web

Francois Freeing the Cloud talk at Debconf10, showed members of the Debian community keen to help see opensource Web applications.

The proposed open&free implementation of Gravatar is a great example, whereby a user uploads an image of him/herself which corresponds to a hash of their email address. In order to make this Web "cloud" service rock, super quick downloads of that image are needed.

Debian knows about mirroring data to distribute data amongst free software agents. And we also now know about CDN, aka content delivery networks and GEO DNS, which point to your local mirror.

So lets pool our resources and offer CDN Web space (100MB?) to free software Web application projects. This will make the opensource Web services competitive in all important page load times and perhaps make it easier for user contributed data to be exported and "open".

I have Debian server space in Germany I'm happy to contribute to Francois's avatar project and other similar opensource Web apps. If you think this is a good idea, please get in touch.

Just listened to IPM and a story about making ATMs accessible.

I think good Web applications can lend themselves to accessibility. First off, for partially sighted persons, one can increase the size of the font. You can’t do that easily on typical cash dispensers!

Next familiariaty. One could be trained to use the ‘ATM Web application’ from home. And when the time comes, the person will know what options to select.

Web applications are much easier to maintain and easier to find developers and tools for. For example, why shouldn’t a banking application support every language?

I think I might write an ATM Web application prototype. If I wanted to take this idea even further I would get it running in a secure public Web platform like Webconverger and write a plugin to dispense the cash, with something like WebVM…

Rang up Vodafone UK to be sure. She was not sure how much it was per megabyte(!). Eventually she said she “thinks it’s 2.50GBP per megabyte”.

Of course she recommended the 7.50GBP Web “bolt on”. So that’s 27.50GBP a month for the ‘fair’ usage of 500M per month.

I think the mobile Web will have a hard time to prosper with these current super offers.

Can you quickly spot the typo between a form field value ”+2731284325” and ”+2731294325”?

Now what if the form field had a cue? For example a colour cue on the border colour:

16 Colours provide instant visual feedback that there is a difference between the two form fields. That’s a 4 bit Web form error detection using md5.

When you enter the same data again and again in form fields like your:
* username
* email
* birth date
* credit card number

Each one of these “datums” could be associated with a cue. So you would subconsciously over time recognise you entered your details correctly.

This cue idea is useful for accessibility. People who are prone to making typos could use a cue (an additional band/channel) to quickly find mistakes.

I initially thought of form error detection, checksums & cues when I accidentally mistyped a number from a business card three times into my mobile. If that business card had a “checksum”, with the number (for e.g.) underlined with the according md5 colour chances are I would have entered that number in correctly first time into my addressbook. Saved the cost of the misdirected texts and saved an awful lot of time.

So a cue is especially applicable in mobile environs. Anywhere I imagine were copy&paste is not easy to do.

Of course a cue does not have to be a colour cue checksum. A ‘cue’ could be some other easily recognisable symbol like Wingdings, different CSS styling like border styles, Unicode symbols, playing card symbols and so on.

So I encourage you to please try my initial implementation called “Get a cue” with Web form input elements. For the developers amongst you, please look at the BSD licensed code. Feedback and patches are very welcome.

Hopefully a defacto ‘cue’ error detection algorithm rises to the top that will help everyone improve their input quality.

get a cue

With the help of a colleague, I compiled a list of the top 50 android applications and roughly which API they required to function.

The Web application specification (offline file access) with device APIs can do what these Android applications can do. Otherwise I do not see any compelling grounds for ‘innovation’ that the Androids Java SDK could provide over the Web… Most of the Android entries look pretty lame and unexciting to me.

Sadly rumour has it that Gears won’t be on the first versions of Android. Well it isn’t that surprisingly as I was practically begging for Gears on Android four months ago.

Sidenote: I am also concerned when operators will start to do Internet data “freely” on their PAYG plans, to facilitate the Web on mobiles. I’m following developments on SMStextNews in the UK… and its disheartening. Maybe data on mobile will be ubiquitous in the UK in 5 years? Rest of the World… who knows?

I’ve been using Firefox 3 (beta5) pre-release lately, because it’s faster than Firefox 2.

• FF3 doesn’t seem work on China’s biggest portal. If the desktop browser can’t grok this, what chance does Firefox Mobile (think developing markets)?
• Autocompletion with “AwesomeBar” (I think it’s called) sucks for me. How do I turn it off or make it act like it did in FF2?
• Image zoom caught me off guard. [View -> Zoom -> Zoom Text Only] to disable. I look to a future of scalable images.
• The bookmarks stuff seems like a disaster. I want it all removed. I prefer simple bookmarklets and del.icio.us.
• I need to update my extension for Webconverger
• No OGG video support

Generally I don’t like their “session management” (browser.sessionstore.resume_from_crash false). It would be good if I could simply ‘lock’ certain tabs like Gmail, which really must be my first tab. I also want it locked so I can’t accidentally navigate away from it which I have done far too many times now.

I am most impressed by the improved “feel” or responsiveness of FF3. I really hope Mozilla can concentrate on re-factoring their code to squeeze it into their ‘fennec’ mobile browser. Update: Blassey kindley informs me Fennec and FF3 are the same rendering engine.

Mozilla’s mobile codename ‘Fennec’ is outperforming microb significantly already. That’s great though after reading a first look I am little bit disappointed to see talk of XUL. I’ve created extensions and I think XUL is crap. I much prefer working within the Web paradigms of JavaScript and CSS. Addon support is fantastic though then again, my experience of extensions/addons/whatever-they-are-now-called is that they can make Firefox slow. Which is bad bad bad.

Actually, when I think about it, an addon could be called a widget.

Update (3/3/2008): We’re also working to bring Google Gears for mobile to Android and other mobile platforms with capable web browsers.

Here is my writeup of yesterdays Android Code Day in London.

Eclipse 3.3 is needed to get the plugin working. Only eclipse 3.2 is in Debian unstable. Download the Europa release and re-setting up the plugin will do it. I’m no Eclipse fan boy, though the integrated debugger works. The iteration cycles are really short for trying stuff out. Very good.

Developers, mainly from a Symbian background grilled Jason Chen over security and wanting C API access. Lot of people didn’t seem to like the idea that users were controlling security. I like Google’s “empowering the users” stance, though I think representatives from operators don’t. I heard that poor argument about users asking their operators for android support. Jason argued well that it’s up to user education to contact the right people. When a computer crashes in the UK, who do people call? VirginMedia? Please! How about Breakpad crash reporting on Android?. Jason used the OHA to defend Google from looking like they have all the political power… Hmmmm.

I can understand the tight rope that Google are walking. They are trying not to fragment their platform before it’s properly released. OEMs, operators will feck it up if they have the chance to play with the source code before a Google co-ordinated release. Once they release Google claim they will release everything under the Apache 2 license. So I asked could we see Android on desktops? Jason said there is nothing stopping you. I hope not. Their opened fonts and multimedia codecs on desktop PCs could really make a big difference for Linux take up, especially in Asian (growth) markets. I have studied and implemented Asian fonts and Android’s font rendering even on that nightmare Website sina looked good to me.

Despite the “Symbian developers” giving Jason hell in the beginning I had impression they actually liked Android. It fealt almost staged. Scary. Symbian C++ programmers learning Java and jumping ship!

Same old problems with images. People are concerned about how bitmap images will scale on different target screens. There is four ‘skins’ already supported in the emulator (QVGA-L+P, HVGA-L+P). We need scalable images too on the Web. Though there are some workarounds demonstrated which seemed OK to me.

During the hackathon, I wanted to write a backup/sync tool. Since only Jason Chen seemed to know Android and there was a filled audience, I didn’t get to ask him how really to go about coding it. Though with the help of Dave from Zyb, we eventually found out about content providers. Took some debugging to find that out, but we got there. Having a working debugger is really really nice. We discovered we needed “android.permission.READ_CONTACTS” in the manifest to make our little application that read out the contact on stdout. Cool, though I’d rather use Javascript and the Web stack. Anyway, Android seemed like a good platform, but I have concerns.

My biggest concern is basically where is Google Gears on Android? Jason could neither confirm or deny this, so perhaps they have it. Though gears is an opensource project and you can see code reviews… no Android mentioned.

What happens if the Android platform is wildly successful? Then we are going to see two major platforms. The Android platform on mobiles and the Web platform on everything else. I worryingly saw no support for Web application device APIs on Android. Encouraging people to write for their Android/java-esque platform undermines their main Web platform! It’s like Microsoft’s mistake of undermining their own platform all over again.

From Android you can use Webkit and the Web stack. But from the Web API stack you can’t seemingly access their Dalvik VM APIs. I disclose I am an employee of Aplix (opinions etc. are my own), also a OHA member. I am actively working on a plugin technology that exposes APIs as familiar JS APIs to Web developers. I have already done a proof of concept implementation of Google Gear’s Location API on mobile devices with Aplix technologies.

Google you should really do the same and make Web applications equal citizens on your mobile platform by implementing Gears on Android (if you haven’t already).

I’m a big fan of Stephen Fry and his work. I can highly recommend his novels too. Brilliant stuff.

Though I find really odd yet wonderful how Stephen is blogging about HTML5.

I have been peering into his world (admittedly I’ve read his autobiographies) and now he’s almost peering into mine.

I feel a little more inspired about working on the video stuff. There is a lot of interest in this and it will be an incredibly important milestone for the “Free Software” Web to get this right!

I’ve noticed that Apple itself seems to be promoting Web applications with a little directory.

I’ve mentioned before, that I think Apple “locking” users into a decent open Web application platform is quite good.

After all the version (Webkit UA string collection) of Safari on my ipod touch is the same as the one on my Macbook Pro. So the myth that the ‘mobile browser will always be years behind the desktop’ has exploded.

However I have concerns:
* “Ipod touch” is not an iPhone. So the ‘iphone.’ prefix to sites strikes me as a bit silly for my ‘iPod touch’
* I want to see instead examples of sites that work well in iPhone without “templating”. They do exist!
* At least iPhone Web developers don’t seem to UA/browser sniff, mobile Web/WURFL style. So desktop users can now view these “mobile” Web apps, without some braindead XHTML format error.

Sidenote: Do not use XHTML

Update: I submitted my Web application to Apple. However Apple wanted a screenshot of the Web application, running on an iPhone. Er… how the hell do you that? I started a thread on the iphone dev list and a Jake got back to me (with the screenshot): “I use snap, part of Erica’s utilities on my jailbreaked iPhone.”

So we had to crack the Apple device, to submit the application to Apple. Hmmm !

Whilst sober, I can begin to type up my thoughts on yesterday’s Mobile Monday event at Centre point, largely about content adaption. I had a good time.

I feel quite strongly against content adaption/transcoding. And no you can’t argue that Opera adapts content. Think of Opera’s approach as a single “distributed browser”. Tight coupling with the browser is great. See my thesis. Openwave/Novarra don’t work with browser vendors like Webkit or Gecko.

I was expecting a debate, though the event seem to be run in such a way that didn’t foster debate. The relevant presentations from Openwave and Novarra were buffered and it was a long time before we reached the “panel discussion”. By that stage I had a few glasses of South African red and the panel was far too biased or rather boring for my liking.

So I fealt like I had to say something for the angry Web developers I’ve seen on the momo list. Unfortunately this frustration could only be posed as a question. Many of the points or myths that Openwave/Novarra pitched could have done with quick interactive responses. How do you ask a question, when they’ve got this, this and that and that wrong wrong wrong.

I know for a fact that WiderWeb/Openwave get laughably low traffic, despite their claims of “opening the Web”! Novarra says they have 160k users of 70 million Vodafone users. What’s that? 0.2%??!

Afterwards I engaged fellow Web developers for support and found little(!). Some people were whitelisted now, so they don’t care. Some people just want flash. Most people want to make money yesterday on the mobile. Others want Apple to open their proprietary mobile platform. Some people were silly enough to get a stupid dotMobi domain to get around the problem or prefix their site with wap. Yes yes… what about the Web? You know, the real one? With HTML?

The heated issue was that:

1. Web developers were writing “Web content” for particular UA strings. (That’s bad)
2. Man-in-the-middle Novarra rewrites UA strings to a standard Mozilla one
3. Web site returns “full site content”
4. Novarra screws up the content
5. User gets that unacceptable “user experience” (funny)

So people were up in arms, because their mobile specific “Web site” with WURFL typically was breaking. So surprisingly I was chuckling to myself, “those guys get what they deserve for making device dependent Web pages!”

Ok, bickering aside. The solution I asked of Novarra and Openwave last night was simply to be accountable.

That means publically giving out proxy details of their content adaption software so Web developers in-the-know can publically evaluate what they actually do. Randy from Novarra said he’ll get back to me. Novarra are launching something soon with Yahoo! Ed from Openwave said he’ll share it with me as long as Novarra do it and that I don’t publically criticize the service. Hmmmm….

Yes, I still don’t really know what they do inside their “walled garden”, so I can’t get too mad. If they stripped CSS and images and tidied HTML, then it’s probably actually OK. Unfortunately I don’t think they are smart enough to do just that.

We are on the brink of something new with the mobile device. The (mobile) ipod webkit browser is the same browser on my MacOSX Macbook Pro. I am tired of “screen size” and “mobile browsers will always be years behind” myths. Lets push for up to date browsers with excellent standards compliance.

Lets stop blaming Web developers and lets stop coming up with new non-HTML markups. Lets discourage hacks like “content adaptors” from hindering the exciting deployment of capable Web browsers such as Webkit on mobile devices.