Opera just released a version of their Mini browser for Treo. Here’s what the download and install process looks like. point your existing Blazer browser at http://mini.opera.com the page detects your device (a Treo 650 in this case) and offers a download link clicking the link starts a 100k download the phone offers to store…
Author: mdubinko
A brief nod to the east: now Japanese mobile users have the option to switch carriers while keeping their existing number. This development is triggering a new round of competition among the carriers and bringing in a new era of free content, something we take for granted in the U.S. -m
Just ran into this. Nice! Mobile mashups are getting some serious momentum. To elaborate on my previous comments a bit, the concept of what people find usable differs between sitting at a desktop and sitting/standing/running/driving with mobile in hand. Desktop sites aren’t optimized for these kinds of use patterns. Ergo, fertile ground for lots of…
Link. My comment: “duh”. In fact, don’t even try to copy Web 1.0 on phones. Even the concept of what’s uable differs on the small screen. -m
Lots more going on at Yahoo! Come join the fun! We’re specifically looking for PHP, SQL, DHTML, XML, and JavaScript folks. And if you have some knowledge of video codecs, definitely get in touch. -m
Whoops, the feedback email address for the XForms Validator was down after my last round of changes. Fixed. -m
One other thing that caught my eye recently: a report from a mobile industry task force led by Nokia that extolls the virtues of unplugging your phone after it’s charged. The report claims that if 10 percent of mobile phone owners would unplug their phones when done charging… it would reduce energy consumption by an…
Another great confererence I missed. Who wouldn’t want a trip to Espoo, Finland? Proceedings (link directly to large PDF). Looks like an interesting mix of theoretical and practical stuff. -m
On a PHP 4 project, I need to use XSLT, but the interfaces seem far more complicated than they should be. Check out this declaration for the function to run an XSLT: mixed xslt_process ( resource xh, string xmlcontainer, string xslcontainer [, string resultcontainer [, array arguments [, array parameters]]] ) Wow, it returns a…
Just a little FYI. Anyone use uses the word “pretexting” in a conversation with me is likely to get on my bad side. At least have the decency to call it identity fraud or even good old fashioned “lying”. -m
Check out this site from Dreamhost: Files Forever. All files are DRM-free and can be re-downloaded at any time. Expect to see more of this from an unhealthy market that wants to break free from artificial constraints. Currenly in beta and open only to Dreamhost customers. -m
The little one just turned a month old. Since I have a spare moment, time for some blog catch-up. A C|Net puff piece survey reports More than two-thirds of respondents said that their data was most vulnerable on laptop PCs, while 40% chose “other mobile devices” (i.e. PDAs, mobile phones, wireless devices) Mind you, this…
Today Softbank Mobile launched a new mobile service, delivering tons of Yahoo! Japan content, powered by Yahoo! US technology, to Softbank Mobile phones. This is notable for a few reasons: In the past, content of this caliber been inside paid walled gardens in Japan. Opening this up could be the tipping point for a shake-up…
All right, the article is actually 12 Lessons for Those Afraid of CSS and Standards, but if I were to write the same list for mobile development, it would be almost identical. -m
Article (with a non-best-practice URL) from seomoz. If you’re into this kind of thing, Web 2.0 The Book has an entire chapter on it. Nitpick: Also note how normal folks say URL, not the even-more-geeky URI. -m
Another example of a small, useful spec defined in a language humans can actually read and understand. It also seems incredibly useful to be able to print basic things without going through the multi-megabyte printer driver madness that everyone else seems to be going for. -m
Another cool thing on the way: this Friday is the first public Yahoo! Hack Day. I’ll be out on the lawn for sure. If you’ll be there–look me up. Since the presentations come rapid-fire at the end, here Chad Dickerson has some tips on presenting in 90 seconds. -m
Spotted via Weinberger. Hiawatha Bray of The Boston Globe writes about Yahoo’s continuing foray against DRM, led by David Goldberg. -m
I just have a feeling I’m going to need this some day. -m
Check this out. It’s a RAZR V3i, which has a show-stoppingly bad mobile browser built-in. (But overall, it’s still better than the ROKR!) Compared to the huge announcements from Apple earlier this week, this one comes in fairly under the radar. Could this be a trial baloon leading up to an official iPhone? If this…
A Siemens SL65 to be exact: Like any jewel, you have to slide the two shells of this tiny giant to open it up. ??? Read it again–it makes even less sense the 2nd time. Aside from hyperactive copywriters, can anyone comment on this phone? Steve didn’t deliver my iPhone yet, so I have to…
I got this link from Eve, and to think, I never even knew there was a consortiuminfo.org. The Microsoft Open Specifications Promise irrevocably lets any interested parties implement and use a list of technologies without fear of getting sued (at least sued by Microsoft). It is similar in tone and scope to earlier declarations about…
For the first time today, I momentarily wished that jEdit had a particular Emacs key binding, not the other way around. -m
A must-read posting from Mark Birbeck, who knows a few things about XForms and Web Forms 2.0. He talks about the respective approaches embodied in XForms and Web Forms 2.0, and concludes that the primary difference between them has little to do with simplicity. He goes on to analyze differences in how developers and users…
I’ve written before about the xslt2xforms project by Sébastien Cramatte. The project is not only still alive, but expanded into an entire utility kit including a PHP5 framework and forming “a complete xforms/xml toolbox based only on w3c standards”. Check it out on sourceforge. -m
Most of the censorship stories you hear on the news involve public libraries, but right now I’m writing this from a hospital, which has free wi-fi. Someone providing a service like this has latitude to do pretty much as they please, including censorship, but is it a good idea? The system here evidently consists of…
Born at 5:38pm on August 29th. 8 pounds, 8.3 ounces. (3864 g) 20 inches (51 cm). Mother and baby doing great. Photos. Name pronounced with a “sh”. The first birth announcement I know of done initially over an IM presence indicator. :) -m
I dug into my mail configuration a bit more and made a few changes. In the past, I had been lazy, so when I needed new email addresses like webmaster at xformsinstitute.com and contact at xformsinstitute.com, I just set up a catch-all. I knew catch-alls would collect lots of spam, but I didn’t know (until…