MomoLondon: Mobile Platforms: Too much choice or Hobson's Choice?

• Annie Turner — editor of telecomseurope.net
• Marko Balabanovic — lastminute.com labs
  • launched fonefood as web site around Western Europe
  • have two or three customisations for screen sizes but not much more than that
  • world looks like iPhone version + everyone else
  • want to have rounded buttons etc for iPhone, but everyone else the same
  • adding location — launched with Google Gears for Windows Mobile
• Ricardo Varela — European Mobile Engineering Lead, Yahoo!
  • working to make Yahoo Go widget framework (Blueprint) available for single apps
  • have native Symbian, iPhone, Android platforms
• Ben Last — EMCC
• Nick Allot — OMTP (Open Mobile Terminal Platform)
  • working with BONDI initiative — calls to mobile APIs from Javascript
• Simon Rockman — Sony Ericsson
  • hope for the future: app stores

Is there a sustainable business model?

• iPhone proves there’s people willing to pay money
  • interesting that this has eclipsed any other payment

Designed for device

Simon Rockman: You don’t get games developers wanting to write the same thing for different devices — they optimize for different hardware

• Simon Rockman: “Trying to make things easy in development will end up with products that people don’t want to buy”
• Ben Whitaker (Masabi): “Niches are too small”
• SR: “It’s more about what can you charge for the app. You can do segmentation based on the device — music phones are sold to particular people”
• Nick Allot: “No route to market”
• Ben Last: “Can address enterprise using just Nokia Series 60v3 & BlackBerry”
• BL: “Route to market via the web — mobile apps are often things that people want to take from the web with them on their mobile. e.g. Google Mail, Yahoo”

We’ve heard “write once play everywhere before” with Java…

• Ben Last: “operators want a piece of iPhone pie, and getting rid of fragmentation will sort that”
• Kai Hendry (Aplix): “the web can degrade nicely, better than Java”

Will the operators and manufacturers really get involved?

• Simon Rockman: “Existing phones are getting cheaper and that’s where the growth is. Processor power is not growing in the same way as computers. Battery power is only growing at 10% a year.”
  • however, there is increase in processor growth at the high end, and this is filtering down steadily
• Nick Allot: OMTP have OEMs & operators on-board

Putting things in the way of normal mobile users actually using applications

• Nick Allot: “warnings are absolving network operators and manufacturers of responsibility for upstream content, just like warnings in a car park telling you not to leave your valuables in the car”
  • “OMTP trying to come up with a sensible trust mechanism — especially one that will allow you to take a phone from one network to another”
• Ben Masabi: “setting up data connections and installation warning texts could be standardized across all phones — just like NTT DoCoMo”
• Nick Allot: “we tried this and have done what we can…”
  • e.g. removing an application that’s deemed dangerous, depends upon legal implications of country, operator contract

What do Yahoo Blueprint think of OMTP and vice-versa?

• Nick Allot: OMTP based on web standards
• Ricardo Varela: Blueprint is out there already

Whither Fennec?

• Ben Last: “Where firefox got good, was when it stopped trying to fight IE but implemented the de facto standards. It’s good to see more browsers coming out that are standards-compliant”

Staying on mobile or going back to web to register?

• Ben Whitaker: “stats — losing 2/3rds when ask to register on PC; losing 50% when trying to go online with GPRS”
• Gambling software (J2ME): “78% installed from a link for the trial — gobsmacked! Don’t expect that for the actual release”

How will the platforms go in the future?

• Ben Last: “will be driven by the killer app”
  • but the killer app is already there — it’s making phone calls!
• Simon Rockman: “killer app is seamlessness. Need to do the right thing on the right device”

Demos

Goojet widget engine couldn’t make it

Shazam — Dominic Pride

Taking music recognition further:

• buy track
• artist info
• share track

Application built by EMCC on Symbian

• deliver same consistency of experience
• go deep into messaging & contacts API

Next MoMo

• October 13th: NFC
• November 10th: MoMo London Turns Three
• December 1st: Social Networking Revisited?

OverTheAir: Google Gears for Mobile -- Andrei Popescu (Google)

Currently running on Windows Mobile as an ActiveX control. Just launched Picasa Web Album for Mobile with Gears. Works in IE 6 & 7, IE Mobile 5 & 6, Firefox 1 & 2 (3 coming soon). Firefox plugin works on Mac. Safari support being worked on. The Mobile version has the same API as the desktop version. Google have also announced that they are porting Gears to Android (no surprise there…) — this will be a Netscape standard plugin, so will probably come to WebKit at a similar time.

Gears is a browser plugin that provides additional APIs to the browser (local storage in a SQLite database, worker threads, local server for server data offline). See http://code.google.com/apis/gears/ for documentation and samples.

Mobile version also provides a Desktop API, which allows creating an icon shortcut to the app. Can provide multiple resolution icons.

Worker threads cannot access the DOM and the window object, so Gears also provides HttpRequest and Timer APIs for them.

Security: Gears will ask the user if a URL wants to store and access information locally. Thereafter that URL is allowed to use Gears to access data from the same origin (scheme, host, port).

BarCamp London: Learning jQuery - Simon Willison

• simpler than Dojo
• Prototype & mooTools stick lots of functions in your namespace — don’t interact well

Step 1: get some stuff

e.g. jQuery('div#intro') — find DIVs with id # intro

jQuery provides lots of CSS 2&3 selectors

• e.g. li#current ~ li (LI siblings that follow #current)

also lots of magic selectors (begin with colons)

essentially a domain-specific language for querying the DOM

Step 2: do stuff

return a jQuery collection

• can be treated as a javascript array
• can also call methods on it (e.g. ~.each(function() { ... }) )
• can also modify it by calling methods like .attr()

can also control css properties & html content, including animations

using Simon’s bookmarklet called “inject jQuery” that injects the jQuery object into any HTML page live

• can then use Firebug console to try things out interactively

jQuery also lets you introspect the DOM objects

• e.g. can call height & width — very useful for drag & drop etc.
• traversing DOM — parent, next, etc

in functions that you add to jQuery objects, often refer to $(this) in order to set something on the page that’s just been called

Unobtrusive javascript — get the page working without and then add a bunch of javascript to enhance the functionality

• in order to do that, need to call javascript when DOM is ready
• jQuery has $(document).ready(), but has been overloaded into $(function() {...}) call

jQuery allows method chaining (like LiFT) to provide concise representations, and end() method provides descoping:

• methods that change context can then be descoped to get back to previous context
• works well with find() method

AJAX & Animation

can load any external URI into the innerHTML of jQuery collection

can chain animations — one will happen after the other

can also roll your own animations

Plugins

one to fix PNGs in IE, another to help with drag & drop

can write your own

Further reading

Good API reference — http://visualjquery.com

Future of Mobile: Beyond WAP: Advance Browsing, Mobile Ajax, and the future of the Web

by Daniel Appelquist (Vodafone)

• Voda are pushing forward on xHTML Reunification
  • XHTML Basic (W3C) vs XHTML-MP (Open Mobile Alliance, ex-WAP Forum)
• Participating in W3C Ubiquitous Web working group
• "In 5 years time, there will be only one web, and it will be the mobile web"
• W3C has launched mobileOK from today
  • Tests plus open source java reference implementation for local checking

• Mobile AJAX Workshop from Sep 2007: http://www.w3.org/2007/06/mobile-ajax/report.html

• DOJO has refactored itself and shrunk down to target iPhone and Nokia S60 browser
  • A lot of the bulk in DOJO was dealing with IE6, taking it out made the lib much smaller
• Device access vs. security
• SVG tiny 1.2 includes AJAX capabilities
  • e.g. Vodafone Germany - Bundesliga SVGt app running in Ikivo player
  • will move to be integrated within the browser
• WICD - Web Integration Compound Document

  • Mandates XmlHttpRequest

  • Details http://www.w3.org/2004/CDF/