News from the front

I’ll keep track on the iphone3G news and factoids here.

• Vodafone has announced it will launch a new iphone in 5 european markets, including Portugal. Orange has also announced availability in a number of markets, including Portugal. The iphone will be available through at least 2 carriers in most european markets.
• AT&T has sliped and an “iphone black” has shown briefly on its online store. AT&T claims this is an internal reference and doesn’t actually refer to a black iphone but it links to the plastic composite shell.
• A 3G on/off button as shown up on 2.0 firmware betas confirming the 3G version has 3G :)
• Suposed leaks of shell designs sent to accessory makers include a video call camera in the front. Not surprising for a 3G phone
• AT&T is in high alert for the 3rd week of June so that’s the believed date for US launch.
• Strings found on the 2.0 betas point to A2DP and GPS bluetooth support
• Also, stuff found on the 2.0 betas makes us think the iphone3G will be powered by the SGOLD3 Infinenon chip which puts the core platform at the nokia n96 level.

I’ll keep track of Google Android stuff here.

• T-Mobile says they will have an Android based device till the end of the year.
• Texas Instrument demoed an handheld prototype based on a current midrange TI OMAP chipset.
• People have managed to get an Android beta booting on HTC TyTN II hardware (not really interesting).
• People have managed to get a recent Android image running OK on a Nokia N810 (this is interesting).
• HTC is working on an Android phone codenamed “Dream”
• Wild rumours say Dell will make an Android device
• Am I the only one who noticed the qvga Android simulator is very very similar to a Palm Centro ?
• Not really Android but AT&T is jumping on the LiMo bandwagon with a lot of enthusiasm so it’s probably not on the Android bandwagon.

(continued from In the beginning, there was the X)

So it was all mobile (by 1993 standards) and converged and everybody was happy. Except everybody was basically a handfull of lucky academics and things weren’t all that pretty most of the time.

At some point regular people started to get online and that was done through commercial isps or walled gardens like aol and compuserve which sold access and wasn’t all that interested in selling mobility. So the expensive storage was pushed out into the edge into people’s pcs through pop and information got basically locked up in an inaccessible dead end.

This was kind of the dark ages of the budding internet. People were trying to transition to wintel, microsoft was fighting the internet and trying to trick people to sign into their own bbs system, msn, styled after the dying models of compuserv and aol. We had html2 and then 3, marquee text and bookmarks files. Mailbox files and bookmarks files and everything was files, at least until your disk died.
You had your work email account and your home email account and pretty much nothing in between. Mobility repioneers had to rent servers somewhere in the internet to push email and bookmarks (manually sadly) back into the network. The server hosting this pages is one of those. It was expensive, and tedious to keep together.

Meanwhile the internet was getting less clunky, despite microsoft internet explorer 5.x (ye gods!!), and storage was getting cheaper and hotmail emerged of its post-buyout nonworking times and by 1998 email was liberated back into the web.

(to be continued)

The summer build up around iPhone3G and Android got me thinking about the perfect phone. The perfect phone nowadays is everything but a phone so the feature list runs fairly long. Here we go,

• it needs to be a phone (duh)
• it needs to have an address book
• the address book needs to know how to sync with stuff
• it needs to be a 3G phone, preferably 3.5G
• and have bluetooth with a2dpc, pan, obex and sync profiles
• it needs to have a decent web browser
• it needs to have a microSDHC slot
• it needs to have a decent camera, 5Mpx, glass autofocus
• and a crappy camera for video conference
• it needs to play mp3 and whatnot
• it should have a decent screen, the palm T|X 480x320 screen seems reasonable
• preferably a touch screen for joting down notes
• and it must be good enough to play video (that’s what microSDHC is for)
• the good camera should be able to capture CIF@25fps (microSDHC is for that too)
• it should be Linux or OSX powered
• or at least S60v3
• and be able to run extra software so it can be my pda
• wifi would be nice but i’m not so sure about that one

So the iPhone3G comes close and it’s pretty likely one of the Android phones get there. So go ahead, make my day!

Redoing the site came about for two main reasons. One was me not being happy with the n-year old content in the old site and with the zombie book of days. The second, unsurprisingly, was me wanting to tinker with current web technologies.

The engine decision was pretty easy, i already used blosxom in the past and i pretty much like it for all the blosxomy reasons. The design itself was on the other hand excrutiating as i’m very much not a designer.

So it started as a technical exercise in xhtml/css which proved in itself pretty depressing as xhtml1.0/css2.0 isn’t particularly more interesting than html4.01 in terms of splitting content and design which again i like to think is the reason why all web designs are fixed pixel-acurate typographical designs (as opposed to the web designers being a bunch of dolts who can’t transition from paper to screen). In the end getting a nice multicolumn flowed design turned out pretty difficult both cause float doesn’t really work that well and flowed layout depends on the block order in the content side of things, not the layout side of things. And of course, i was cheating and ignoring the multitude of css bugs on ie6 to avoid utter madness.

In parallel it seemed a good idea to go utterly web2.0 and thick-client and push all non-static content to the browser. That was obviously a ploy to play with jQuery and newer versions of Dojo. So i had content being pulled from feeds, put into accordions and tabs all very much dynamic and moving on the browser.
And then it dawned on me it was all very daft. Nothing was actually being accomplished, i was creating huge load times, breaking box models left and right (hello microsoft!), fighting doms and nothing was accessible anyway. And in the end, most people would be viewing the content through a feed aggregator and would never touch the site itself. So that would be a wasted month if i didn’t come out of it much more experiences in the horrors of the web.

So in the end most of the stuff got scratched, all javascript went away, content got constructed server side and floats went away.
On the down side tables came back. Here xhtml/css is much better than html4. Instead of tables going into html they came back on css so we get divs that render as tables and we don’t break semantics but we can’t influence render order in css so we end up saying the table layout in html.

Eventually, 10 years from now, browsers will catch up to xml/css3 and i’ll be happy happy doing server side components that spew out xml that’s perfectly laid out by a designer i’ll wont need to know.

Hi. There’s a new site here. There’s still a link to the old one somewhere. But this one will actually have content.

So there.

Vote Wiggum’08

I remember when the world was simple. There was quite a lot out there to find out and not a lot of prerequisites. I knew quite a lot of C and enough OO and C++ to get by and when pragmatism or Web was involved there was Perl, quite a lot of it really.

Nowadays things are somewhat more complex.

Google took the big leap and announced Android. Obviously, my geek panties automatically bundled themselfs at the prospect until I realized the API was all Java. As soon as I started remembering Java I realized why I forgot all about it.
Then Adobe released the AIR stuff and I’m all over javascript which despite the name has preciouslly little to do with Java and gives me both desktop, web client and thanks to aptana hopefully server side too.
Apple released the iphone SDK and I’m all over it, again. Except Apple has the warm and fuzzies about ObjC which is just enough like C to be strange and enough like nothing else to be strange.
And now Google busts out the App Engine which again gets me over excited. Google is all about Python on the Web side and obviously the API and rutime for app engine is Python. Sad thing is I dislike Python only slightly less than Java.

So now there’s 4 languages, one that I know nothing about, one that I don’t mind and 2 that make my brain want to sludge out through my ears all competing for my attention in overlaping or complementary spaces. The result ? I’ll most likely never get anything done again!

The convergence/mobility challenge is all the hype today but in fact it isn’t new. It was solved some two decades ago by the same people using the same technologies. We’re cheating!

in the times of old there was something called the mainframe (featured in a number of scifi movies) which was basically a fairly large computer in a lot ocasions running some sort of unix flavour os. In those cases most likely there were some much more graphical but much less powerfull workstations, also running some sort of unix system, which had the X-Window system. On that a lucky person could run locally a graphical fat email client (email was new then so people would actually say Email) to read his email stored on the mainframe in full graphical glory. Or what passed for full graphical glory back then.

If the guy wasn’t important enough to have his own workstation he might have access to a X terminal which was basically what now is called a thin client. This things booted from network and displayed on their local X-Windows server graphical apps coming from a computer somewhere in the network (as opposed to running a vnc or rdp session, the X protocol is totally network enabled so the apps were literally running somewhere and coming across the network). Fundamentally the experience was the same as running the app locally on a workstation except more slugish cause gigabit ethernet isn’t a thing of the past. A X term was somewhat expensive so it was hot desked (see, another this-century paradigm right there!) and it was hot desked cause it could be.

Then again, our joe user might find itself away from its trusty workstation or locked out of the X term room so he could just cruise down to one of the glass teletype rooms and catch up on his email and do some actual work on a text terminal linked up somehow to his mainframe. It wasn’t as confy as his workstation but it would get the job done.

Away from office, if he was lucky enough to be on the internet, he could even telnet into the mainframe from another interneted machine have all his data at his finger tips.

So people could actually access their data and work on a number of devices across campus and even off campus using the new exciting internet protocol (yes yes, decnet, x.25, all that too). Their were both converged and mobile. So when did this go wrong ?

(continued)

Yes, this is what passes as cuting edge in the US mobile market. Yes, you can actually use non Verizon CDMA handsets on Verizon. :)