Dude, there’s a WordPress posting app for iPhone… Tee-hee! (it’s open source too, assuming Apple doesn’t crush the developer over the mysterious SDK NDA …)
OSCON reports: Open Mobile Exchange
Been here in Portland for a couple days for the start of OSCON, but still recovering from Egypt time… :D Some notes on the Open Mobile Exchange sessions…
A lot of the sessions told the same sad story. To make a long (sad) story short:
The good news:
Highly-capable “real web” browsers are here and becoming more widespread. WebKit, Gecko, and Opera-based browsers are shipping now on various devices or available for installation, and the Mozilla folks are working on a next-generation Gecko-based mobile browser.
Making the “mobile web” actually able to reach the real web is a huuuuuge boon:
- People can reach sites that haven’t been optimized for mobile access (eg, 99.99999% of the web)
- Mobile-targeted versions of sites can actually look good and be useful
- Developers finally have a chance in hell of testing their mobile-targeted sites — the desktop versions of the browsers provide many of the same capabilities as the mobile ones, so you can preview faster and more reliably during iterative development.
The bad news:
Oh, where to begin! First, the bubble-burster:
- Phones with good browsers are expensive! To reach those oft-touted billions who will own a mobile phone before setting eyes on a computer, we’re going to need the browsers in the $20 commodity phones, not just the $500 luxury smartphones.
- Phones with good browsers are a tiny, tiny, tiny percentage of those out there today — even a tiny percentage of those shipping now.
- To wit, for many years we’re going to see a lot of phones with no or crappy browsers.
Now, we can hope that Moore’s Law For Phones will push all the cool stuff into the commodity devices Real Soon Now, but I didn’t see anybody showing me evidence that it’s actually happening. Even the Symbian guys, who boast their OS runs “90% of the world’s smartphones”, realize they have only a tiny share of the total phone market.
We’ll consider this a “growth opportunity”. :)
The second challenge is that web apps today, while very capable with AJAXy stuff, have several major limitations:
- No access to native device capabilities (camera, GPS, telephony)
- No consistent system for offline functioning and data storage — you lose access to the world when your train goes in a tunnel or you get on a plane
- Performance problems due to running JavaScript on top of HTML on a relatively slow, limited CPU
You can get around these limitations by writing native applications, but Here There Be Dragons.
- Huge array of incompatible OSs, with
- incompatible development models, and
- incompatible application delivery formats
The “Linux mobile” people like the LiMo foundation are putting effort into standardizing some of the base software which should help with that, but honestly even us Penguin lovers hate that it’s virtually impossible to build a distro-independant package for the desktop and server Linux worlds. Do we really expect it’s going to be different for mobile Linux?
Even if that was solved, you still have to produce your Windows Mobile, iPhone, Android, and Java FX Mobile 2ME P2P WTF versions just for starters.
It seems to be everyone’s hope that native apps will “fade away” in importance as web apps become more capable.
But this is going to depend on the various browser makers and device makers agreeing on some things:
- Sensible offline code & data storage. There’s motion on this with things like Gears and HTML 5 work, so I’m optimistic here.
- Creating, then hopefully standardizing interfaces between web and native capabilities. This feels like a coming browser war… worst case is we can hope that JS libraries will abstract away the competing interfaces. Sigh.
So in the meantime, we’ll all make our pretty little web apps, churn out the occasional iPhone or Android or Mobile Linux app to use geolocation data or the camera or work offline, and wait for things to get better.
Oregon Trail
Ah, back in the U S of A… Will be here in Portland, Oregon for a few days for OSCON, now sitting in on the Open Mobile Exchange sessions.
There couldn’t be any greater contrast between Cairo and Portland. The trees are green, the streets are wide and clean, the people are polite, and the cars aren’t trying to run me over. I even figured out the light rail system and got to my hotel for $2.05. Yay!
Will follow up more on Wikimania when I’ve had a chance to decompress and finish spooling out my notes.
State of the MediaWiki at Wikimania
Lived through my talk at Wikimania, yay!
Slides as PDF (7mb) for those that want it, though they’re fairly abstract. :)
On Expressways
After ruminating about the elevated expressways around Taipei and Cairo, much more rarely seen in American cities today, I went Googling about for more background on that sort of road and stumbled on this awesome site with things like a map of past and never-were freeways in San Francisco which have been torn down or never got built in the first place.
Egypt is hot
Spending a few days in Cairo prior to Wikimania Alexandria…
The food here is excellent!
The traffic… not so much.
Code slush for MediaWiki 1.13
I’m declaring a “code slush” on MediaWiki trunk for the next week or so, so we can concentrate on cleaning things up for making a 1.13 release branch, timed oh-so-delicately to approximately coincide with the Wikimania conference (coming up July 17-19).
I’d like to ask that new experimental features and giant refactorings that aren’t vital fixes be pushed back until after the branching; this’ll give us all a chance to make sure the release goes smoothly and that changes that are made get the attention they deserve.
It’s a-gonna be awesome! :D
Wrong number
“Hello, may I speak to Donald (something) please?”
“Sorry, you have a wrong number.”
… pause …
“Oh, I really *do* have the wrong number. I thought I didn’t for some reason. Sorry!” *click*
o_O
Obligatory iPhone 2.0 post
Nothing earth-shattering in the announcement, but some pleasing things…
- Rumor is it gets better reception — might be very welcome here in San Francisco, where you get 5 bars on one block and 0 bars the next…
- Faster download speeds are great… assuming I get any reception… :)
- Longer battery life — I charge it every night anyway, but might be nice during travel.
- GPS — more accurate placement for maps would be handy, but I’ve found it good enough on the old system.
Otherwise it’s pretty much the same, hardware-wise. New software will be available on the old model too, and there’s still not a model with 32GB storage. 16’s not quite enough for my full music library, so I don’t have a huge incentive to upgrade from the 8GB model unless the reception really is good enough to… say… successfully make phone calls from my flat.
As for pricing… the purchase price is lower, but the the plan’s an extra $10/month, which more than makes up the savings over the contract lifetime.
On the plus side, the draconian requirement to activate your contract at the store means our European friends will stop pestering us to buy iPhones for them to take home and unlock. >:D
Mobile format tweak
The HAWHAW library used for our Hawpedia-based mobile gateway does this cute thing where on a “grown-up” web browser it squishes the formatted output into a tiny rectangle, with a cute picture of a mobile phone around it.
This “simulator” mode makes it … sort of… look like an actual mobile device. But IMHO this causes more harm than good. Two main problems:
- Unrecognized devices can end up being shown the simulator skin, often horribly misrendering it (like the Palm Treo at right — hopefully recognized since a few weeks ago)
- It’s harder to actually get a feel for the variety of behavior on devices with different screen sizes. There’s everything out there from the tiniest cell phone to the iPhone to the Amazon Kindle reader’s big ol’ 6″ screen. There’s no way to resize the tiny rectangle, so you can’t estimate how things are going to feel on the medium screens.
I’ve now disabled this. With the simulator / “big screen” mode off, regular web browsers and unrecognized devices get pretty much the same output style that you see in things like the iPhone. It’s reasonably clean, and will properly scale and wrap with your screen size.