| Why people hate Adobe (and have now headache with sports-tracker.com)?Posted on August 21, 2010 by Mikko OhtamaaFiled Under flash, nokia, series 60, technology, user experience, web development sportstracker.nokia.com was a GPS based sports tracking service for Nokia phones. Around a year ago it spun off as independent company, which was a good move if you really want to develop your service business. Now sports-tracker.com has launched a new website. You can upload your runs and photos there and share your sports results through social media. It was delightful to see the new site opened and having the features been missing so long time ago. However, I was not totally happy with what I saw.
The whole new site is built on top of Adobe Flash run-time technologies. There are no traditional web pages per se. The problem is that full page Flash is resource hog. In the picture above you see that opening this web site in my Safari web browser spikes CPU to 100% usage – and it actually stays there indefinitely (note: on front page, see remarks below). This means that my computer is working to barely survive under the stress caused by this one web site – and my computer is powerful iMac. This means that if I have this site open background in my web browser my laptop battery would die very very fast. This means that all programs I try to simultaneously use on my computer become sluggish. I assume that when sports-tracker.com was spun off from Nokia they contracted some digital advertisiment agency to built the new site for them. Digital advertisement agencies are often, not always, companies focused on the brand and visual appearance. They love to work with Flash because it gives good authoring tools to build nice looking, bling bling filled, animations. Flash is a great tool for animations. Flash is a great tool for building browser based games. However, it is not good for building the whole web site where the user experience criteria could include 1) the site actually to responds to clicks 2) the site does not bring down to the whole computer. The decision makers probably drink cool-aid “hey let’s built the site with the Adobe’s latest tools – have you seen the demos how coooooool they look like”. The thing is, I want to just see my sports tracking results. I don’t care whether the diagrams have blurred drop shadows with state of the art Web 3.0 mouse over effects. Now I can enjoy the effects, points for the artistic leader for that, but doing the actual task, accessing my sports results, have become irritating task to do. Things respond sloooow – that’s the main reason. In-flash scrolls bars have noticeable lag. There exists an uncanny valley how normal web sites behave and how 100% Flash site behave. My right click does not work. I cannot right click a link and open it in new tab. I cannot right click a link to copy it to my friend. I cannot access the site on my N900 web browser (which even has Flash). I coudn’t even send feedback to sports-tracker.com team without first installing a desktop email client, as the email address cannot be copied from Flash to web mail. Text boxes are little different. I cannot hold my horses to see Adobe conquering mobile phones with Flash and doing the same thing for mobile browsing experience it has now done for sports-tracker.com. The site is not bad. Usability guidelines have been followed carefully when building the site. The developers seem to have gone into great details to make the operations smooth as possible. For example, URL fragment identifies are used to make sure bookmarking works even though Flash is present on the site. Social media features, not present in old sport tracker, are finally there. The results of design decision to built the whole site on Flash, instead of using Flash for some components only, might not have been seen by the time this decision was taken. When Nokia Sports Tracker was first introduced 3-4 years ago with the first Series 60 GPS phones it was ahead of the competition. Wow effect had no limits – can you really do that with your mobile phone – in real-time and live? It is funny how time passes. It is definitely possible to build a sports tracking site, which looks cool, but does not have issues mentioned here. Note: With little more research it seems that CPU usage stays 100% is specific to front page only and it has issues of not winding down action when you move away from your browser. However, rendering of other pages still uses vast amount of CPU, causing lag you do not see when opening web pages. The background CPU consumption on sports-tracker.com page is aroud 8% per tab when should be 0%. Note 2: I am using the latest 10.1 Flash Player.
Python 2.3, Python for Series 60 1.4.5 still in use… and insight into Symbian deployment process and user experiencePosted on August 18, 2010 by Mikko OhtamaaFiled Under nokia, pys60, python, series 60, technology Nokia’s Python for Series 60 has a long history. It is a Python interpreter, originally escaped from Nokia prototype labs, running in your phone. It is said to been awesome to show mobile/embedded developers, who were love with their static C compilers and 4 hours built times, opening a Python prompt in your phone and typing import audio; audio.say(“your phone loves Python”) by keypad (Nokia Series 60 phones come with a speech synthetizer). Python for Series 60 is the best tool of building a simple proof of concept mobile applications. The lack of speed, lack of good UI libraries and difficult deployment problems makes it challenging to use it in production grade environments. PyS60 has also a history of staying in archaid Python version – namely Python 2.3. It was not until this February when stable PyS60 2.0.0 with Python 2.5 was released (1.9.x was considered experimental according to the release notes). Luckily looks like new winds are blowing (Qt acquisition, Meego/Maemo) and Python is getting higher priority. For example, PySide Qt bindings is very high profile project. Based on this, we hope to expect Python to the first class citizen in the future Meego and Symbian devices. My company had a little side venture with PyS60 Community Edition when we were still betting that Symbian and Python would rock the world – the era before iPhone changed the game. PyS60 community edition was effectively a revamped PyS60 1.4.x with Python 2.3 toolchain which actually made PyS60 application production deployment possible. Possible…? -you ask. Madness… no. It is Symbian. It is certification and signing and obscure error messages. Basically vanilla PyS60 is being shipped as an external SIS (Symbian package format) and Symbian platform security makes it impossible to deploy two production signed applications using vanilla PyS60 on the same device. The only cure was statically building Python for both apps from the scratch, which is exactly what PyS60 Community Edition was doing. But this all was long long time ago. Aeons in mobile time. So I was today surprised when I got email from a person (David) using PyS60 Community Edition. We never upgraded PyS60 Community Edition to Python 2.5 . In fact we haven’t touched the project about two years. David was effectively using Python 2.3 and asked questions about the tool chain internals. My first answer was a question Why on Earth you are still using Python 2.3? I thought maybe the guy had somehow missed the last two years or was a stuck with an old phone. However… this was not the case and the answer was very insigtful. Yes, I’m aware of PyS60 2.0.0, but I prefer PythonCommunity, at least for the moment: no OpenC neither Platform Services dependencies; smaller .SIS size and memory footprint. I think that the final .SIS produced with PythonCommunity, with everything necessary to run contained in it and with a clean installation without multiple dependencies, is a better fit for a mass-market than the files produced by PyS60 2.0.0, above all taking into account that people don’t know what S60 or Symbian are. Also, the runtime deployment on the new PyS60 isn’t automatic for S60_3rd and S60_FP1 devices, so in the worst case scenario, users may end having to learn to install the different files (pips.sis, ssl.sis, stdioserver.sis, Python_2.0.0.sis, PythonScriptShell_2.0.0.sis) in the correct order, which is a big no-no for a mass-market deployment. So…. I hope someone in Nokia is reading this blog entry carefully. Do it like Apple does. Make your application deployment static. Make OpenC static. Make every freaking library which is not shipped with the device statically buildable. It should be possible now when everything is open source. It will consume precious device RAM, but at least it will make mass market application development possible. SIS hell is worse hell than deb hell, or DLL hell, as the end user cannot fix it due to device security. In the related news SIS smart installer was announced few weeks ago. Personally I wouldn’t bet it can deal with all the problems of versioning and Symbian platform security. Forum reports aren’t promising and looks like very Symbianish user experience can be expected. In positive light, it seems that Python is being considered for this process.
Peek-a-boo – Python logo spotted in outdoor advertisement!Posted on August 17, 2010 by Mikko OhtamaaFiled Under plone, python, series 60, symbian, technology This caught my eye when coming home from the work.
The finger points straight to the snake…
Kudos to Nokia for this. Nokia’s phones are the best platform if you wish to have pleasant rapid mobile application development in Python – just stay away from Symbian and Series 40 models.
Developing and distributing QT applications for Nokia… not yet!Posted on May 4, 2010 by Mikko OhtamaaFiled Under apple, nokia, phonegap, qt, technology This information was posted to Phonegap Google groups also. Next N900 release (PR1.2) will include QT 4 in the default install. It has been delayed due to various problems observed in the leaked beta. Also, N8 will be the first device supporting Qt out of the box. It is not shipping yet. Nokia Qt SDK should allow unified Qt apps for Symbian and Meego:
It is not yet possible to deploy Qt apps through OVI store, so targeting third party apps to Nokia Qt is kind of pointless. If you need to develop to Nokia using a web framework, don’t rely on native QT Webkit, but target to Nokia WRT instead. Nokia bought Qt in January 2008. It has taken over two years to ship the first Qt enabled mobile phone. Meanwhile, Apple has released App Store and risen to be the leading smartphone provider with its iPhone…. talk about slow development and the lack of leadership. So the hype around “QT will solve everything” is still just hype… they still don’t have nothing solid out there.
Mobile browser wars: Nokia microB vs. Firefox FennecPosted on January 2, 2010 by Mikko OhtamaaFiled Under Business, browser, fennec, maemo, mobile, mozilla, n900, nokia Begun, this mobile browser war, has. When mobile internet is growing 8x faster than desktop internet everyone wants to have a share of it. In the core of this fight is the mobile browser – the doorway to the mobile internet. Usually phone comes with a browser from the phone manufacturer: Safari ships with iPhone, Android ships with WebKit based browser and Maemo comes with Nokia microB. Besides the default browser, open platforms have seen third party browsers created for them: Opera Mini has 30 million users and several browsers have been created for Symbian platforms. (Note that iPhone is not really open platform regarding this as Apple developer terms specifically forbid creating alternative browser engines for their Safari – all iPhone “browsers” are just the same Safari with new toppings). Now Mozilla foundation is releasing Firefox Fennec (RC1 version is available for Nokia N900), touted as the most innovative mobile browser this far. New user interface ideas, desktop syncronization and vibrant add-on community are something yet to be seen for mobile browsers. Mozilla did an amazing thing with Firefox when it actually managed to push Internet experience forward and compete against Microsoft’s bundled Internet Explorer with sheer quality. Can Mozilla repeat the same thing it did for desktop browsing for mobile browsing too? Is Fennec good? I installed the release candidate and conducted some tests by visiting on popular sites. It is especially fruitful to compare Fennec against Nokia’s own microB browser as they both are based on the same Gecko rendering engine beneath the hood. The differences of the browsers are, actually surprisingly, not limited to branding and user interface shell. Fennec is portable browser – Mozilla hopes to run Fennec on other mobile platforms beside Maemo in the future. Fennec user interface is based on Mozilla’s XUL library and you can actually run Fennec on your desktop computer too. Nokia’s interest, on the other hand, is have an optimized browser for their own mobile phones: microB user interface is using native Maemo user interface components. Below are some aspects of the browsers compared against each other. Start up time
This is a pain for Fennec. Loading all that XUL Javascript needed to run Fennec is just too much. You really don’t want to start Fennec for a quick browsing session, unless you have the patience of a cow. I am not sure whether N900 keeps microB loaded on the background all the time or what’s causing the difference. User interfaceThis is really where Fennec shines. Nokia enjoys some reputation of being a boring engineer house with little innovation left to stir. After learning the trick of left and right sweep, which is cleverly demostrated on the start page, Fennec user interface instantly feels intuitive. microB, on the other hand, uses somehow clumsy “bottom right corner full-screen button” to access buttons and left-right sweep is not very well thought. For example, switching a tab/browser window takes three “clicks” on microB (show menu – switch application – choose next browser window) when Fennec does it with one sweep and click. Also, backward navigation is much more intuitive on Fennec and takes too many gestures on microB. Both browsers have search integrated to the navigation bar. Fennec start screen is more clever, showing the history and shortcuts, while microB shows only the bookmarks. Fennec navigation bar also is a combination of title and navigation bar, saving the precious screen estate on small physical form factor. Fennec zooms to text fields automatically when you start to input text into them and also have soft “tab keys” to navigate to next and previous input field. Page reading and speedOn sites with above average layout complexity, Fennec is unbearable slow compared to microB, up to the point the browser is next to unusable in its current incarnation. As they both use the same rendering engine, I have hard time to understand how microB manages even the heaviest dynamic pages (Facebook profile page) when Fennec becomes unusable even on a moderate complex page (slashdot.org). The thing with Fennec is that for some of the the time it does not register your interaction and does not have any indicator showing if it is responding – it has grinded to halt, little bit like desktop computer when swapping. And even when Fennec is responding the scrolling of the page refreshment is sluggish compared to microB. This makes the page reading experience unusable. A normal user won’t stand 1-3 second frequent responsivity pauses or page movement which cannot be controlled. microB must do the rendering somehow different - is it hardware acceleration on font rendering, smarter management of images or some other trick?. However, until Fennec reaches the smoothiness of microB, there is no way I would switch to Fennec over microB. (Note: You can press CTRL-Backspace from N900 keyboard to force application switch if you cannot exit from halted Fennec otherwise) Mobile browsingThough N900 has 800 pixel wide screen, it is still a mobile phone. Small physical size, low bandwidth with high latency and limited CPU power might make you to pick a mobile internet version of the site when it is available. However, since the screen has exceptional high Dots-Per-Inch value, this poses a problem for rendering sites with the default font sizes. Fennec does not seem to have a shortcut for setting a large text size. This is something one would hope to see on such high DPI device as the most of the time default web site fonts are too small to be usable. Also, Fennec does not use the shoulder plus and minus volume buttons for zooming – microB does it and it is very natural place for this function. Fennec seems to have some difficulties with mobile site rendering: for example touch.facebook.com and yle.mobi are not scaled to full width. Instead a narrow colum of 1/3 screen width is displayed. BugginessmicroB is very solid piece of software. It crashes more rarely than Safari on iPhone (might this be because of more memory – low memory conditions seem to be a normal crashing condition for Safari?). Fennec is still in its first version and have some issues. (Note: I managed to get Fennec to zombie state – I had to go to terminal and type killall fennec command to make the browser become launchable again). Sites testedSlashdot.org Geek discussion site microB: no problems Fennec: slow, frequent pauses, not smooth scrolling slashdot.org/palm Very simple mobile version of the above. microB: Font too small Fennec: Scales correctly Facebook.com High profile social networking site microB: Sometimes little slow, but seems to work perfectly Fennec: Unusable slow touch.facebook.com microB: Perfect (at least when scaling font up a little) Fennec: Does not scale correctly (default scale uses only 1/3 of screen width, double click zooming scales too much) yle.fi Finnish national broadcasting company site microB: Ok. Readable and usable with text size large. Fennec: Ok. The default view is navigable, but not readable. You need to double-click zoom to read the text (Fennec doesn’t seem to have text size large option)- yle.mobi The mobile version of above. microB: Perfect with text size large, ok otherwise (need to double click to zoom and then click to choose a link to follow). Fennec: Ok – font size too small GMail HTML version The default Javascript version of GMail is too heavy for both the browsers. GMail still provides “Basic HTML” view as the fallback for devices with less CPU power and network bandwidth. microB: Ok – you can do some basic emailing Fennec: Ok. Does not seem to be affected by as much of “slugginess” as other sites are (might the slugginess be a Javascript issue?) Youtube.com The web version of flash based video sharing site. microB: Plays Flash movies ok – smooth scrolling even whilst a Flash movie is playing Fennec: Frequent grinds to halt, sluggish, unusable. Manages to open Flash video, though. m.google.com/youtube The mobile version of above. microB: Youtube claims the browser is unsuppoted Fennec: Cannot enter the site – shows only the page of Youtube Mobile instructions twitter.com (web site) microB: Perfect Fennec: Ok. Sluggish when opening new pages, but still usable. Fennec start view ships with Twitter button, so one might assume this site is well tested for Fennec. m.twitter.com The mobile site of above. microB: Ok – the default font size too small, but when settings text size large works well Fennec: Ok – the default font size too small. Double click zoom does not work well on the twit feed, making reading difficult. plone.org A community site with relatively simple layout. microB: Ok – minor rendering errors Fennec: Ok – minor rendering errors iltalehti.fi Finnish tabloid web site with lots of images. microB: Ok Fennec: Grinds to halt, unusable slow SummaryThough having nice promise of innovation, the advise for Fennec development team would be “back to the basics”. The slugginess and response times of Fennec are such an issue that one would not yet consider it as an real alternative for Nokia’s default microB browser. With Fennec’s user interface and microB’s speed one could have a near perfect mobile browser. Depending what kind of future co-operation Nokia and Mozilla foundation will have, we might live to see it. Cross-platform mobile application development and paymentsPosted on September 30, 2009 by Mikko OhtamaaFiled Under android, blackberry, html5, iphone, javascript, locationing, payment, series 60, symbian, technology We have been piloting multi-platform mobile application development and payments in few client projects. Target platforms usually include iPhone, Android, Blackberry and Nokia Series 60. Also there are two notable usual cases which need to be specially handled
Sounds easy, right? Well it isn’t… Below are some notes for our due diligence work which you fellow developers might find interesting. SDKsMobile phone vendors are jealously and don’t want to co-operate with each other. Building application which works in all handsets is major headache. We found some reasonable candidates for cross-platform mobile development doing HTML and Javascript. HTML and Javascript pages are converted to native application using a wrapper technology (a.k.a. appaccelerator). Doing Flash Lite or Java ME can be pretty much forgotten nowadays as they won’t run on the most hyped platform, iPhone. Flash Lite has poor support for anything except content authoring due to primitive and limited APIs. Java ME provides horrible user experience. (X)HTML is the only common language spoken by mobile phones. Thus, there has been a rise of “appaccelerators”, technologies which allow to create mobile applications with HTML(5) and Javascript.
All these wrap the browser component (WebKit) and provide some extra Javascript APIs when your web pages as executed under the application mode.
Rhomobile has little different use cases from the rest of the bunch as it provides client-side programming using Ruby and less focuses on Javascript/web applications. Payments and in-application purchasesThere are four major way to do mobile payments “inside” the application for bought content and subscriptions. The price tag on the application itself is left out on this discussion as the application stores themselves take care of it.
App Store payment is the most attractive as it provides the best end user experience. It allows you to use App Store payment mechanism inside the application. It is safe and no need to hassle with external payment providers. However, App Store payment can be used only for content consumed directly inside the application. You cannot use it e.g. for ordering a pizza. I think this might be related to recent EU legislation forbidding SMS payments for services not consumed in the phone itself. SMS payment is ok for little payments. Operators take big cut of the revenue, generally 30% – 70% depending on the country. Short code fees usually start from 500€ set-up fee + 500€ / month. SMS cannot be often send as a background, but the user is presented the normal SMS editor which reduces the user experience somehow. For credit card payments there exists several providers. Credit card has the cheapest entry fees, but the downside is that the user needs to have the credit card. This excludes teenager audience. Direct operator payments are not very well supported yet globally. Most western operators support them. The operator also takes a big share and the fixed fee is pretty high. My favorite payment provider thus far is Bango which provides credit card payment starting 9€ / mo. and scales up to worldwide SMS payments which cost few grannies per month. In most cases, the payment experience will not be smooth. You need to open the phone main browser on the payment provider page to do the payment. This usually will close your own application. Rarely you can do the payment inside the application and support multiple platforms. After doing the payment most platforms allow you to close the browse and reopen your application using a special URL handler. Wikipedia mobile payments page is also useful. Image upload<input type=”file”> won’t work on iPhone and some other platforms as those don’t have user browsable file system. Also the file dialog usually doens’t have image preview making it useless. Phonegap has a branch which supports images picking using iPhone’s own gallery browser. In any case, there is not yet cross-platform solution for this. Future prospectsIn some time-frame we will get rid of the need to wrap HTML applications natively as the web browser applications will support all HTML5 features without extensions and probably have some proprietary extensions for mobile specific features like SMS. We already have had some taste for this:
Building a mobile site and applications with Django and PythonPosted on September 30, 2009 by Mikko OhtamaaFiled Under Business, django, iphone, linux, mobile, pys60, python, technology Recently we created a mobile site for an interactive bicycle tour. oulugo.mobi (you need to use mobile browser to access the site or you’ll get a redirect) is a multimedia enriched bicycle tour through the historic parts of the city of Oulu. All content is provided by OnGo. The route, which you can bicycle through is drawn on Google Maps. There are nine action points where the user can listen to streaming audio clips, with still images, in his/her mobile phone. This is sort of augmented reality experience: The user sees the real world (where he/she is now bicycling) combined with the historic events (audio playback narrative). For example, at Linnansaari (a location on the route) you’ll see the actual 17th century castle ruins and the narrator tells how the castle exploded when fire, caused by a lighting, reached gunpowder warehouse… boom. The explosion caused stones fly over 400 meters. Alternatively, the clips are available as podcasts from Oulu Tourism pages. You can download them into your iPod for offline listening and use in conjuction with a paper map. This demostrates interesting mix of multichannel publishing: paper, web, mobile and podcasts. The tour is bilingual in Finnish and English. There exists unreleased iPhone application, based on PhoneGap, which allows the user to track his/her location real-time on the web page. We didn’t see it worth of trouble to go through Apple iPhone application review process. When location based service support comes for the browser this feature is indended to be included as the standard HTML5 feature of the service. There also exists Nokia Series 60 mobile application, based on PyS60 and Series 60 BrowserControl API, which allows the user to track his/her location in real-time. The application provides wrapper around Series 60 WebKit control and allows Javascript to access phone native functions (GPS) over localhost socket communication. Like with Apple, we didn’t see real-time tracking feature interesting enough to go through Symbian Signed process to get our application released. Also, BrowserControl had seriousquality problems and we didn’t consider it stable enough for the end users. Some work is available in PyS60 Community Edition repository. The service is hosted on Python specific virtual server on Twinapex services server farm. Features
Software stack
Development effortDevelopment time: Around 100 hours. Three different developers where involved. Used development tools: Eclipse, PyDev, Subclipse, Subversion. There were around five meetings between the content provider and the technology provider. Few beta testing rounds using iPhone application were performed by bicycling in -10 celcius degrees weather (north and so on…). No polar bears were harmed during the creation of this mobile service. The service is linked in from Oulu Tourism pages and thousands of paper brochures printed for Oulu summer season 2009. About the author Mikko Ohtamaa pygame goes mobilePosted on December 17, 2008 by Mikko OhtamaaFiled Under mobile, python, technology Pygame, the easiest way to make computer games in the world, has just reached your pocket. Check our announcement at http://discussion.forum.nokia.com/forum/showthread.php?t=152969 |
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