PavingWays

Our June meetup for HTML5/CSS hackers was a hot one! We had around 30 degrees around here, and were sweating like crazy. Drinking hot tea apparently is a good helper (thanks Björn).

Again, less people attended than anticipated (learning there again). Luckily there were also two new attendees, thanks for coming Jens and Christoph!

The restaurant we picked was rather noisy, in part because they had all their windows open, which again also was rather unproductive air-condition wise…so maybe a restaurant is not a good place to do a tech meetup after all. That also did not help listening to Dennis from Hamburg, who joined us to present a project over Teamviewer/speakerphone.

The project was pretty interesting though: Dennis is using a Kaazing server for his Facebook-based Tic-Tac-Toe game. The game logic runs inside a JSP web application on the server and is using the Kaazing component for messaging with the clients. Clients connect either via a WebSocket connection (here’s the HTML5 part) or a fallback mechanism using Flash. The only thing to do for the developer is to include the Kaazing iframe component into the HTML of the game. Kaazing itself is a Java-based and enterprise-oriented product. WebSocket capabilities with fallback mechanisms and simple integration into web applications are underlining this.
Thanks Dennis for the demo! Unfortunately there is no version of this online, it’s all only working on a local machine. By the way Kaazing apparently runs on the AppEngine.

We also covered some other topics, SASS was one of it. Opinions about using it diverted and some attendees were reluctant to it because it is ruby-based (workarounds are there) and because it forces you to learn another non-standard CSS language - valid points I think.

Jens was kind enough hinting us towards the WebTech Conference in Mainz, taking place October 11th to 13th. Christian Heilmann is one of the speakers, so this surely becomes an interesting conference.

Finally we have been looking at some interesting HTML5-related links that I have been collecting lately. Here’s the list:

• http://happymagicfuntime.com/blog/html5_for_drunks (fun read)
• http://remysharp.com/2009/07/06/rimshot-with-html5/ (audio bookmarklets)
• http://html5shiv.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/html5.js (IE hack to enable HTML5 tags)
• http://html5.validator.nu (using Mozilla’s HTML5 parsing Engine)
  • about:config -> html5.enable in FF 3.6+ (3x faster parsing)
  • details here
  • test page here
• http://media.chikuyonok.ru/ambilight/ (HTML5 video with Ambilight effect)
• http://www.html5laboratory.com/drag-and-drop.php (good intro)

Thanks to all attendees and until next time.

Update: now that Steve Jobs’ keynote is over we can confirm that our hopes from below have not been fulfilled (again) and the new iPhone 4 will not feature a dashboard or home screen widgets. This rumor has actually been around for quite a while - we’ll not stop hoping though and we all should not forget that there are tons of other great devices out there that are well worth looking into developing for (see below)!

What else is new with the iPhone 4? Not much actually, except yet another screen size AND resolution we have to keep in mind when developing apps: 960 x 640 at 326 dpi.

Original: Apple has supposedly started to pull applications from the app store that implement Dashboards or interactive home screens (see here (same here, here too, at first).

These apps enable their users to put several Widgets on one screen, same as in Apple’s own Dashboard Application for Mac OSX. With these the lack of multitasking can be overcome, at least to some extend, and users get an interactive overview for different applications. MyFrame from Groundhog Software or DashPad from PXL Creations are examples for these. .

Ever since we saw the first iPhone and its non-interactive idle screen / home screen we thought it would be great to have really interactive widgets on there. Wouldn’t it be nice to see the actual weather forecast for the next 8 hours in the icon itself without having to open the actual application?

Meanwhile the Nokia N97, N900 and Android phones have this feature and I would assume Apple needs to improve in this direction as well.

So, you realize this is a question mark up there in the header, right? We just speculate, but it might well be possible that the iPhone 4G, already featuring multitasking, might also feature an interactive home screen or at least some kind of dashboard for widgets. It would be a logical step and Apple would probably do this in their own manner and most probably do it right (from a user and Apple’s perspective at least).

Still, the big question, at least for us as web technology fanatics would be if such a dashboard would be filled with web-based widgets (just like Nokia) or native applications (as in the case of Android). It’s hard to foresee, because Apple tends to go both ways from time to time, Mac OSX Dashboard widgets rely on web technology. However iPhone Applications are strictly native by design.

Let’s wait and see, within the next 3-5 hours we will probably know more.

Jesse and I took part in Germany’s GTUG Chrome Extension Battle back in March. GTUG stands for “Google Technology User Group” and the Extension Battle was a hacker competition to create some kind of Extension for the Google Chrome browser. This is rather simple to get started with and very similar to creating web-based widgets.

We had been playing around with gameQuery and some CSS3 hacks back then, so we decided to use what we had and created a Space-Invaders clone as a Chrome Extension. The outcome is called “CSS3 in Space” and it can be downloaded in the Chrome extension repository. Too bad I never found the time to finalize the multiplayer part :( But the game works pretty well as it is - especially given the few days we used to hack this together.

In the battle, we won 2nd place in Germany and scored Ogio Neoprene Laptop Sleeves…that’ nothing compared to 1st place and Nexus Ones but better than nothing, right? Currently we are at 1443 total and around 400 weekly installs, which is not too bad. This includes a “Top Picks” placement during the first few days which was part of the winning prize, so it will go down. It is actually strange how the “weekly installs” are calculated - the Extension is available for 10 weeks now so you should really see 144 installs per week.

Still, if we manage to stay at around 100 installs per week, we will be at 5k users in a year - that’s not bad and it makes me conclude that Chrome extensions, along with other browser Extensions such as the ones for Firefox or Opera can be considered a good channel for web-based apps and widgets. Monetization is tougher than in app stores, but that’s a whole other story.

It has been a few days ago, but I still wanted to provide a little recap of our last HTML5/CSS3 meetup.
We were set up for eight people this time but only had a turnout of five. It was still a nice evening at Frollein in Sachsenhausen. Additional to great food there was some HTML5 with Modernizr presented by Jesse and a lot of Node.js. Modernizr is a tool you can use as a fallback mechanism for new HTML5 pages. You include the JavaScript file in your HTML5 page and it detects the browser’s compatibility for all sorts of new features. The tool adds classes for each supported HTML5 attribute to the document’s body so you can take care of these document parts with special CSS classes. Modernizr also creates a special JavaScript object to do things like: if (Modernizr.geolocation){ …do geolocation stuff … } - kinda neat. It would be great to have this as a jQuery plugin or even better within the jQuery.support feature.

Both Andreas and myself had prepared a WebSocket demo. My demo did not work, Andreas’ did, at least halfway… There was incoming data from Twitter’s brand new streaming API to Node.js. The WebSocket connection to Chrome did not really want to work completely that evening, but we could see #fail-tagged tweets streaming in on the console :) I can not really recall the context, but there were also talking about Strophe, a JavaScript XMPP library framework well worth looking into.

I don’t have access to Andreas’ presentation (see below), but I also created one, so here’s another introduction to Node.js:

We were thinking of getting a small HTML5/CSS3 project going within the meetup group, so everybody has something to work on until the next meetup - I still think this is a good idea, now if I could just come up with something useful…The next meetup will be around the end of May, stay tuned!

UPDATE: Andreas provided Links to his slides and the project itself, it’s called tweamer and it is available on GitHub. Here are the slides:

If you want to attend the HTML5/CSS3 Meetup in Frankfurt in May, please sign up here: http://bit.ly/aVEmCm

Once in a while you come across a new technology and are just blown away by it. You feel that something like this should have been around much earlier and that it is (gonna be) a significant milestone, not just in your own live as a developer but in general.

The last time this happened to me was when I dug a bit deeper into a project called node.js or just “node” as the binary is called. In case you have not heard about this don’t worry. However, if you are a developer, especially if you are working with JavaScript, then you should be concerned and maybe check your news sources, because it is a couple of months old already and it is drawing a lot of attention lately! If you’re not a developer this might get a bit techy from here, but maybe you get something out of it after all…

Ok so what is node.js? It’s actually not too easy to explain, but basically node.js is an:

• open-source
• low-level
• evented
• non-blocking
• event loop based
• SSJS runtime environment

It is written in C and JavaScript, it contains the V8 JavaScript engine, a CommonJS module system and it helps you to implement highly concurrent web servers by handling I/O very efficiently, namely in a non-blocking way. Support for TCP, DNS and HTTP is included and many HTTP features are supported that are important for Comet-style web applications - things like hanging requests.
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Some more interesting news announced at the Mobile Word Congress:

• Google’s new strategy “Mobile First”
  Google’s new strategy: “Mobile First”  The company now focuses more on smartphones than on desktops. That means giving mobile top priority and launching new products first on mobile platforms before creating PC versions.

  (Source: brighthand.com)

• 60,000 Android phone a day
  Google’s Android launched a year ago and is now available on 26 different devices in 48 countries. 60.000 Android devices running this operating systems are now being sold on a daily basis … meaning about 5.4 million handsets per quarter, or 21 million per year. Apple sold 8.7 million iPhones last quarter and 25 million in 2009. Seems like Android is gaining ground, hopefully internal fragmentation will be taken care of (if that’s possible).

  (Source: mobilegamesblog.com)

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Instead of a lengthy blog post here is just a wrap-up of quite interesting news announced at the Mobile Word Congress today:

• Symbian joins Open Screen Project
  The Symbian Foundation is joining the Open Screen Project, an industry-wide initiative led by Adobe to enable the Adobe Flash Platform across a broad range of devices. This means that Symbian will be integrating Flash 10.1 in future releases of the platform.

  (Sources: allaboutsymbian.com, eon.businesswire.com)

• Ericsson launches eStore
  Today, Ericsson unveiled an application store product for mobile operators allowing them to set up their own application store. The eStore is available in 25 markets worldwide, reaching more than 1 billion subscribers throughout more than 100 operator networks. It already has 30,000 free and paid apps and games. The eStore is backed by Opera who provides the client framework for widgets and applications across multiple channels and devices.

  (Sources: mobilegamesblog.com, finchannel.com)

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At Mobile World Congress 2010, Adobe announced today that it will bring Adobe Air to mobile devices, starting with Android and Blackberry phones.

At the moment you can build desktop web applications with AIR that run outside the browser on multiple operating systems, but soon it will be possible to create Android and Blackberry apps as well. These mobile apps will be able to store data locally on the phone, access other data on the phone such as photos, and be distributed as regular apps in the Android and Blackberry app stores. Not only that, but the same apps created with Flash developer tools will be exportable as iPhone apps (”Packager for iPhones“). The big picture is that developer can create applications once with Adobe’s developer tools and then output them as AIR apps for Android and Blackberry phones, native iPhone apps, or Flash apps on the Web. (more…)

Last year in October I wrote in a blog post about smart phone applications coming to cars. Today I read an article about Deutsche Telekom and tyre maker Continental joining this market as well.

They plan to put apps into all vehicles via an Android-based on-board computer. The prototype called AutoLinQ will be demonstrated at this year’s Cebit show. Inspired by the iPhone drivers can search for apps, download music, pick up news, check emails and answer them by using voice recording technology. The promise is: all without taking hands off the wheel or eyes off the road!

Deutsche Telekom said in a statement that the core functions of AutoLinQ include an online address book linked to the navigation system. Drivers can type in journey destinations on the computer at home or work before getting in the car, or via their mobile phone when out and about. As the vehicle is connected to Deutsche Telekom’s mobile network, drivers can call up information that tells them where the car is parked, or check whether the sunroof is open and close it remotely using their phone.

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We just wanted to take the opportunity of the beginning new year to wish all our readers all the best for this year and the new decade!

We are in the process of changing our website design and content. The new page will contain more information about what we have been doing lately and what we will be doing soon - all in the area of games, mobile widgets and app stores.

Because of this there was not much happening here during the last few weeks, except maybe useless filler posts like this one. But it’s gonna be better soon, so please stay tuned!

I have been asked to do part of the technical review of a new book from Apress called ‘Beginning Smartphone Web Development‘ and was happy to help.

The book is written by Gail Rahn Frederick and from what I have seen so far the book is going to become a great introduction to mobile web development. All the necessary fundamentals are well covered and explained with practical examples and there are some more advanced sections on using Ajax and device capability databases.

Anybody interested in the challenges and details of mobile web development can take away something from the book. Publication is due in December 2009, so make sure you put it on your Amazon wishlist now!

On July, 31, RIM has officially launched their app store Blackberry App World 1.1 now also in Germany, Austria, France, Italy, Spain, Ireland, Luxembourg, Belgium, Portugal and the Netherlands with enhanced features, such as:

• sorting options (newest, name, price, vendor, popularity and relevance),
• filtering top 25 free and paid apps,
• additional categories and sub-categories and
• SD card archiving for downloaded and purchased apps (customers can now reinstall deleted apps from their memory card). (more…)

The ads for Nokia’s N97 have started to appear and in Germany as it will hit the first shelves by June 18th at 5 pm in four selected cities. With the release of the N97 our travel planner widget “Panda Route” will be launched, too, and we are pretty excited about it!

Widgets are now becoming more and more popular on mobile phones and we think it’s gonna change web- and application development quite a bit too. Nokia’s new touchscreen phone comes with several widgets already pre-installed, but you can also download more from the Ovi store. With this step Nokia is especially addressing web developers. Recently they launched new mobile development tools that take advantage of three of the world’s most popular software development environments used by web designers and developers.

• Nokia Web Runtime (WRT) Extension for Adobe Dreamweaver,
• Nokia WRT plug-in for Microsoft Visual Studio and
• the newly updated WRT plug-in 2.0 for Aptana Studio that we have been using too

“These new Nokia WRT tools open up the mobile development market to more than 10 million web developers and creative professionals worldwide who work with these widely used development environments every day to create web applications and content,” said Craig Cumberland, Director of WRT Tools and Technologies, Nokia. “These WRT plug-ins enable the easy creation of feature-rich widget applications for the enjoyment of mobile consumers around the globe, providing new horizons to untold numbers of individuals and organizations seeking to extend their web content and Internet presence into the mobile space.” Nokia says.

We absolutely agree and we were also mentioned in Nokia’s press release: (more…)

Today Nokia has globally opened their long-awaited Ovi Store to an estimated 50 million Nokia device owners across more than 50 Nokia devices including the forthcoming N97.

To all Nokia device owners out there: open your Nokia device browser and go to store.ovi.com. Now you can personalize your Nokia phone by downloading apps, ringtones, widgets, games, videos etc.

The mobile client is available in English, German, Italian, Russian, and Spanish and supports operator billing in Australia, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Russia, Singapore, Spain and the United Kingdom. Globally, credit card billing is available through the mobile application and the mobile website. On the N97 the store application is pre-installed, same for all other new devices that are supported. (more…)

We’ll be going to Monaco by the end of April to attend the Nokia Developer Summit 2009.

During this summit in Monte Carlo on 28-29 April, Nokia is holding a “N97 24-hour Hackathon” competition. I am one of 10 developers selected by Forum Nokia who is gonna hack together a Web Runtime (WRT) widget for the home screen of the new Nokia N97.

The Hackathon session will be streamed live and I will be in action 24h competing face-to-face with the other developers. At the end of this Hackathon, all widgets will be judged by a panel of experts from Nokia Forum & Nokia’s N97 team. The winning designer will get a Nokia N97 pre-loaded with the app. Also, the next to cash prizes, “[...]The winning widget will also be awarded premium spotlight status on the main page of the new Nokia Ovi Store, which is opening in May. It will be free to download in Australia, Germany, Italy, Ireland, Russia, Singapore, Spain, United Kingdom, and United States. The apps which come second and third at the Hackathon judging panel will also get spotlight placement on the sight.[...]” (Source: Nokia).

Nokia is going through quite some replacements on the widget and content distribution front these days: Their WRT Widgets will replace formerly well received WidSetsâ„¢ and maybe other apps too, and Nokia’s new Ovi store will replace their current offering called Mosh.

I am really looking forward to the event - not just because I can spend some exciting days in Monte Carlo :), but also because it’s a great opportunity to get in touch with many people in the mobile and mobile web area since a long time.

Sources:

Nokia Developer Summit 2009
Nokia N97 Widget Competition
Nokia N97 Data Sheet
Forum Nokia

Recently, Opera released its new “State of the Mobile Web 2009″ report and revealed that they had one of their largest monthly increases ever in January 2009. Opera Mini now has more than 20 million users. Those users viewed approximately 7.6 billion pages in January. Page views and data transfers increased 18% month-over-month. That means, not only more people are using the mobile web, but they also use it more often.

The mobile Web usage is booming in developing countries. Among the top 35 countries using the browser, Armenia, Nigeria and Egypt showed the most growth between January 2008 and January 2009 in terms of unique users. The most significant growth (2800%) was in Armenia (a country with 3 million residents). On average Armenians surfed 669 pages per user in January and that is far more than it is in other countries.

“Looking back on a full year of mobile Web growth, it is easy to see why mobile devices will become the primary device for Web usage in most of the world,” said Jon von Tetzchner, Opera’s CEO, in a statement. “Developing countries may lead the way due to the sheer prevalence of mobile devices versus PCs, but the solid growth rates in developed countries such as the United States, the United Kingdom and Germany, show the entire world is moving in this direction.”

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During February 16-19, Barcelona again has become the “capital” for the whole mobile industry with the Mobile World Congress taking place. Despite the global economic crisis and declining mobile phone sales (for the first time ever since 2001), the mobile industry expects global growth due to new devices and services. This optimistic outlook is also proven by the sales figures of smart phones. In 2008 almost 160 million smart phones were sold worldwide. This year as much as 190 million smart phones could be sold.

A survey by analyst Nielsen and Tellabs, based on more than 50,000 mobile users in the UK, France, Italy, Germany, Spain and the US, shows that there will be an dramatic increase in the use of mobile data services (such as mobile internet, email, photo uploading and MMS) over the next two years with a significant ramp up in the next 12 months. 71 per cent of consumers anticipate the daily usage of services such as mobile internet and more than half of the approximately 200 million mobile data users in those countries expect to increase use in the next two years.

According to the study, about 49% of US respondents said they were planning to surf the mobile web more in the next year, compared to 34% of those in Europe. Preferences of US and Europe users differ (see the following picture below). In Europe, Italy tends to be the leading adopter across all services, while Germany shows comparatively low adoption rates.

(Source: http://www.tellabs.com/news/2009/index.cfm/nr/53.cfm)

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As soon as Nintendo announced the next version of the hugely popular Nintendo DS gaming console, called the Nintendo DSi, I was curious if along with some hardware upgrades, such as 2 cameras, better screens and a SD card slot, there would be major changes to the OS and software included, especially if a decent web browser would be available or even included…and I was hoping for Opera. There is a video of the DSi presentation on YouTube.

Turns out there will be a web browser available (see above video from 01:45)…and it will be an Opera browser! In contrast to the current DS version, the DSi web browser will reside on the console’s flash memory meaning it will not come as a game-cartridge as the currently available Opera browser does.

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Recently, Opera released its interesting and insightful “State of the Mobile Web” report. In this report, Opera analyzed the traffic of more than 44 million cumulative Opera Mini users worldwide.

Opera Mini: the world’s most popular mobile browser

Since its worldwide launch in 2006, Opera Mini has become the world’s most popular mobile web browser with millions of users and billions of page views:

Social Networking Services drive mobile web usage worldwide

Interestingly, almost 40% of all visited web pages with Opera Mini were social networking services. In the US, South Africa and Indonesia even more than 60% of the user were visiting these services with their mobile devices. That shows social networking services are very popular worldwide.

Top 10 Sites in the US, India, South Africa, UK and Germany

You can find more information and the whole report here: http://www.opera.com/mobile_report

We’ll be going to Berlin on Sunday to attend the Mobile Internet Conference. The event is organized by IIR Telecoms and they asked me to chair the sessions on Monday 03/31/2008.

The topic for my introduction for that day is ‘Mobile Web 2.0′. I’ll start learning all the buzz words of the past 3 years by heart over the weekend to be prepared ;)

Maybe I can slip in a little announcement concerning the long awaited launch of the Groupile Beta that’s due in April. We have about 140 people waiting, they signed up without really knowing what to expect, some of them are waiting since last year. April will clear things up.

The conference is gonna be a big opportunity to network and get in touch with many great people in the mobile and mobile web area. The speaker roster looks great even though CTIA/IEEE WCNC 2008 in Las Vegas is at the same time. On Monday the following companies will be presenting and hold a roundtable discussion at the end of the day:

• Google YouTube
• Bluenove/Orange
• trutap
• Cyworld
• itsmy.com
• Yahoo!
• emap
• Zed
• Telecom Italia
• Eyeka
• blinkBox

The W3C, Jamba and many international carriers will also be there and present throughout the conference.

We’re looking forward to meet you there, too!