Robin Jewsbury's Forum Nokia Blog

Publish to OviStore hints and tips from a real user

robin.jewsbury — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 22:00:48 +0300

Refresh Mobile

I've just been to a Forum Nokia developer event here in London. It was very well organised and well attended. I can say there was a real attempt and promise that Nokia are trying their hardest to solve as many issues to help developers as possible and I really believe they are doing good work here. There was some friction in the room when issues to do with developers, the Ovi Store QA Process and Ovistore in general and I realised I should do this post which gives a few hints and tips on using the Ovistore. Just a bit of background. I have written and submitted more than 20 apps to Ovi store, 3 to iPhone Appstore and more than 20 to Blackberry Appworld and do think I can put all the issues into context of what its like with all the appstores.

1) The QA process is frustrating on all the appstores. In fact by far the worst is Apple in my personal experience. One issue is they all fail to explain the real reason adequately for a rejection - its seems to be in everyone's system that they send a standard e-mail rejection where the reason for the rejection is unclear, So Ovistore is not bad in this context -it could be easier though.

2) On Ovi your app needs a certificate if its Symbian or Java but does not need a certificate for WRT. So, for ease of submission I'd recommend WRT (although the number of handsets supported is fewer than a Java submission for example. Then the question is how to sign it. The answer is you can self sign (forget java siged) and I'd recommend using the Thawte certificate for Java not a Versign (Thawte is cheaper anyway). Both have issues - neither have root certificate on all devices. But Thawte is best. If you use Thawte then deselect the following handsets 2730, 3208, 6263, 6600i, 2720 fold, 3710 fold, 3720, 7020 and 7050.

3) WRT and the N95. The N95 had WRT support in later versions. In reality most people have upgraded and therefore its usually safe to select the N95 and N958G, but it seems that sometimes the QA people don't know this and sometimes get rejection from them which you should sort out by commenting back to them. A further problem occurs with N95 because you often you get "content missing" in Ovi store if an N95 tries to download a WRT (this is simply a bug in Ovistore which I am sure will be fixed sometime soon).

4) QA is only part of the process to getting your app live. It can take up to a week for it to actually go live after it's passed QA before it appears. If you watch the "Published to" flag it will initially say 0/1 channels and later say "1/1 channel". When it does this it means its about to go live... it still takes up to a further 24 hours to actually appear. People often think its not there when it really is, because it depends which devices you published it to. So you should really look with a real phone (or use a user agent switcher plugin inside Firefox). Finally there are often cases with content which never appears in these circumstances. This is because someone in Ovi made a mistake (of course in a well designed system it should not be possible to make this sort of mistake-but I'd better not go there). In this case just fill out a comment in the content in publishers. I find they are helpful and you'll get a solution.

5) Finally depending on your content you may get the "sensitive content" email. This happens for example if you have pictures of girls in bikinis or even men in shorts in your content. Your get a list of contries you need to de-select (mostly moslem countries). This list is annoyingly long and the chances are you'll make a mistake entering the selections for the list. For until they have a "sensitive countries template" you'll have to live with this frustration.

An US centric view of Mobile by Marc Andressen

robin.jewsbury — Sun, 22 Feb 2009 11:12:06 +0200

There is a really interesting interview with Marc Andressen on the web. There were two things in the interview which I struggled with. First he predicts the death of the print industry in favour of the Internet delivery and the other one was his glowing description of the iPhone.

Whilst I'd love it to come true I find it hard to believe that the print industry should close their presses and put all their effort into perfecting Internet delivery. But this certainly has made me think. What will it be like in 10 years time? I do think that devices which emulate the ease of reading on paper will be more prevalent (in fact the phone will will be that device). So in that sense a dramatic change for all forms of publishers (from brands down to bloggers) is about to happen, but I was shocked by the statement that the New York Times should close its presses now.

The other part of the interview which made me think was his description of the iPhone. He described it as the first phone to have a full operating system and said it had been beamed in from 5 years in the future. He mentioned RIM and Windows Mobile as other smart phones but did not mention Nokia or S60. Why? I find it quite frustrating that the American view of phones is so different from the rest of the world. Why is Symbian not viewed as a full operating system? He also described the developers eco-system round the iPhone as being a first too. I have a mixed feeling on this. Firstly, he seems to have ignored the fact that Symbian is as a full OS as the Unix on the iPhone. He ignored that its been possible to develop fully fledged applications for years on S60 and then sell them (allbeit through 3rd parties). However, Apple do currently seem to have a more complete end to end developer eco system which Nokia is now addressing with Ovi Publish. It is a shame that the US view of the world seems to have ignored the achievements of Europeans, but I guess we have to keep trying to get everything right.

Perhaps it will be Europe which gets the solutions to the print industry moving from paper to the Internet right.

Steve Balmer's prediction on dinosaur paper publishers in the next 10 years

robin.jewsbury — Sun, 08 Jun 2008 12:32:53 +0300

I was fascinated by Steve Balmers interview in the Washington Post this week. The core quotation for me was

"Here are the premises I have. Number one, there will be no media consumption left in 10 years that is not delivered over an IP network. There will be no newspapers, no magazines that are delivered in paper form. Everything gets delivered in an electronic form".

So this sort of prediction has been around for years. But this time is goes a lot further - this time he is implying that the publishers who remain in "paper only" will become dinosaurs and further all other publishers will have most to Internet only delivery. A further knife in the back for the big branded publishers was

"Also in the world of 10 years from now, there are going to be far more producers of content than exist today. We've already started to see that certainly in the online world"

So is this really going to come true? Yes, I think it is. This prediction did not come from "hot air". Microsoft will have paid a lot of money for this prediction and it will be substantiated via a lot of unpublished analysis. Steve Balmer will be retiring in 10 years and he's paid for a prediction which could be used as he epitaph for the industry.

Then today I read in the UK's Sunday Times about the success of Amazon's Kindle and it's the same story about the death of publishing books on paper. The Kindle is selling extremely well in the US and is amazingly already taking 6% of book sales that are available for both the Kindle and paper - here the prediction is that Authors could sell direct to Amazon (dissintermediating the publisher all together).

So are these predictions signalling the death of the big branded publishers? No, they do not go that far - for sure the big successful brands will adapt and survive - there is still a need for quality and consitency. However, it does signal a need for them to adapt and that they will get smaller audiences from their existing countries. The number of content producers will continue to increase and take their own share of the audiences. The good news for everyone is the world audience for internet media is going to signficantly increase. The growth of the mobile internet in countries such as India, South Africa, Indonesia, China and countries in the middle east is already massive. So long as the publishers produce relevant localised content they will be able to benefit from the globalisation of publishing.

Others will benefit too. I do think a more prevasive Kindle and publishing platform is a Mobile phone. So phone manufacturers and those providing the software services for them (such as ourselves) will benefit - and that's was really interests me.

One Internet - 2 mobile worlds

robin.jewsbury — Mon, 05 May 2008 13:35:15 +0300

I've been looking at the Morgan Standley Internet Trends report. Its an excellent report which charters the growth of the fixed and mobile Internets. One thing that has interested me for some time is that I've noticed that there are two worlds for the Mobile Internet and I wondered if this report could shed light on my thoughts. I'll call the two worlds, the Old World and the New World. I plotted the above graph (explained below) and was disappointed as it was not as clear cut as I expected but all is explained below.

Old World

The Old World consists of the established fixed Internet countries where the consumer discovered the Internet via a PC. These people have subsequently also bought Mobile phones are increasingly discovering the mobile Internet through on the phone.

New World

The New World, mainly consisting of the emerging economies, has a population who are discovering the Internet firstly by Mobile phone. With perhaps only the technical elite in these countries using the fixed Internet.

Discussion

Now my observation has been that those in the New World are engaging with the Mobile Internet much faster than the those for the Old World. The reason is perhaps that there is a greater expectation and disappointment from those moving from the fixed internet to the mobile internet. Looking at the Morgan Stanley figures, I wondered if I could show the grouping of countries on a graph. The reports shows the top 15 fixed and mobile Internet countries. I worked out the ratio of of users on Mobile/Fixed Internet. I also included the rate of change of the ratio for each country and this is shown by an up or down arrow before the country name in the graph above. The groupings are there but its not as clear cut as I had hoped. The problem is that the Mobile phone penetration rate for a country does not represent the Mobile Internet engagement by users. For example in Italy the penetration is 133% because of the intense interest in having the status symbol of a phone, but the interest in Mobile Internet has not matched this interest - another way to look at it is that because there is only one person and one internet viewer for very 1.33 phones so immediately the ratio becomes unrealistic. So I then looked at our own data for our EyeMags service. The reason for choosing EyeMags over Mippin (our main service) is that EyeMags has had 100% organic growth (absolutely no marketing had been done for it so there should be no real country weighting other than that the UI is in English).

So here Indonesia and India do indeed come out significantly ahead of UK and US. However, other new world countries such as China, Russia and Brazil, do not show up significantly so again the analysis is disappointing. My conclusion now was there is a 3rd effect going on - that is maturity of the the Mobile Internet. In China, Russia and Brazil the potential is huge but the maturity of the Mobile Internet is low.

Conclusion

This is a complicated area. There are undoubtedly two mobile internet worlds and levels of maturity play significant role currently.

World "everyone connected day" 11th June 2012?

robin.jewsbury — Sat, 26 Apr 2008 17:39:17 +0300

Perhaps someone can help. I've setup a site at http://phonecount.com which has dynamic counters showing the world population and the number of connected phones at this moment in time. Given the current rates of increase of both I work out when the total number of connected phones is equals to the total world population - I ended up with 11th June 2012. I use poetic license to call this "everyone connected day". Of course not everyone will have a phone, but many people will have more than one phone and this will make up for those without phones. To me this will be an important day for our industry as conceptually it marks the point that everyone is connected via voice and the Internet.

The question is have I got the right figures? I got the world population figures from the US Census Office so I think that's OK. The phone growth figures was taken off the GSMA site and I found this more difficult. I ended up getting a figure of 200M growth per quarter and then inferred 25.72 additional phones per second. Does anyone have a better source for this as it seems a little bit of an estimate? Also has anyone else done this before? Am I the first?

Also please forgive the blatant advertising of my own product on this site. I have to justify the effort taken somehow.

Mobile Web Search is not working very well

robin.jewsbury — Sun, 16 Mar 2008 19:13:44 +0200

Mobile search is poor - it produces inconsistent results and can often fail to tell the difference between mobile and fixed sites. This article details the failings...

Let's start with a few of definitions. The Mobile Internet is the collection of sites which have been specially built/formatted for small screen devices/phones. The Fixed Internet is the Internet as viewed on large PC screens. Mobile Search is the attempt to search for content on the whole (fixed and mobile) Internet where the results can be displayed and formatted on small screens (examples are m.google.com and m.yahoo.com) . The problems for the mobile search engines are that Mobile Internet is still very small so the search engines include (actually they prioritise) content from the Fixed Internet and then display on the phones using a transcoder. A transcoder takes fixed Internet content and reformats it for the small screen. Transcoders have what I believe is the impossible job of taking a web page and putting into a long thin column on a small screen and then paginating it if it's too long. The reason why I believe this job is impossible is because the fixed internet consists of a vaste array of web site formats and there is no way anything can know how to cut up a page and put it neatly in a long thin band on a phone screen in a user friendly way. Its true that good transcoders can make a reasonable job of 2/3rd of the Internet. For example 3 column web-site can often display OK on a transcoder, although because the left hand column of web-site is often the navigation this does cause transcoders an issue - some display this navigation at the top of the page and the user has to scroll all the way through it before he can read the content he really wants to. Others more successfully hide the navigation and take the user direct to the content and then allow the user to open up the navigation later. The better transcoders also realise their impossible tasks and do not transcode if the device has the capability of displaying a web page (eg for a Series60 running the Safari browser devices or the iPhone). The good search engines can tell the difference between a mobile site and a web page and not transcode

Now let's get into specifics how do Google and Yahoo mobile search engines compare on these things. Please be aware this is the siutation in March 2008 and because of the fact that nothing really worksperfectly what is actually happens is changing daily. So if you read this more than a month after March 2008 be aware it may not be the same.

First both Google and Yahoo present web and mobile web results separately, although Google does put mobile results marked with a little phone symbol in the web results when there is a significant result and real mobile web content is an extra click away on Google.

	m.google.com	m.yahoo.com
Only uses transcoder with fixed Internet sites – does not transcode Mobile web sites	Yes, generally works	Only thinks wml sites and ones beginning m. are mobile. Other real mobile sites are incorrectly sent through the transcoder
Does not use the transcoder with web enabled devices	Only iPhone is given full web page	iPhone and Series60 Safari browsers gets full web pages
Transcoder hides original web page navigation from user	Attempts to but often fails to find the beginning of the real content	Yes works well.
Transcoder works well	No, produces poor transcoding and often errors	Better than google but still has confusing content
Displays mobile web content	Yes, but several clicks to find it and then often contains m.youtube or wap.mtv content rather than the long tail.	Yes, but contains mostly wml content. The better mobile sites cannot be found.

Finally, I think the main problems result in there not being enough Mobile Internet content. For me transcoders are an temporary technology in place because there is not enough Mobile content. Long term webmasters will either create mobile specific sites or use tools such as Mippin to quickly convert them. Once there is significant Mobile Internet content in place search engines need to start prioritising mobile content over the poorly performing transcoded content.

As I write this the situation changes daily so I hope in a few months I will be blogging a slightly better story for Mobile search.

The iPhone Inconsistency

robin.jewsbury — Sat, 08 Mar 2008 17:51:07 +0200

I've just spent most of the day watching all the iPhone videos at Apple developer site. All very interesting and informative. Some of the new Safari features such as CCS transformations, CSS animations and the local data SQL support from Javascript (sort of Google Gears like) look really good. When are we going to get these features in S60 Safari browser? Please tell me it's soon!!!

But that was not the point of this post. I watched one particular video called "User Interface Design for iPhone Applications". This is an excellent video and lists great advice for developers of any mobile application for any platform. Basically it says when you take a desktop application and port it to the iPhone you should only take a subset of the functionality and create a simplied user interface AND the UI design should be consistent with the iPhone UI design. All excellent advice which I would say works for any mobile application design on any platform. However, the more I watched these things the more I thought of the iPhone advert for the Internet shown on US and UK TV. See the AT&T version here. This advert has always bothered me. Basically it shows the iPhone looking at the PC web version of the New York Times (in the US version) and the Guardian in the UK version. The claim is that the PC Internet is now works unaltered on the mobile phone. Any yet this is totally inconsistent with the advice Apple are giving application developers who are telling them to change adapt the content and functionality for the iPhone.

Has Steve Jobs noticed the inconsistency between his marketing message to the consumers and the technical advice to developers? Web applications are still applications after all and also should be adapted to the phone. And indeed, this has happened. Facebook wrote a very good web application for the iPhone. So why Mr Jobs are you telling consumers and developers totally different stories? Well, infortunately the consumer is being told an incomplete story yet again which will rebound on the the poor software industry yet again. So please My Jobs (you love consistency in your user interface), please be consistent in your messages.

Web Apps vs Mobile Apps - the debates begins!

robin.jewsbury — Sun, 02 Mar 2008 20:44:27 +0200

I was very interested to read Michael Mace's latest blog about the death of mobile apps, and Carlo Longino's similar blog also taking about the death of mobile native apps.

Michael Mace shows this graph on his blog

We had this debate a year ago in our company and totally changed direction because of it - basically we stopped producing mobile apps a year ago and started producing a web only solution. The concern was that we would not be able to create such a good user experience with the Web as we had achieved with our Mobile apps - afterall we had won several user experience awards for our applications. This fear has not materialised; we put considerable effort into producing an excellent web experience. Where we've really excelled is in our development cycles. We've gone from a 3 month development cycle producing 14 different application variants (12 Java and 2 Symbian native variants) to a 3 week development cycle - we actually have more user experience variation than we used to coping with difference screen sizes and device capabilities but the development is so much easier and so much faster.

Admittedly our application is ideal for rendering in a browser, but other application developers should also consider a move to web experience too. Afterall the same happened with the fixed internet in the 90s. In the beginnings of the Internet many applications were produced; my first experience with Internet shopping with Tesco was using an application which required a huge installation including a local database install. It worked fine for the early adopter (me), but when they wanted to make it a consumer experience they came up with a brick wall - it was called installation (too many things could go wrong and did). The same is true of mobile applications today - installation is too big a hurdle for the average consumer.... it needs to be just a click away.

The mobile browser is getting better day by day and can now do many of those things only applications could do in the past - its only going to continue getting easier in the browser.

Post to Myspace - a bit limited

robin.jewsbury — Fri, 15 Feb 2008 13:19:55 +0200

I read with interest the Mashable article explaining how to share content on MySpace from your own site, so I tried it.

Unfortunately it is very limited. It does allow HTML to be posted but that HTML is altered before it is displayed making it almost useless. For example it removes Javascript - so I thought of using an Iframe. Then, I found it removed the Iframe so I tried a picture and guess what is replace that with 2 dots. Shame, seems they're concerned about security. What's worse is they have no mobile option so the sharing screen displayed is a large form which would not work on a phone too well.

In the end the only thing you can do is give it some text and give it a URL. If the Myspace user clicks the url they then get an "offsite" screen which they have to accept before getting the content.

All a great idea but the implementation is so limited its not worth thinking about until they fix the issues.

Affordable data whilst roaming

robin.jewsbury — Thu, 14 Feb 2008 13:28:06 +0200

Just returned from Barcelona where thanks to a post on MoMo London we bought some Yoigo SIMs, where the charge is only 1.3 Euros per day for unlimited 3G data. The network did completely crash for an hour on Monday but for the rest of the time it worked a treat and we were able to demo our software at a fraction of the price of our UK Operator which charges £7.5 per megabyte whilst roaming. Yoigo only allow 2 SIMs per passport and because there were 3 of us I then installed JoikuSpot beta which turned my N95 into a WLAN hotspot for my colleague to use. My N95 got quite hot but it all worked well. The only issue with JoikuSpot was that it did not have any security so anyone could also use my Hotspot and it did not seem to allow https or smtp/pop.

Thinking about this whilst roaming data rates remain high its probably worth buying the best SIMs in each country with good data rates. Perhaps some reader of this blog should set up a web site providing advice on best deals.