PavingWays

Last week we attended the monthly held Mobile Internet SIG: Mobile User Experience at the ACCESS building in Sunnyvale. The event started at 6:30 pm with pizza and free T-Shirts and it was our first mobile-oriented event here in the Bay Area.After 30 minutes of networking with quite some interesting people, e.g. Dr. Paul James of Nokia Inc. (Nokia also sponsored this event), the presentations started. The first one was held by Sergei Krupenin, Director of Business Development at ACCESS. Sergei showed some interesting innovations which we will soon see in upcoming versions of the NetFront mobile browser:

• Smart Swing Navi: By using the captured image of phone camera, you can scroll or zoom contents by tilting phone vertically and horizontally.

• Visual Bookmarks: Visual bookmark helps you to select bookmarks by showing page thumbnail together with page title and URL.

NetFront also supports web standards for web applications. They developed a widget framework that supports the creation and use of dynamic Web applications based on open standard Web technologies like HTML, CSS and JavaScript/Ajax - sounds familiar, but they actually showed a widget in action on a windows mobile device. It was quite impressive to see how the widget was launched from the top menu bar and then became usable on top of the currently open application. In this case an excel sheet, just like a widget should work. Here you can find some more info and pictures of the NetFront browser in action.

The second presentation was held by Deborah Johnson, Technology Manager at FrogDesign. She introduced her company and their Celltop technology, which enables users to access, manage and organize a wide range of information already available on their Alltel Wireless phones. Celltop is only available on Alltel phones, free-of-charge and features 10 “cells” that come pre-installed and via download. Each cell is a category- specific half screen comprised of graphics and text that provides shortcuts for wireless users to navigate through information and applications including: call log, weather, news, baseball, basketball, football, rodeo, stocks, text messaging inbox and ringtones.

Both talks were very interesting and caused a lot of questions. It is very interesting to see how slowly data plans grow in the US. Mobile internet still seems like being in its early stages to some extend around here. Also if you compare the numbers of visitors (it were about 30) to the ones of Web 2.0-centered events like geekSessions, you get this impression.

After all it was a great evening in a nice location and hopefully there will be more of those - thanks to ACCESS and SDForum!

The Mobile Ajax FAQ is created by Ajit Jaokar, Rocco Georgi and Bryan Rieger and is maintained at the Horizon Channel. We welcome comments and feedback at ajit.jaokar at futuretext.com.This post has been moved to a page on PavingWays - the following questions link directly there.

• What is Mobile Ajax?
• Is there a Mobile Ajax checklist/minimum requirements?
• What does Mobile Ajax look like?
• Why should one do Ajax on mobile phones / what problem does it solve?
• What are the options to Mobile Ajax?
• How do Flash Lite and Java compare with Mobile Ajax?
• What is the difference between Ajax Platforms, Frameworks, Toolkits and Libraries?
• What existing Mobile Ajax frameworks, toolkits and libraries should I use?
• Can I use existing frameworks, libraries and toolkits?
• What is the relationship between Mobile Ajax and Mobile Widgets?
• Which browsers support Mobile Ajax?
• Which enterprise applications employ Mobile Ajax?
• What is the role of the Apple iPhone with respect to Mobile Ajax?
• How do applications like mojax or bling software fit in?
• How can you develop for and test on all those browsers?
• What are the (current) hurdles in implementing and running Mobile Ajax applications?
• What is AHAH / AJAH?
• Is there any standardization initiative for Ajax?

Finally I get to post something about my visit to Paris and specifically the XTech conference 2007. I went to XTech to speak about “Ajax on mobile devices — making mobile web apps ubiquitous” and of course to attend as many of the other sessions as possible. Here’s some of my observations:

The location (Novotel Paris Tour Eiffel) was ok, I liked the last location in Amsterdam better though, because the different tracks were closer to each other. The organization was excellent as usual, special thanks to IDEAlliance and Edd Dumbill for that. I even did not have a problem accessing the wireless network - contrary to many others.

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On April 16, 2007 Nokia announced their S60 platform would support widgets in subsequent releases. This means, using their WebKit based browser under the hood, newer phones (S60 3rd ed. with Feature Pack 2) will have support for those small applications, mostly serving not more than a single purpose (e.g. show the weather or an RSS feed) that are well known on the desktop since a couple of years now.

In preparation to my talk at this year’s XTech conference I want to point out some important things related to this announcement. I think widgets on (mobile) devices are a major step in the right direction and I feel the mobile web can finally get the boost it so desperately was waiting for since a couple of years now. “The Ubiquitous Web” is this year’s XTech topic - I feel the mobile web will become ubiquitous pretty soon…This article can be seen as a primer to my talk at XTech: Ajax on mobile devices — making mobile web apps ubiquitous.

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