http://www.osnews.com/story/10200/ Exploring the Future of Computing en-us Copyright 2001-2009, David Adams adam+nospam@osnews.com Tue, 10 Nov 2009 08:40:14 GMT http://www.osnews.com/images/osnews.gif http://www.osnews.com http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? 3) It's your company .

No, but seriously, good thing this. I recently bought me a Sharp TM100, a mobile phone with a 240x320pix 5x4cm tft screen, capable of displaying 262000 colors-- Perfect for a quick browse when I'm either on the train or waiting for something. It's a huge market and I deffo agree with you for moving in on that. Let's hope more companies join OSNews.com in having a decent mobile version of their site! Mon, 04 Apr 2005 17:30:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? David Adams writes "Well, my not-so-grand experiment with MoBits hasn't really borne fruit. Since I got started, not only has it proved to be harder than I had thought to establishing customers (leading to a vicious circle of not wanting to update a site that nobody reads, while nobody wants to read a site that's never updated), but several really good companies have launched that cover the same subject matter."

No really, this isn't a troll.. as you will see in 1 year from now Mon, 04 Apr 2005 17:31:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? 's, 's, 's! What next? tags all over the place?! Oh... Mon, 04 Apr 2005 17:35:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? Yes, Mobits is affiliated with OSNews, and we're not trying to hide it. And, Mr. Anonymous, thanks for bringing up such a painful subject. You are not a nice person. Whenever you try to start up a new venture, there's always the chance that it's not going to succeed. I believe that being successful doesn't mean that you never fail, it just means that you're able to walk away from your failures before they consume you and move on to the next thing with renewed vigor. Fortunately for Mobits, its success won't depend solely on my talents, but on those of many other talented people who will be collaborating with me on this project. And the main reason we wanted to announce it on OSNews was that I know that there are many OSNews readers who could bring their expertise to the table, and I'm hoping we can hear from them. Mon, 04 Apr 2005 17:39:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? If you had taken the time to actually read their blurb about their focus and the kind of compatibility they need for it, you would understand why they use good ol' HTML. Mon, 04 Apr 2005 17:40:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? Jon, exactly. Reading their text, I can also see that the focus of Mobits is not Firefox or Safari. Thir focus seems to be AvantGo, Netfront, Blazer and a handful of other browsers you probably never heard of but they are used a lot on embedded systems, phones, pdas etc. And these browsers can't do CSS or DHTML, we are talking about *barely* HTML 3.2-compliant browsers over there.

Mobits fills up a niche in a territory where it's not easy to deal with the massive incompatibilities some of these browsers have. It's nice to see niches get filled in. Mon, 04 Apr 2005 17:47:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? While I wish David Adams every luck in his venture and I actually think its services are very good (OS News mobile rocks!), I have to ask - is an OS News post really the place for such a blantant advert?

This isn't a technology report, editorial or review - its a biased promotion of an affiliated company thats been presented in the same mannor as every other story or editorial thats published on OS News.

This leaves me with a worrying question - how bias or are other OS News stories? Can I pay to have my software or web site promoted as if it was a story or review?

If MoBits needs promotion by its sister company, why doesn't it just place an add at the side of OS News like every other company and add "Site Created by...: links to the bottom of the OS News mobile site??

Just my two cents... Mon, 04 Apr 2005 18:02:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? Usually when you start a venture, you tell people about it. Mon, 04 Apr 2005 18:06:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? Mobits is a sister company to osnews as David said and so it can be mentioned here. Slashdot has promoted their OSDN web sites over and over again, particularly sourceforge and newsforge so I don't see why David should not promote his new venture through his other site. It's not like he received money to do a blatant advert, both are his companies. Mon, 04 Apr 2005 18:08:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? > Usually when you start a venture, you tell people about it.

I don't have a problem with this - like I suggested, take a discounted/free advert at the side of OS News for 6 months.

> It's not like he received money to do a blatant advert
> both are his companies.

But he *does* receive money for it!! OS News will have a large number of visitors, a large number of unique visitors and a large CPC throughput.

> Slashdot has promoted their OSDN web sites over and
> over again

I have NEVER seen Slashdot promote a sister company as a regular news item. Yes, they do from time to time have stories about sister companies, but its generally only when its IT news. OSDN is a large IT/OSS company, Slashdot is a web site that reports on IT and OSS stories. You will find that the Slashdot stories about sister companies are news-worthy items, and will be picked up by other news sites too.

Can you really imagine another new site picking up David's story??

> particularly sourceforge and newsforge so I don't see
> why David should not promote his new venture through
> his other site

Slashdot has normal adds for SF.net and NewsForge unless they have done something that is really newsworthy and is picked up by many other news ites, not adverts in the guise or stories. In fact, if you take a look at Slashdot right now, there isn't a single add for a sister company.

Like I said, I wish him good luck, but OS News can not be considered a serious news site posting "stories" like this. Mon, 04 Apr 2005 18:22:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? This leaves me with a worrying question - how bias or are other OS News stories? Can I pay to have my software or web site promoted as if it was a story or review?

Well, if you have a new company or product that you'd like to announce on OSNews, I'd encourage you to use our news submission tool. Heaven knows dozens of people do it every day. We determine that some of these are of interest, and post a news story or even an entire article about it. For example:

http://www.osnews.com/story.php?news_id=10155
http://www.osnews.com/story.php?news_id=6847
http://www.osnews.com/story.php?news_id=10006

Just a few examples of new companies, projects, or product releases that we dermined with our "bias" that we should promote. Yes, OSNews is biased. We will only post stories that we think will be interesting to OSNews readers. That means mostly OS, new computing technology, or OSNews site-related items, with some general technophile-related interest stories thrown in when we feel like it.

Now, if you have a blatantly off-topic announcement you'd like to make, I'm sure if you offered us enough money, we'd post it. But it would have to be A LOT of money. We're only human, after all, and it's just a web site. ;-) Mon, 04 Apr 2005 18:33:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? >I have NEVER seen Slashdot promote a sister
>company as a regular news item.

I do call some of these news items promotions:
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=99/08/10/1841244&tid=99
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=99/09/17/0836245&tid=99
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=00/02/03/0823235&tid=124
http://apple.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=02/12/23/1349232&tid=3
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=01/12/07/1253241&tid=150

It would have been nicer if you had joined the discussion about mobility and web browsing instead of your rants. Besides, you can always ignore the news item if it doesn't interest you. I have a PDA and I browse a lot with it and so the item is in the realm of my interest. Mon, 04 Apr 2005 18:34:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? >> I have NEVER seen Slashdot promote a sister
>> company as a regular news item.
>
> I do call some of these news items promotions

Every singe one of those links is a news story about an OSS company and was picked up by lots of other news sites such as, cnet.com, news.com and businesswire.com.

Slashdot has a duty to report big NEWS, however I agree, its tricky when your reporting big news about your own company

Am I the ONLY person who feels that this wasn't the right thing to do? Mon, 04 Apr 2005 18:42:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? Yes. Why wouldn't they use the resource they worked so hard to build (osnews) to make known their new effort? It's like owning a bicycle but still decide to go to work by foot every morning so you don't offend the people who don't have one. And osnews.com is featured on almost all of the mobits pages (I reckon you had a look?) with many screenshots of how it renders on mobile browsers. Mon, 04 Apr 2005 18:47:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? Well... Opera does this automaticly, and it works great! Mon, 04 Apr 2005 18:50:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? I believe that the launch of a company that focuses exclusively on designing mobile-friendly sites is the kind of thing you'd see posted at certain news sites or magazines, because as far as I know there aren't any such companies. It would normally be off-topic for OSNews except for the fact that OSNews was its banner client and continues to be its main portfolio piece, but in fact I'm working on a press release right now, and I hope that it gets picked up by other publications. Public relations is an important part of any company's launch. Some companies are lucky in that they are unique enough or wierd enough that editors find their debut newsworthy. Just search news.google.com for "new company" and see how many there are.

By the way, if anyone knows of any other consulting firms or design companies that focus exclusively (or even mostly) on mobile sites, please let me know. Mon, 04 Apr 2005 18:54:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? >Opera does this automaticly, and it works great!

No it doesn't I am afraid. Opera's default rendering on mobile devices uses SSR and this is _extremely_ ugly (it's a bunch of text with no images and no paragraphs -- a huge blob of text). I had to disable SSR on-the-fly to make Opera look good for osnews. Try it, and then go to *any* other site you want and see the difference. Mon, 04 Apr 2005 18:54:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? I'd give Opera some credit, Eugenia. It's just that what they're trying to do is very, very hard. The results are going to vary wildly from site to site. In case you're wondering what they're talking about, see http://www.opera.com/products/mobile/smallscreen/

It's a cool idea, and it's amazing that it works as well as it does, considering the fact that every web site is designed and coded differently, with a cacophony of standards and non-standards. But it's no panacea, and its existence isn't a good justification for not creating a mobile-friendly design.

Remember, mobile device users, by and large, can't just decide that they can use Opera, or any other browser other than the one that comes installed on their device. That makes this whole situation much more challenging than the early Web days, when all could seemingly be solved by slapping a "built for Netscape" button on your site. Mon, 04 Apr 2005 19:02:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? I have used Opera's SSR, just press SHFT+F11 on the desktop Opera, it's the same thing. On the version 8-pre of the browser SSR works much better than before, but point of the matter is, Symbian version is still version 6.20 and MS Smartphone version is 7.60, and back in these versions, it was way better to have to scroll horizontally and vertically to read something than to use the SSR eyesore.

I am not saying that creating something like SSR is easy to do, it's not. It's just that the end result so far was less than satisfiable. Mon, 04 Apr 2005 19:08:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? Good luck with the venture. And I am sure as Eugenia pointed out this will be a niche market.

If you believe that all sites should render properly on all devices, even small screens then I may disagree with you, I think it really depends on who, when, where the site is for. One thing I constantly have to explain to people is that unlike a printed document, with the web you cannot control how the person is going to see your site. Given that there are so many devices out there and a billion people surfing the web, thats a guess) and so many sites, I don't think that it is always necessary to develop a site so that it looks nice on a mobile browser. It really just depends on the purpose of the site.

I was also wondering if your technology made use of new web standards when the browser supports them. To me that would imply some sort of XML content storage and then the appropriate transformations depending on the browser detected.

Just wondering. Mon, 04 Apr 2005 19:28:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? If you are talking about WURFL, I hope that this is going to be used only on a few cases. The problem with WURFL is that it is not updated too often and other times the phone makers themselves have mistakes in their xml files (they usually copy/paste stuff blindly). You can't completely put your trust to WURFL. Mobits's focus is primarily "mobile HTML", not WAP (however they do wap too if asked). But instead of writing html for desktop browsers, they must be careful to catter really problematic browsers that are barely cHTML-compatible (e.g. PalmONE ships all its devices with the licensed WebPro and so many palm people use it, even if that browser sucks big-big time -- I wonder why they don't license Netfront instead or just use the free AvantGo which is miles more capable than WebPro).

It's a different market, different challenges (see: browsers that can't even get the tag right . It's a niche, as I said earlier. Phones are getting more powerful so I don't see why not more people in the next few years wanting a mobile site for their businesses. It's about maximum customer reach and I am sure some people will be interested in it. Mon, 04 Apr 2005 19:40:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? I think that potentially there is a lot of business to be had in the niche. Since I have not seen to many companies advertising this service/technology.

I don't know to much about standards/technology around mobile browsing for the web so WURFL was new to me.

A lot of CMS's use their own XML schemas which allows them to be able to push out the appropriate HTML/XHTML depending on the type of user agent requesting the resource. Just more seperation of content really.

Not sure how you do the OSNews/Gnome Files sites, but using the above mentioned technique would be very expensive and time consuming but more flexible than just having different static versions of the site template.

If possible I would be very interested to get a high level overview of how the mobts technology works. I realise that it could be a business secret however. Mon, 04 Apr 2005 20:10:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? what's the point in letting me know theres a program on the google guts if even with my desktop i can't watch the video? Mon, 04 Apr 2005 21:04:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? Like Frank said- Opera already does this. But so does Pocket IE in WM2003. PIE in PPC 2k and 2k2 don't do a very good job, but Pocket IE in WM2003 does a great job "One Column" view, but even the Default mode is pretty good. Also, NetFront, which you can get for all versions of PocketPC/WM2003, Linux, and PalmOS does this too and does it very well.

...so why have this? I guess if you're on a cell phone with a crappy browser it might be worth having, or on an older PocketPC. Mon, 04 Apr 2005 21:21:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? There's always sites like mine (http://palm.nccomp.com) that is simply a collection of PDA/Smartphone optimized sites. It ain't the whole internet, but its enough to function. Heck, it even has some, errrr *entertainment*. Mon, 04 Apr 2005 22:49:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? I have a Motorola A780, which ships with Opera. It's a real http browser, in addition to supporting wap. This thing can download cnn.com, reformat the page to one long column and resize the photos to fit. It's the first phone I've ever used with a workable web browser.

And I've wondered why osnews.com looks worse than any other site I've visited. Now I know why!

P.S. I am am Motorola employee. But I love osnews. Please fix your site! Tue, 05 Apr 2005 00:41:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? I have no idea what you mean. Can you please be more specific? I have here some of motorola's emulators and the site looks more than fine.

Mobile Opera is automatically supported by OSNews' mobile engine and it looks lovely in it. I think you are just trolling. It's not fair you know. Tue, 05 Apr 2005 01:00:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? It's not the same:

1. These browsers can't reformat successfully everything out there. Most of the time their single-column view is not even usable neither as nice as a site that was created to have a nice design on small screen in specific.

2. Not all browsers support one column. And the ones they do are not always that successful delivering something better than an eyesore.

3. The designs mobits can deliver are not always "one column", it all depends on what a client needs. For example, if a clients needs support only for PDAs, more advanced designs can take place, I am sure. Tue, 05 Apr 2005 01:09:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? I was going to post from your hand held demo to be smart a%% but you didn't have this article on the
mobile page.

Seriously, it's kinda cute in mobile
form. 75% of the net doesn't need
full pages to get the point accross
it just wastes space. The mini-layouts are kinda neat.

Anybody know how to get Firefox to "fake out" the browser string and
display mobile links in a tab or
such.

I'll have to see if this turns out on the page... I tried to get it to
format just in the mobile window. Tue, 05 Apr 2005 01:20:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? >you didn't have this article on the mobile page.

Yes, that's why it's called a demo and not a live demo. It's a saved-down static version of the mobile version just to show.

>Anybody know how to get Firefox to "fake out" the browser string

Yes, there is an extention for it that I also use sometimes for testing. Be aware though, the mobile designs don't look good above VGA, they are specifically made for mobile devices.
http://www.chrispederick.com/work/firefox/useragentswitcher/ Tue, 05 Apr 2005 01:29:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? David,

Thank you for your work. OSNews looks fantastic on my Sharp Zaurus VGA screen running Netfront 3.1. I can bump the text size up larger (for my 40-something eyes) and the layout still looks great.

Question: Why can't I read all the comments to a thread in one long post? I can only read one batch at a time.

Suggestion: The lime green color links read very faintly on my device. Perhaps it is better on other devices, but another color would help display the text on small screens.

Again, thanks!

Bill Tue, 05 Apr 2005 02:02:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? > Why can't I read all the comments to a thread in one long post?

I have explained this before, it's because of offline browsers (avantgo, isilo, pluck*) that sync based on the link depth and they run out of memory when they unesessarily download both the comment pages and the huge full-comment page. Also, we don't want people to run out of memory on phones either, which is very common that some phones produce an error or even crash as they can't handle more than 12 or 16 KBs of data at the time.

>The lime green color links read very faintly on my device.

It all depends on the gamma of the LCD and how it was setup by the manufacturer. It looks ok on my devices for example. Tue, 05 Apr 2005 02:22:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? . And these browsers can't do CSS or DHTML, we are talking about *barely* HTML 3.2-compliant browsers over there.

Hopefully Mobilt will rebuilf their tool to be XHTML/CSS compliant. Writing with HTML 3.2 is a lot of pain because of maintenance issues. Tue, 05 Apr 2005 04:22:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? The whole point of mobits to not do that (I take it you read their "compatibility" paragraph under /Services?). Mobits targets mobile devices. From the moment that 95% of these browsers don't support XHTML/CSS, it would be *terrible* business for them to go with these modern technologies you mention. XHTML/CSS is not a possible target at this point in time. I have said it many times: the mobility browser world today is like the desktop web was in 1996-97. You have to code with these limitations in mind.

As for being a pain to develop, it's one good point to bring new business in. Other design houses don't want to deal with the problem you mentioned, but MoBits does. That's an advantage over competition. Tue, 05 Apr 2005 04:46:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? Well, most of web portal platforms state they support wireless mark-ups (at least WML). In fact it is done through extensions and in general it looks quite poor, I mean, the look'n'feel and the experience.
I think all wireless portals (or portals which support wireless mark-ups in addition to regular HTML) need a centralized storage for devices' (mob. phones, PDS and so on) capabilities. This repository must be updated as soon as new device appear in the market. Portals could make local replicas of such repository in order to speed up the recognition process.
The second very important thing - an unified content format (based on XML). It would hold all necessary data to render a concrete mark-up tags. Then portals would apply necessary XML style sheets on those pieces of content and here you have correct view . The selection of a XML style sheet would be based on user agent.

Of course, I know that such content wouldn't be very attractive or very funny, but this is the price we pay in order to render the same content on a wide range of mobile devices.

P.S.: regarding WURFL - I think it's a good idea with quite poor implementation and without the proper support. Tue, 05 Apr 2005 05:57:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? The ironic part is, I've read this news with my mobile, in bed. ;D Tue, 05 Apr 2005 06:18:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? Cool, nice to hear. You just woke up, right? So, what device do you use? Tue, 05 Apr 2005 06:20:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? @Eugenia: it's an old Nokia, 6210. I'm reading the WAP version with it. Since WAP is very cheap now, I have recently build an WAP interface to our financial system at work. You can check invoices and stuff. It's very handy. So is reading OSNews while bus ride. Tue, 05 Apr 2005 09:37:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments