Hartti Suomela's Forum Nokia Blog

A couple of service notes: Upcoming service break and Discussions performance

2008-11-04T18:35:45+02:00

As noted before, all Forum Nokia web sites will be unavailable this coming weekend (November 8th and 9th). We apologize for the inconvenience!

On another note, the performance fix I wrote about earlier was taken into use today for Discussion Boards as well. The statistics show significant performance improvement for people accessing the site especially outside Europe. And in my personal opinion, the discussion boards are really working faster for me here in U.S.

Improving the performance of Forum Nokia Wiki

2008-10-14T17:34:50+03:00

We have been painfully aware of the fact that Forum Nokia online community sites (discussion boards, wiki and blogs) appear sluggish in certain markets. In Europe he situation is pretty good, but everywhere else the pages take long to download and render - the worst region in this respect being Asia.

Recently we (or more specifically the company maintaining these services for us - hats off to them) came up with a mechanism to speed up the sites considerably (basically we are starting to serve most of or static content including JavaScript scripts using distribution networks). Today we took that solution in to use for Wiki. Blogs have been using this solution already for a while and discussion boards are next in line to go through this transformation.

If you are based in Europe, there is not probably much difference in Wiki performance. But people in other continents and regions should really see an improvement in the Wiki rendering speed. Do you?

May is Location month at Forum Nokia

2008-05-03T02:22:07+03:00

Last month was Flash, this month the theme is Location Based Services. The Video Player in the Lobby will showcase some LBS stuff... after showcasing a few days a wrap-up video from Bossa 08.

API for MOSH

2008-03-18T01:07:33+02:00

Did you ever want to experiment with MOSH? ~~Now it is possible, as the~~, Soon it is possible and the Atom API for MOSH is already out as a draft.

And what is this API for?

"The Nokia MOSH application programming interface (API) implements the Atom Publishing Protocol as a mechanism for publishing, editing, and distributing content on the MOSH platform."

Sorry for the somewhat ugly look&feel of the API document. I ran the original HTML document through Wikitext formatter, which did not do a perfect job... Any suggestions for better tool for this job?

[EDIT: Failed to mention that the API document is of course a draft for a service which does not exist yet and the dev team is interested in getting your feedback. Sorry for jumping the gun.]

Video highlights on Lobby

2008-03-13T02:30:44+02:00

It has been a while (loosely speaking, strictly speaking better term is number of months) since I last wrote anything here. Of course you have been able to find my witty (again, loosely speaking...) comments on FN discussion boards, but those are all only answers to someones problems, not anything original.

On with the show. As some of you have seen we have had the video player on our Lobby site, which we have used to highlight videos related to mobile development. After our recent (small) site update the player got more capabilities and we can now point that to videos on stored on existing video libraries, like YouTube. So we are not limited to the videos we have produced on our own. Trust me, this is a good thing.

This also means that the rotation of the videos gets faster. And at least for the following next months the videos will be highlighted based on monthly themes. March is Web runtime, Widget, Widset, what say you....

The current one out is a headspinning gameplay video of Bombus Widget for WidSets from Lancaster University, which seems to have about 140,000+ downloads at the Widset Web site.

What's the next one? Send your suggestions to me, either through this blog or to my email (you know my first and last name and surprisingly Nokia uses firstName.lastName in the email addresses...)

Course on how to design pages for mobile browsing

2007-10-29T14:17:03+02:00

Scott Weiss from Usable Products Company is teaching a "WAP Design" course in London (Dec 3, 495 Pounds) and New York (Dec 11, 695 bucks).

According to the email I received:

This course is for designers who want to know how to design for today's phones, using today's mobile browsers. It is filled with examples and exercises geared to ready designers for immediate success.

WAP Design includes XHTML, CSS, and .mobi issues in a designer-focused course covering the following topics:

    * WAP Overview
    * WAP, including XHTML, CSS, and .mobi
    * Successful and Unsuccessful WAP Sites
    * Requirements Gathering for Design
    * Competitive Analysis of Desktop and Mobile Web Sites
    * Mobile Design Patterns
    * Expert Design Guidelines
    * WAP Design Toolbox
    * Wireframing
    * Paper Prototyping

More info.

S60 Podcast - intro to Widsets

2007-09-26T02:22:28+03:00

Found some extra time to listen to one of Phil's S60 podcasts (Podcast #28). The most recent one is an interview of Tommi Sihvola, one of the inventors of Widsets. (Quick summary: Widsets are mobile widgets that enable anyone to create, publish and share internet content to be accessed on their mobile phones. The Widsets on the phone are basically a Java application running the small widgets inside.)

In the interview, Tommi talks for example about how and why Widsets got started. It was interesting to hear that their first target phone was Motorola Razr... which basically forced to be really aware of the available resources (good thing in the long run!).

Links to Nokia UAProf information

2007-08-29T03:26:03+03:00

There was a recent discussion of the Forum Nokia discussion boards about where to find the UAProf information for Nokia devices. The list at http://nds.nokia.com/uaprof/uaprof_list.txt does not exist anymore, instead the the links to the UAProf XML documents can be found on the FN device specification pages (scroll down the page until you see the UAProf Link section - it is close to the bottom of the technical specification part).

Unfortunately some of the specification pages are missing this information, but that should be corrected in the coming days.

Sites designed for mobile phones?

2007-06-22T21:17:58+03:00

Bango has apparently set up a service, which checks if a site is mobile phone friendly. They are using a rating from 0 ("This site is not designed for mobile phones.") to 5 ("This site is designed for most mobile devices."). However I have no idea what these numbers really mean and what features the service is checking.

An email in the MobileMonday mailing list mentioned that this checking has something to do if the pages should not be "transcoded" and that 'the pages delivered are inspected to see if they have been adapted or if they are just "plain old html".' I guess this means that if the phone has a powerful Web browser like the S60 3rd Edition devices or iPhone, the numbers from this service are not really relevant. They matter if the phone has a WAP browser only.

Not surprisingly many of the mobile service sites rate pretty well (getting 3-5 out of 5). However without knowing what the service is really checking it is hard to tell how useful this service is. Any more infornation, anyone?