PavingWays

While working on a couple of things we realized strange behavior in IE Mobile on a Windows 5.0 phone. It’s not really a big issue but it could lead to tiny hiccups for developers, so I felt like posting it here.

The issue occurs then POSTing a form (multipart/form-data) to the server (running PHP 5.x) which contains an input field of type “file” and you leave this file empty.

What you on the server side normally do is to read the form values submitted by the user through the $_POST and the $_FILES array (in PHP) and then do whatever you like with it. These arrays are populated by PHP with the values of the various input fields on your form, and inputs of type=”file” don’t appear in $_POST, but in the $_FILES array, any other input type’s value goes to $_POST.

Now as long as you fill in all field on your form everything is fine, and IE Mobile works as described.

BUT: While any other browser seems to not send empty inputs of type=”file” to the server at all, IE Mobile does just that AND it goes to $_POST causing you to have a key with the name of your input=”file” field with en empty value in the $_POST array after sending the form. This doesn’t hurt at all, but it is weird, especially because this ONLY happens if you leave the input=”file” form element empty.

While this is a bit strange, it’s not really a problem, maybe not even a bug, maybe not even against the standard (I didn’t look it up). After all, uploading files through a form on a mobile browser does not seem to be what many people do (although it works pretty well…mostly).

I totally forgot blogging about that and more or less for completeness reasons I want to mention that I have been attending the Google Android developer day in Munich (actually in Aschheim/Dornach) on January 29, 2008. I met Jason Chen, one of the presenters at the event, the day before at the Mobile Monday in Munich.

The people attending, at least most people I have been talking to, were mobile developers sent by their companies, pretty big ones. There were some start-up people there too, but not many. Comments and questions in general were pretty critical, detailed and practical. Interesting was the big interest of taking part in the Google Android development competition from the audience. Apparently mentioning 10 mio USD in price-money creates some interest ;)

I was of course mostly interested in the WebKit-based web browser in Android and I have to say it worked pretty well in the SDK emulator, it even has the same “bug” that I had experienced while testing the Frost library on the iPhone when it came out. So no surprises there too and one more browser to look at when developing mobile web apps, even though it’s almost the same browser as on the iPhone or Nokia’s S60 3rd edition phones (also exhibiting the “bug” mentioned above - so it’s apparently a WebKit issue after all).

Bottom line is: no surprises after all, Google leaves no event without mentioning that they’re looking for developers and if you’re interested in Android development, get the SDK and read the docs.

I found an very interesting article about mobile social networks on mashable.com. It is about a report of M:Metrics, which indicates that mobile social networks are growing worldwide and that they actually can be seen as a driver for mobile web usage in Europe as well as in the US.

By the numbers:
M:Metrics is reporting that in June 12.3 million consumers were accessing a social network via their mobile phones in the US and Western Europe. The US had the largest number of users (7.5 million mobile subscribers), followed by Italy (1.3 million), then the UK (1.1 million) and then Spain, Germany and France.

The most visited mobile social networks:
In June the most visited mobile social networks in the US and the UK were:
- MySpace (3.7 million mobile users in the US and 440,000 in the UK)
- Facebook (2 million mobile users in the US and 307,000 in the UK)
- Bebo (288,000 mobile users in the UK)
- YouTube (901,000 mobile visits in the US)

In France, Germany, Italy and Spain the most popular mobile social network was MSN’s Live Spaces, which is only available off-portal. That means users were accessing this service through their mobile web browser and not through their operator’s site.

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In recent years online social networks have experienced huge growth. Typically sites like Facebook.com or MySpace.com have been a place for the younger demographic in society to express personal interests and information. The report “Social Networking: Finding Friends Online“ from InStat describes these networks as “virtual social structures consisting of individuals that are connected through various social familiarities, geographies, business connections, or common interests”. In short: social networking sites are a great place for self promotion.

But with tragedies like the tragedy at Virginia Tech on April 16, 2007 it began to show that online social networking sites have become more important than just promoting yourself. They became a public place to mourn the loss.

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