Robin Jewsbury's Forum Nokia Blog

Live from Nokia World

2009-09-03T12:16:36+03:00

First thanks for all the kind remarks about us winning the calling all innovator internet innovation award 1st prize.... we're all very pleased with that result. It was a lot of hard work and its great to get something back.

Meanwhile this morning there's been a raft of interesting announcements. The Ovi Maps API looks really good and very powerful, Nokia Money have teamed up with Obopay to enable bank payments for billions of new users and finally facebook announced their new connection APIs for use with phones in applications and from the mobile web.

All very exciting. Yesterday's most interesting annoucements for me with the new N900 linux based phone which is sure to compete well and amazingly will appear as soon as Oct and the X6 phone which finally has a capacitive touh screen - its the way forward for Nokia.

Dawn of a new age for software development for phone applications

2009-07-19T13:26:17+03:00

This week Palm has finally released their SDK for Palm Pre development and Google have continued in their announcements that web technologies will be the eventual approach for mobile phone development. Nokia's WRT technology is now well established and grown signficantly with S60 Ed5 services APIs. Meanwhile the real issue with this technology has been the speed of execution of Javascript is being solved using better Javascript engines and the emergence of new HTML5 functions allows browsers to get closer to native speed execution.

The common approach of all these methods is to use HTML, CSS and Javascript as the basis for writing applications. Each manufactirer is enhancing their Javascript libraries to so that there is API access to system functionalities such as media, sensors, GPS, address book and other core phone functions. Where some manufacturers have not opened up their APIs yet (eg Apple) other group are providing frameworks to do so (eg Phonegap providing plaform access for iPhone and Android).

Additionally W3C have their own widget development metholdolgy which is being supported by a number of operators via the jil.org. Ths technology is very close to WRT and indeed they provide very good tools to convert between WRT and the W3C format.

My own view is there is now a need for someone to create a framework sitting on top of all these technologies - they are all amost the same/compatible with slightly different wrappers and different syntax for the APIs. The real need for all developers is to write their applications only once for all platforms - a framework can take away these diferences.

My own experience of working with these technologies is to develop using Nokia's WRT to create working applications. I then use Phonegap to create the same applications running the same code on iPhone. Its not as easy as it should be - there are all sorts of gotyas, for example scrolling is done differently on iPhone and Android to how normal browsers work, but it can be done and its the future for a new way of doing software development.

N97 Homescreen Widgets

2009-07-03T17:09:36+03:00

The N97 has a great new feature called Homescreen widgets. I thought I'd write a little here about what they do and what is involved in developing them.

So yesterday we announced that we have just released 4 homescreen widgets for the N97 and here they are shown in the screenshot below...

These widgets show the latest news for each subject area which in order above are News, Celebrity Gossip, Gaming and Tech News.

So you may ask what can homescreen widgets do? They can show dynamic content on the homescreen. In our case every 6 seconds we show a different story. The widgets can be written in C++ or HTML/Javascript and CSS - guess what the latter is much easier and that's what we use. Each widget is just an area of the screen - in our case 312 pixels wide by 91 pixels high. The graphical elements are just layered on this canvas and the content can be changed in anyway you like. There are just two restrictions:

Flash content is not allowed (which is a shame)
Any programmed interaction with the screen is translated into a single event to run the widget in full screen mode - so don't bother putting any links on the home screen they will not work.

So that just leaves you with issues when writing these things. The biggest issue is battery life and the biggest consumer of battery is going online. So you need to ensure all the content is cached and it does not need to go online continuously to get content. Fortunately Javascript has an object called Image which can store binary content and we use this to show the content on the homescreen. We only go online every 30 mins to check for the latest internet content (the user can change this value though.

Finally there's one extra trick we perform. WRT technology allows the storing of text content on the memory card, so we ensure all the text content is saved all the time. This means that if you go on a plane and have to switch your phone off, then when its back on in offline mode the application still works seemlessly. So you can always use this application and no matter what you do there is always something interesting for you to read.

Now all you developers out there may be asking how all this was done under the covers and for you the great thing about WRT is that you can read all my source code inside the application to see how I did it (although please take note of our copyright statement)- sorry if am a bit untidy sometimes :-(

All 4 widgets were submitted to Ovistore at the same time but only 1 made it to live so far (they told me they are very busy), so for now I've provided some links below and when Ovistore does publish all of them I'll remove these links from this story.

Downloads for Nokia N97, 5800 / 5530 (NB only N97 has the homescreen functionality, but it runs on all 3)

Download News Buzz widget

Download Gossip Buzz widget

Download Gaming Buzz widget

Download Tech Buzz widget

Porting Madness - square plug round hole.

2009-05-12T16:44:29+03:00

I am amazed as the sudden interest in what's involved porting of applications between different manufacturers smart phones technologies because I really think something is being missed in many cases. Why would you want to port code between platforms? Why develop the same thing 4 times because down the line you'll have to maintain 4 different code bases? Why not develop cross platform in a single code base and use wrappers to cope with each platform idiosyncrasies? So when I say 4 platforms I am saying iPhone, Android, Blackberry and S60 (we'll leave Microsoft out for the moment but it would fit in this list at some stage).

This reminds me of a situation I was in a few years ago when we were developing an application which worked on a majority of phones. We had 12 variants of the J2ME version and 2 Symbian variants too. It ended up with 3 major code bases and with the Java one being divided into the 12 variants. It was a nightmare to deal with in terms of development, maintenance and testing.

So when would I recommend actual porting between technologies. Only in 2 circumstances:

1) When code has already been written in an existing technology (ie converting a legacy application)
2) When a display rate of greater than 2 frames per second is required (eg for fast moving games)

As developers we strive to write code only once for all platforms. This not only has the advantage of only having to write core code the first time but most importantly that the code is fully maintainable in a single code base. J2ME used to promise this capability, but the iPhone has completely destroyed this. So until recently the fragmentation of technologies in the different devices has made this impossible but the emergence of using web technologies with javascript and css has now made this a reality.

For all other cases I would recommend every developer consider web technologies for creating cross platform applications.

So how can this be achieved with the diverse platforms we have. This is how its done...

For iPhone use a native objective-c wrapper to host the web application which can have local and remote html, javascript and css. The best native wrapper to achieve this is using a project called PhoneGap (www.phonegap.com).

For Android use a native Java wrapper to host the same local/remote web application. Again use the android version of PhoneGap to accomplish this.

For S60 Ed5 touch phones use WRT again with the same local/remote web application. In this case to cope with a remote component Ajax or an iframe can be used.

For S60 non touch phones use WRT too but be aware that iframes do not currently work properly and additionally code for handling keyboard events needs to be added.

For Blackberry the situation is very fluid as the current technology does not work properly, but this is supposed to be fixed very soon and at this stage again I would recommend using Blackberry PhoneGap as the Java wrapper for web applications. Currently Blackberry PhoneGap does work but the web control used to display web pages currently ignores all formatting so it makes it pretty much useless. When this is fixed (note this is a Blackberry issue) it will only be available to latest devices.

So how do you write the cross platform web applications. In general there is good consistency between the support for Javascript and CSS across iPhone, Android and S60. So you can write code once and run it everywhere. You need to be aware of screen size and there are two approaches to ensure good behaviour. Firstly you should try to use CSS styles like "width: 100%" where possible. This is needed both within the application as well as support between devices - within the application support for portrait and landscape modes helps if you use these styles. However there are times when you need to know the screen dimensions so the following 2 variables are very useful:

var screenWidth = window.innerWidth;
var screenHeight = window.innerHeight;

These variables need to be set on a timer to cope with switching between portrait and landscape modes - there is no consistent javascript event to detect this scenario currently. Once you know the screen size then the font size can be set using Javascript to change the CSS style sheet. This is need for the S60 Ed5 phones with 360x640 pixels - in this case we would have a command "font-size: 170%" just get the font readable on these devices.

Meanwhile some of the PhoneGap developers are creating a common layer of Javascript code to deal with the native APIs for accessing GPS information, the address book and saving data locally. They do not include S60 but the translation between the two approaches is not too difficult. In fact saving data locally can be achieved purely in Javascript for iPhone, Android and S60 WRT apps and does not need the native wrapper involvement.

Conclusion:

Think twice about porting. If you can write your code just once then this is a major advantage. You just need to ensure that you screen does not need to update too quickly.

Decline of US Newspapers

2009-03-31T11:01:08+03:00

There was an interesting article in Techcrunch yesterday on the decline of the US Newspapers.

Obviously we have heard this story for some years now but two things struck me. Firstly the declines are increasingly rapid and more importantly the decline are in online too. I think that the decline in online is an indication that the newspapers are failing to monetise their content in the online world. I think we all know that online consumption of news is increasing and this is at the expense of print. Furthermore the opening up of mobile content consumption through products such as our own are also reducing the need to for users to take their news via print and there are environmental benefits - removing the piles of paper waste littering our streets. It just needs the content owners to work out how their content can be monetised. Obviously we feel quite good about this as we have quite a successful route for monetisation for publishers through ad impressions.

Furthermore a billion people will be coming online via mobile in the next 4 years so its only worldwide growth or the content industry.

Automatically distinguishing between a phone and a PC on a website

2009-03-29T15:29:54+03:00

Despite browsers on phones getting better and better there is still a need for Mobile formatted sites, if not just for lower end phones, but for those on high end phones that hate the waiting or the difficult navigation of the full web on a phone.
Once you acccept this the next stage after creating your mobile site (which is easy with products such as Mippin) is how does your site detect between a phone and a PC.

We get asked this question several times a month by publishers big and small. How to automatically distinguish between phones and pcs and send them to the right version of their websites. Unfortunately there is no simple answer to this question because these publishers have substantial PC users and want to do the detection without degradation to their PC website performance - so they need to do the detection on their own hardware. At the same time there is not enough standardisation on the server-side to make it a simple answer.

However, we have fully documented several approaches and we detail them here. There are 3 approaches:

1) Don't make it automatic. Just create a domain name m.yoursite.com or yoursite.mobi and send them to the right site. However, this is not very user friendly.

2) The next approach is if the publisher is using Apache servers there is a script that can be put in place. This script is here.

3) Finally for those using Wordpress we have a specific solution for wordpress owners. There can install a plugin which does it for you. Details of this plugin are here.

Note that these script are all geared with pointing the user at Mippin as the mobile rendering of the site, but this code is open and its easy to change the code to point at any mobile rendering so you are not forced to use us.

Google's Mobile Strategy

2009-03-08T15:20:11+02:00

I watched Eric Schmidt on Charlie Rose last night - very interesting. Nearly all the talk was about the importance of Mobile in Google's strategy. Eric explained how Mobile was taking over from the PC in Internet access and as he said he saw another billion phones being sold in he next 3.5 years. In fact this statistic struck a chord with me as I have a site called phonecount.com which tracks the mobile phone growth and predicts 2.5 billion extra phones by mid 2012 (I wonder if he took account that the population of the earth will also increase by a billion in the same period). Now I am sure my approach to calculating this increase is flawed as I just do a linear projection on current increases and I assume lots of people will have more than 1 phone too, but I do think whereas my estimate is perhaps over optimistic Eric is under-estimating hugely. Does anyone reading this have better figures so I can make my numbers better?

Meanwhile I was also impressed by Eric's description of the need for content being implicitly personalised for users. By this he meant that the Internet server should know what content each user is interested in and exclude what they have already looked at and push that content to them. Again this struck a chord with me because this is precisely what we are trying to achieve in my own company - so perhaps we have our own strategy right :-).

Another interesting fact he mentioned was because of Moore's law our phone's storage....

" in 15 years, it’s a thousand times cheaper and faster. So unless something changes in 15 years, I have a grandson, he’ll be 18 in 15 years. He will have all of the world’s information, every video, every movie and so forth on a single hard drive. If he started watching it, he cannot finish watching it in 85 years. He’ll always be frustrated."

This is a fascinating fact. Could this mean that in 15 years time our phones will have the world's information resident on the phone. Then all we need the Internet for it how that information is changing. This offline/online approach to using data requires a re-think to how we use the Internet and the software on the phones themselves. I can see a few new businesses being created based on these new concepts :-)

Microsoft announce no real strategy for Phones using Cloud Computing

2008-10-29T10:22:50+02:00

I read with interest Steve Ballmer's letter to staff on Techcrunch (the letter is near the end of the post). Its a carefully crafted document. It starts with the concept of "Software plus Services" - this is he wants to merge the cloud with the rich applications available on a PC (ie protecting its software base and its developers). This is the concept I blogged about a month ago about the fatter client with cloud services. Details are still unclear but I still suspect a Microsoft fatter client is always going to be more complicated than a Google gears type solution.

He then announced the creation of office in the cloud (ie much like Google Docs). He then moves on to how Microsoft can help enterprises to the platform which keeps it anacronym of ASP but changes its name to Azure Services Platform.

Finally at the end of the letter he reaches the consumer and then in a single paragraph is this statementon phones

"With the mobile phone and other devices, it’s the ability to take action spontaneously-to make a call, take a picture, or send a text message in the flow of our activities."

For such a carefully crafted letter this is such a weak statement. To be fair he then mentions Live-Mesh described as a multi-device personal data sharing between the PC and other devices. But even this does not seem much of a strategy. I do think that Microsoft has lost its' way with Mobile.

Making a viral video with a Nokia N95

2008-10-26T21:18:26+02:00

We've just spent the last few days making a video to advertise some new social features we've just added to our product. We filmed it all using Nokia N95s and amazingly it worked incredibly well.

We were concerned the quality would not be up to it but had no discernable frame drop out and the quality of the result was excellent. We still have a version which is good enough to play out on TV but sending it to You-tube lowers the quality anyway. For me the real advantages were less obvious: we often had members of the public in the background and they were not put off at all by a group using their phones to take pictures, whereas I am sure with a big camera you would not get such natural performances. For me this was the big bonus. One thing we did struggle with though was that to start with we were filming with more than one phone to get different angles of shots, but when we attempted this we were always getting the other camerman in the shot - in the end we had to stick to one camerman.

Cloud Cuckoo Land - the new Apps versus WebApps story

2008-10-05T21:12:39+03:00

I wrote an post in March saying native were on the downturn and webapps were the answer to everything. Since then several things have happened:

Apple released their AppStore in June and have had sales of $500m since then. Their apps are native apps, the ones I had said were on the decline.
This week the BBC have the released their iplayer download for S60 phones using the WRT functionality. The WRT technology is a downoadable app but its not native - so somewhere in between a webapp and a native app.
Microsoft have been spreading rumours a major change to Windows. Two weeks ago Microsoft Chief Research and Strategy Officer Craig Mundie, announced something call Client-Cloud. last week Steve Ballmer changed the name to Windows-Cloud, but said the name would be different when it was really announced at the end of Oct.
Google have announced that Gears should not be considered just as enabling offline working - they have made it clear that they can enhance the connections with the underlying OS (eg multi file uploading) whilst maintaining security.

The reality is now that we can no longer simply argue about webapps vs native apps. Now there is a sea-change going on where I believe the industry is positioning itself to make the Internet truely work well with the Mobile computing platforms. As always different people are solving the issues in different ways. Google believe in thin client/cloud computing but have realised that this does not work when it comes to mobile computing. So Gears now enables the browser to become fatter and more connected to it's host platform. The great thing is they're enabling easy access to upload mutliple files (eg pictures from a phone to a server) and local phone functionality such a location. Because they need ubiquity for this technology they also realised the only easy approach was to launch their own Chrome browser - and furthermore they have made it clear this will eventually run on the Android mobile platform.

Meanwhile Nokia have been working on the WRT technology for some time. WRT allows a webapps to be installed locally on the phone, but for me its just another approach to fattening the browser on the phone. For me the release of the BBC iplayer app is a definitive moment for this technology. Local installation is ideal where user want to repeatedly come back to the same thing. The important point is that this is pure web technology enabled as an installed application and found from a phone menu. Also there have been reports of enabling Javascript access to core phone functionality (eg GPS location) just like Gears is doing.

What Apple is doing is interesting. I think they are playing with us poor developers. They've made us learn their ObjectiveC platform for Native apps which was released in June 2008. Meanwhile they always had their DashCode functionality for the Mac which is almost identical to Nokia's WRT apart from the fact Dashcode can contain native code. Will we have to wait until June 2009 for DashCode for iPhone? My cynical brain is telling me they did not want too many apps this year so they made the programming hard - by making the programming hard it also increases the quality of the apps produced (only dedicated developers can produced them). Dashcode for iPhone will appear when Steve Jobs thinks it will help him most.

Its unclear what Microsoft are considering under the name Windows-Cloud but my guess is that they will present something similar to Google Gears and/or WRT/DashCode. I suspect there will be a native element to Windows-Cloud, just like Apple, Microsoft need to exert some control and make their developer's more exclusive.

Microsoft are about to create a new technology and with it we will get all the hype surrounding it. The reality is they will make it exclusive to Microsoft with connections to surface computing, Silverlight and Popfly, but it will essentially (I think), amount to the same features of parts Google, Nokia and Apple are already developing. Its just a shame that we may end up with 4 different approaches to solving the same problem. I can, of course, see possibility for interworking and convergence. In particular Dashcode without native code and WRT should interwork and Google Gears could interwork using a Javascript abstraction layer. The Microsoft version may not interwork but may be they would be happy with that.

Meanwhile I still believe in webapps but I may slightly change my definition of a webapp and include DashCode(non native)/WRT apps.... they are almost the same thing. I see the undoubted success of the Apples native iPhone apps an aberration. Apple will cleverly introduce Dashcode apps at some stage - the consumer will not spot it, and most developers will just think Apple made their life easier - not realising they could have done that this June.

Perhaps we're all in Cloud Cuckoo Land until its clear what Microsoft, Apple, Google and Nokia are really doing with all these technologies.