/V640iR101-3G.xml' http://disney.com/

And just in case, with iPhone User-Agent (and no UAProf as it doesn't serve it):

curl -D - -A "Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 2_2_1 like Mac OS X; it-it) AppleWebKit/525.18.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/3.1.1 Mobile/5H11 Safari/525.20" http://disney.com

Even more nerdy note, the desktop site sends the following header:

X-Cnection: close

According to a quick search some proxy or gateway in the middle.

Speaking of crappy User-Agent strings

2009-05-20T10:50:00.002+01:00

I am normally a fan of Opera Mini and I use it quite often on my V640i, but yesterday we stumbled on a very wierd string.

A Samsung SGH-E740 (on Device Anywhere, so you can probably try it yourself) has Opera Mini installed and the User-Agent string is Opera/8.01 (J2ME/MIDP; Opera Mini/1.1.7621/hifi/tmobile/uk; Motorola V3; en; U; ssr).

Now WHY is that "Motorola V3" string there? Surely this is not a Razr V3, surely Opera Mini aspires to be a better browser than the one pre-installed on the Razr V3, so WHY?

I don't have a clue, of course.

PS: The X-OperaMini-Phone-Ua header is there and has the original User-Agent string.

Predictions on the Apple Tablet/Netbook

2009-04-30T22:47:00.001+01:00

Here I am, on a nice Samsung NC10, according to a personal survey one of the most popular netbooks these days (every single netbook at dotMobi is an NC10!). I really wanted an Apple netbook, but it's not coming and Apple seems reluctant to release one or at least according to their public announcements, the last one just a few weeks ago.

My own take on this is that they are still not happy with what they have and certainly they have no plans to compete with the 200-300 USD products such as the Dell Mini 9 (AMAZING price for a whole laptop).

If I look at the general Apple trends and the technologies they rolled out in the last year or two, I have a list of features that I think they will (or would) include in a netbook if they ever released.

Let's start from the display which of course determines the overall size and is often identified as the main battery-eater. In line with the latest Apple products, it should be an LED monitor and should be 10 or at most 11 inches. Smaller than that you should use an iPhone, bigger you should buy a 13" MacBook or MacBook Air. I am not going into the reasons why you would want a 10" laptop, I'm using it just now and I know a lot of users that are happy with this size. Even though admittedly very small, it is VERY portable.

The hard disk will not be there or rather, it will be SSD memory. The MacBook Air had it since launch and even if expensive it has a number of advantages such as that it's not a movable part (very important in an ultra-portable), uses less battery, weights less. Apple has already leveraged the technology and know exactly how to use it and what the downsides might be. The Dell Mini 9 has a ridiculous 4GB SSD, Apple should do something better, the Air has 128GB, for a netbook 80 or 100 might be enough even though these days space is never enough.

Now think about the experience Apple has with engineering design, casing of the new 17" MacBookPros and the MacBook Air, you can expect that it will be VERY light and very thin. I doubt it can be much thinner than the Air, so I would expect it in the range or 1.8cm in the thickest point and the weight should be around 1.2kg VERY attractive.

The small details: no ethernet, wifi 802.11n, bluetooth, 1 USB. Pretty much like the Air.

I think the new Ubuntu Netbook Remix has an interesting UI, clearly optimised for such a small laptop with limited resources. I would not be surprised if Apple came with a version of OS X optimised for these power CPUs and small screens. It would be slick as usual, simple and effective, as Apple has got us used to. Could be touch screen, but I think it will not be, if you want tactile feedback it needs to be thicker than what you can get with an LED display and they will want to be able to say it's the lightest and thinnest of all. I would expect a comfortable keyboard, or at least as much as it can get in such a device. I repeat, a comfortable keyboard and this should rule out a large multitouch trackpad that also acts as a keyboard, users still need tactile feedback while typing (did I mention how impressed I am by the NC10 keyboard?).

If you factor in all these specs, add the Apple premium price, it is going to be in the price range of 1000 USD (or Euro as they are pretty much the same at least in Apple's mind). It's a high price for a netbook, but Sony has already done that, they paved the way, consumers will not be so surprised by the price and I can see them queuing to get one. 1000 is still a reasonable price for a computer, do you remember how much we used to pay for laptops 2 years ago?

Sorry, your HTTP headers are incomplete

2009-04-20T19:27:00.003+01:00

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?

logme.mobi update

2009-04-13T15:57:00.003+01:00

I felt like my little site to see a browser's HTTP request headers, logme.mobi, would at some point die and that is why I have not updated it in months. The reality is much brighter and while I see crawlers visiting every other day (don't care about those very much and I'm sure they do not care about the service!), I also see mobile devices and strange User-Agents coming every day. This is of course a good sign, a proof that it is useful to some and even if it's very simple in concept it's good that it is being used.

For this reason I have spent half an hour today to make a small change that I think can be very useful. Up until yesterday I showed the headers as PHP stores them which was probably OK, but less than perfect as PHP uses its own header names and changes everything to uppercase. Using a simple function (apache_request_headers) I have now changed to the actualy names as received by Apache. This is probably a change that will not make a huge difference to the most, but it's a valuable improvement to some. I have some other improvement on my mind, but I need to install some software and unfortunately I don't have time, but expect something soon.

I also removed the officially-dead-for-quite-a-while list of tests. I originally created them thinking of using them as a test suite for browsers and mobile devices and wanted to store results in a database. Eventually and thankfully, dotMobi came in and we developed a nice site for testing that is fully integrated with DeviceAtlas and so now I'm linking that site, if you want to run any tests (see the online docs for TA-DA). Remember that in order to login you will need valid mobiForge/DeviceAtlas credentials; on the up-side, all your tests results are stored with your profile.

New Gmail mobile built on HTML5

2009-04-10T22:38:00.003+01:00

I was very pleased to read an article from Alex@Google that describes how they have decided to develop the new gmail mobile web interface.

There are at least two reasons why I liked this article, one is that, as Alex mentions, the team originally developed a J2ME application (that I used quite a bit on my old Sony Ericsson W810i) and then decided they needed a web application to serve slightly different needs (and probably slightly different users). The second reason is that it seems like if you don't create an application for the App Store you are going to fail, while Alex explains quite a few reasons why developing a web site was better than a native application.

Bottom line is, of course, that users get multiple options and an opportunity to choose what suits them best.

I think the article is well worth 10 minutes of your life, if you still haven't read it, hurry up to check HTML5 and WebKit pave the way for mobile web applications.

Google crawls and converts WML pages

2009-04-10T16:05:00.003+01:00

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! :)

Safari 4 like Chrome lets you kill unresponsive windows?

2009-04-02T19:02:00.003+01:00

The other day I had some background process taking up a lot of CPU while synchronising some data. I knew it would be slow and so I decide to read some news on the web. One of the pages I opened had some flash in it and after a few seconds a popup appeared asking if I wanted to kill that window. I assume that the background processes PLUS the greedy Flash player were making everything too slow.

It is interesting though that this is clearly a feature that appeared first in Chrome and apparently has propagated to Safari. A good feature, of course!

Me+dotMobi @ MWC

2009-02-15T23:55:00.002Z

I am once again in the beautiful city of Barcelona, but once again not (only) for fun, but for the 3GSM, or MWC as they call it these days.

If you are around, come say hello in Hall 7. If you can't find us, try @me on Twitter.

Swedish Beers @ MWC 2009

2009-02-10T10:37:00.002Z

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!

Hosted apps available on SourceForge

2009-01-31T18:30:00.003Z

I have started using SourceForge many years ago when we decided to host WURFL there. At that time, the choice was easy, SourceForge was synonym of open-source and everyone who wanted to host his project would go there. Over the years (and after the dotCom bubble burst) many competitors came into play (Google's Code, BerliOS and more), but SourceForge is still there.

For quite a while my impression has been that they did not add many services to developers. I have to admit that it must be very hard to keep their systems up and running with all the needs developers have, nevertheless the forums, the mailing list and other bits of SourceForge, in my opinion, would have needed a revamp. Of course, being them in the open-source business as a hosting company, it seems strange to develop things in-house and not take advantage of existing software (and hopefully contributing!). It looks like SourceForge agree with me, in fact in yesterday's newsletter they announced changes in their online help (moving to Trac's wiki) and most of all the availability of a number of open-source software for use to their developers.

A number of updates are available here on the official Site Status page.

WordPress Mobile Plugin by Andy Moore does dirty things

2009-01-25T18:58:00.004Z

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.

Linked in Carnival of the Mobilist 157

2009-01-19T01:23:00.002Z

James @ mjelly was the author of issue 157 of the Carnival of the mobilist. He kindly decided to link to my blog post about the Sony Ericsson V640i and also to James' articles about the Switching algorithms on mobiforge.

2009 (controversial) predictions

2009-01-09T17:56:00.003Z

I think the first predictions for 2009 I've seen, at least related to the mobile space, were from Carlo Longino. After his predictions no other predictions I've seen so far are very interesting or are adding much value. Kudos to Carlo to be the first, sorry for the others who I think have wasted their time.

Of course, if you want to get your predictions right you have to stick to something very likely to happen and that will probably not appear SO interesting or will not surprising TOO many people. Challenged a bit by James Whatley (a.k.a. whatleydude) here I am wasting a bit of my time and trying to bring some more controversial and probably less likely to be accurate predictions. If I can get 1 right, I think I'll be proud.

1. mobile/not-mobile becomes irrelevant
The line that separates a mobile phone from a PC is becoming thinner and thinner. We have mobile phones, smart phone, EEE PCs, laptops, notebooks and probably more I can't think of and you can basically get ANY display size between 2" to 19" and put that piece of electronics in your pocket or your bag and also be connected at any time. The distinction between "desktop" and "mobile" is about to disappear.

2. Garmin for car-navigation becomes irrelevant
Garmin has been the leader in car-navigation for many years, their products were the best by far both from the perspective of accuracy and software bundled. Nevertheless Tom Tom in many countries like Italy is the synonym of "car-navigation". Garmin for some reason could not make it (was it just marketing?) and now Nokia is seriously in the game and all other vendors are releasing at least some device with GPS (did anyone say Google Maps?), so any user who wants navigation, will have it in his mobile device. I am really sorry to say that Garmin has no hope (and Tom Tom will follow quickly or be acquired).

3. Microsoft gives up on licensing their mobile OS
I am not sure if Microsoft will start selling their own "Zune-phone", even though I personally think it would be a failure, but I believe their OS itself has no hope and no reason to continue to exist, what Microsoft really needs is focus on licensing Active Sync and maybe a Mobile Office (If Google can't get a proper mobile version of their online docs first). They will continue making money on what they are really good at and keep the dominance of the e-mail and contacts. Anyone who wants to compete with RIM will have to integrate that and pay the fee.

4. Motorola mobile devices division is acquired
Carlo bets on EITHER Motorola or Palm, so I'm aligning behind him, but with a clear bet on one.

5. eBay online auctions are either acquired or become irrelevant
I personally think eBay is really a poor site and it seems like they could not make any improvement in the last 10 years. They have been ignoring mobile so far and honestly I think they are making a huge mistake. More and more when I search for something all I see are ads. Paypal is a GREAT idea and Skype has killed any other VoIP service, but ebay... well...

Monitoring Streaming sessions

2009-01-08T17:34:00.003Z

When testing mobile devices and media streams you need to monitor quite a few things to discover if it's the device, the network, your server, your media file or something else that fails. Here is a screenshot of my desktop at the moment.