US Wireless Carriers To Start Blacklist

Posted on 4/12/2012 by Robert

Wireless companies are going to start a blacklist for stolen phones. This is a long overdue move. It should have happened years ago. The downside to smart phones like the iPhone having a high resale value is that they have a high resale value. By that I mean they are targets for thieves.

Some, notably Sprint and certain wireless companies in other countries already have such blacklists. A search on ebay for “bad esn” returns quite a few phones. It’s virtually a guarantee these are all stolen phones. Some are sold for parts, some are taken to other wireless providers. Stay away from any phone marked as such if buying used or buy new. I know lots of developers buy older model new phones on eBay, and some buy used. Avoid the “bad ESN” listings so you don’t support this.

Hopefully the next step will be cooperating with overseas partners for a global blacklist. It shouldn’t be terribly difficult to accomplish. That would even further reduce the value of a stolen phone to being worth much more than it’s parts.

On H.264 Revisited

Posted on 3/14/2012 by Robert

Once again the debate over H.264 has come up in the Mozilla community. I’ve been a strong advocate of the WebM/VP8 codec given its liberal license and abilities and still am, but agree H.264 needs to be supported. It’s a requirement for mobile (B2G), and becoming necessary on the desktop.

A little over a year ago Chrome talked about dropping support for H.264. To date they have not done so, or given any indication that is even still in the plans as far as I know. In 2010 Adobe said they would be supporting WebM (link in that same blog post). They too have failed to live up to their promises. In either case I’ve found no indication on the internet they ever plan to go forward with those plans.

I suspect in Google’s case they were pressured by various providers and mobile partners who don’t want to encode or support another encoding. Google’s been trying to woo anyone/everyone for the purposes of Google TV and presumably YouTube. It’s likely just not worth it for them to push. There are various theories floating around about Adobe including a lack of clear Flash strategy in an HTML5 world. Adobe does however have a “tools” strategy. Perhaps time will tell.

Furthermore Apple and Microsoft are fundamentally opposed to WebM as they are both licensors for H.264. The odds of them supporting something that hurts their bottom line unless the rest of the web is threatening to leave them behind is nearly 0.

I question however if it should be bundled vs. using system codecs. Windows XP aside, system codecs mean that Microsoft and Apple are essentially responsible for making it work as well as the expense. Plugins could be used for OS’s that don’t ship with the appropriate codecs.

It’s time to put some effort into a JavaScript player for WebM and make that liberally licensed. Browsers still aren’t quite there, but eventually the day will come when that’s workable. The web will then gain the ability to have video play on any (modern) device. Just not natively. That is the backdoor for an open codec.

The real issue is larger than the <video/> element. It’s software patents and their ability to undermine innovation and progress. It’s important to keep this in mind. Just look at mobile. It’s completely possible that the entire mobile industry could come to a halt over patent lawsuits and fear of lawsuits. All it takes is a company willing to press the button. Google spent $12.5 billion in what is essentially the patent equivalent of nuclear proliferation. That’s how real the threat is perceived. H.264 is arguably a fart in a hurricane.

QR Codes Suck

Posted on 3/6/2012 by Robert

WTF QR Codes might be my new favorite blog, at least for the past 2 days it has been.

Anyone who thought QR codes had a chance in hell of catching on meet the following two criteria:

Doesn’t understand the very basics on how humans prefer to interact with technology.
Is too much of a computer n00b to remember the CueCat.

Oh look, and a cryptic spot of contrasting pigment! Let me take out my phone, browse to an app I’ve pre-downloaded in case I ever ran across such a marking and is specifically for this purpose. Now I’ll point and focus at this spot, universally found in an awkward position and try and take a picture. I’ll likely need to try more than once due to lighting, focus, obstructions (common for billboards, moving trains, cars) and it not being a large enough portion of the picture for my phone to figure it out. Once I succeed at this magic act, I’ll be taken to a mystery site that could just be malware (it does exist for phones), or perhaps a legit site.

Amazingly someone went through this use case, and thought it was a brilliant idea.

Bonus: They did this years ago when cell phone cameras were much worse than they are today.

But seriously, it was a bad idea (or a really good prank). Lets just laugh about it, and move on.

On Boot To Gecko

Posted on 2/27/2012 by Robert

Always bet on JavaScript, always bet on the web. This is really the reason Boot to Gecko is so interesting. Microsoft is now learning this the hard way. If Apple isn’t careful they too will learn this the hard way.

There’s been a lot of talk today about Telefónica’s involvement, but it’s worth noting the Mozilla blog announcement also mentions Deutsche Telekom Innovation Labs will join the Boot to Gecko project with dedicated development resources. That’s a pretty big deal.

The ability to run on lower end hardware which is cheaper to produce in quantity will make a huge difference. Tech in general tends to focus on North America, Europe, Japan, Korea, Brazil, Australia in terms of target market. They do this because they are wealthy countries reasonably free markets, similar taste, and trade agreements make it favorable.

This however has a huge downside. Overall this is excluding a huge chunk of the world. China alone is about 1.3 billion people (CIA estimate 2012) with a GNI of $7,570 (compared to $47,120 for the US). As large as Brazil is (~192.3 million), it’s only half of the 385.7 million in South America.

Take a look at the map in terms of GNI:

Now compare that to population density. Pay close attention to Asia, South Asia and Western Africa:

Who’s dominated this market to date? For most of the time it’s been Symbian since phones that run that slim OS have been rather cost effective. More recently it’s becoming Android now that older hardware exists that can be produced cheaply. Notice in the graph below where Android’s growth is coming from. Many would like you to think it’s only Apple and Android out there. That’s hardly where Android is growing users from. It’s market-share from Symbian.

That Apple iOS dip is likely the drop-off prior to the iPhone 4S shipping rather than Android. It was only released in October after iPhone 4 sales stalled in anticipation. You see a similar dip in 2008. 2009 is likely offset by the iPad’s success.

Of course an OS that runs fast on slower ARM hardware will run blazing fast on more expensive state of the art hardware. So everyone really benefits from being lean and fast.

This is about bringing the mobile internet to billions of people. It’s a big deal.

Hat Tip to Wikipedia for the maps and graph

Mobile Experience On A Budget

Posted on 1/5/2012 by Robert

This blog is largely read by people on traditional desktops and laptops. It’s mobile usage is a bit on the low side, though that’s changing. I decided I wanted to start making the mobile experience suck less, but I didn’t want to go as far as serving a whole new experience for mobile. Responsive web design is interesting, but I didn’t want to invest so much time in it just yet.

This is still an ongoing project, and partially an experiment but here is my game plan:

Make The Standard Design Light/Flexible

The site right now is actually pretty simple in design and structure. It’s a grid layout, everything is modular and ID/classed up. I’m a slight performance junkie and graphically impaired, so image use is pretty minimal and I’ve sprited what I could to make the design as light weight as possible. The core site itself is actually just a few requests. Everything that can benefit from being so is minimized/gziped to lessen the payload down the wire. JS is only included on pages where it’s needed. Light payloads and minimal requests are the name of the game.

This benefits all platforms. Even with 45 thumbnails from Project 365 images on one page, I still can load it all about 2.5 seconds on my laptop. That’s not terrible. Some say “think mobile first”. I say “think performance everywhere”. There’s no reason why performance should be limited to mobile.

Rejigger For Mobile

Step two is to adjust the site for mobile. In my case that means hiding some less useful things, and some size and layout related changes to fit on a smaller screen. Like I said, I’m not serving up a separate mobile site. My pages are already rather light and saving 1 KB doesn’t seem worth it to me just yet. I just want my existing site to not feel like a desktop site. This is more about usability. Performance wise I optimized with mobile in the back of my head while working on the desktop experience.

I didn’t want to include a separate mobile stylesheet since my changes are intended to be subtle and minimal. Besides, that’s a separate request for mobile users. Instead I appended to my existing stylesheet with something like this:

@media only screen and (max-device-width: 480px) {
    body  {
        min-width: 0;
        width: auto;
    }
    #page {
        min-width: 0;
        width: 100%;
    }
    /* and so on… */
}
@media screen and (max-device-width: 480px) and (orientation:landscape) {
    /* landscape specific css */
}

Like I said, I intended for my changes to be pretty subtle. This works pretty well. The one thing it can’t really handle is images. I tend to be pretty light on image use, so it’s not a deal killer for me. However I may eventually look at better solutions in the responsive image world. For now I’ll just make the editorial decision to keep image use tame.

In general my philosophy has been:

Does this have value in a mobile context? (no: hide it, yes: continue)
Can I adjust the layout/design to make this not suck on mobile? (no: hide it, yes: continue)
Is this more work than it’s worth? (no: do it, yes: hide it)

Final Thoughts

I’ve still got some more polish to do, I know <pre/> blocks don’t look/feel right and the comments area is still not quite there. The image gallery experience is not even started. But overall it’s still better than the desktop experience I was serving just hours ago.

Perhaps one day the paradigm will shift on this blog, but I don’t see that happening just yet. Most of what benefits mobile also benefits the desktop experience. This approach gives me an improved mobile experience with minimal hassle. I also benefit from not needing two do work twice as I would if I had a separate mobile experience. That means more time to be productive.

The “gPhone”: T-Mobile G1

Posted on 9/23/2008 by Robert

Google G1 Phone So the infamous Google Phone aka gPhone is finally out. The big news is that it is the first to run Android, which I shared my thoughts on a few months ago. Now that the press has been all over it, here are my observations:

App Store

The fact that there is no company (yet) restricting what you can install on it is awesome. Apple has seriously dropped the ball in this regard. I’m still thinking Apple will eventually loosen up just like the original “no applications” stance. I’m also thinking T-Mobile, if not other providers will want to clamp down on what users install to ensure nothing competes with their offerings and eats too much bandwidth. Not to mention security, or “security” depending on how you look at it. Just wait. They already block VoIP. It will expand in time.

The Network / Bandwidth Cap

T-Mobile’s 3G network is enough of a reason to say no. It’s way to small and new. Likely because of this, they snuck a little clause in the terms (via dslreports.com) limiting you to 1GB of 3G data, then essentially crippling the service for the remainder of the billing period:

If your total data usage in any billing cycle is more than 1GB, your data throughput for the remainder of that cycle may be reduced to 50 kbps or less. Your data session, plan, or service may be suspended, terminated, or restricted for significant roaming or if you use your service in a way that interferes with our network or ability to provide quality service to other users

Software

Android is Linux. I love Linux. That said, love polished software most of all, and I love the UNIX-ness of Linux most about Linux. That said, the iPhone’s UI is way more polished even in the demos, which we all know are way better than reality. That said, iPhone OS is at 2.1 now and Android is just taking off. There’s time for future polish.

Another gripe is the attachment to Google services. What happened to “do no evil”? Google released Chrome which kept your default search engine (even if it was a competitor). The phone on the other hand requires a Google account. Lack of Exchange support isn’t a great thing. I bet this is because of it’s open source nature. Apple simply licensed ActiveSync from Microsoft. I’m not sure if Google could do this for Android itself (though an application running on Android potentially could). The licensing could be tricky. Push mail for Gmail is a nice touch though.

Hardware

Google G1 Phone Having a keyboard is nice. Totally not worth the size though. USB adapter for a headphone jack? It’s 2008, that’s not acceptable. No multitouch? Come on. It does have a Qualcomm MSM7201A which is a 528 MHz ARM9 chip from what I understand. Not sure if it’s underclocked or not. The iPhone has a 620 MHz ARM11 underclocked to 412 MHz. It has 192 MB RAM compared to the iPhone’s 128 MB and a 3.1MP camera, compared to the iPhone’s 2MP. Using an SD card for storage is a mixed blessing. One one side you have expandable storage (awesome). On the other hand, no built in storage (suck). You’ll need to buy a card if you want more than 1 GB, meaning most of the hardware cost savings between it and the iPhone will be gone.

From a size perspective, it’s slightly larger in most ways and heavier. That’s likely mostly due to the keyboard.

Gizmodo has a great hands-on discussing their initial impressions. Pretty much matched my feelings from seeing the demos, and having played with the Android emulator.

So far the iPhone is still the clear winner, but it’s only one phone on the the Android platform thus far. It’s not a threat yet, but it’s not eliminated either.

Rebreaking The Web

Posted on 5/29/2008 by Robert

It’s happening again. Once upon a time, browser vendors started adding their own features without consulting with each other and agreeing upon standards. What they created was a giant mess of inconsistencies across browsers and platforms that is still in effect today. Ask any web developer and they can tell you of the pains that they have suffered trying to make seemingly trivial things work everywhere consistently. It’s no easy task. Before IE 7, even an ajax required something along the lines of:

var httpRequest;
if (window.XMLHttpRequest) { // Mozilla, Safari, …
    httpRequest = new XMLHttpRequest();
} else if (window.ActiveXObject) { // IE
    httpRequest = new ActiveXObject("Microsoft.XMLHTTP");
}

That’s right, IE 6 didn’t support the native xmlHttpRequest object (more here). This is just one of many examples in JavaScript and CSS. document.all anyone?

The end result of this problem became to be known as the “Web Standards” movement. Simply put it’s an idea that code should follow a standard that results in consistent output across all browsers on various platforms. Write once, run anywhere. While it’s taken years for this to manifest, it’s slowly become a reality. Firefox, Safari, Opera have fairly consistent rendering (at least in comparison to the mess of just a few years ago on the browser scene. IE 6 was fairly poor in terms of modern web development, but IE 7 made progress, and IE 8 is Microsoft’s greatest effort to date to bring their browser up to speed.

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Flash For iPhone

Posted on 2/12/2008 by Robert

Gear Live is reporting that Flash for the iPhone is coming. Given how many times rumors like this come around, I’m slightly skeptical until I actually see confirmation for myself.

That said, if there is an implementation, I suspect it will be a special mobile version, and very MPEG-4 centric. By that I mean H.264 as the encouraged (if not only) video encoding, and AAC as the preferred audio format, with MP3.

There’s a simple reason for this. AAC, MP3, and H.264 can be processed using hardware decoding. This means the CPU isn’t needed, resulting in lower power consumption. Many mobile devices have specific hardware for this reason. There is unknown hardware in the iPhone, which may very well be for hardware decoding.

By leveraging hardware decoding it allows Apple to offer things like video without sacrificing thermals or battery life. Since Flash can now use H.264 as well, it could offload some of that complicated processing. The CPU itself contains PowerVR MBX 3D graphics.

This could allow for most Flash to work, with much lower power consumption. The downside to this is that VP6 encoded video wouldn’t be able to use hardware decoding. For many online video sites (which use VP6 since H.264 is still very new) you’d have to run off of the CPU meaning more thermals and power consumption. A notable exception is YouTube, which thanks to Google’s work with the Apple apparently uses H.264 by means of a custom application.

Google For iPhone

Posted on 12/5/2007 by Robert

There’s been a lot of talk today about Google’s launch of it’s services optimized for the iPhone.

It got me thinking. Is it really about the iPhone? Or is it about mobile standards based browsers (WebKit in particular). What I’m talking about is Android, who coincidentally also uses WebKit. Call be crazy, but Google’s launch of this offering isn’t really about riding the iPhone’s popularity. It’s about being in that new mobile space. You might even say this is being tested on the iPhone, before Android comes around. No longer is mobile limited by a basic WAP deck. This one uses the same technology the rest of the web uses, only designed to look and function well on a small screen by people with giant clumsy fingers.

This space isn’t limited to just WebKit. Gecko has made some headway into the market (mainly via Nokia devices), and is preparing to make a big effort in the near future to bring Firefox Mobile to your phone. Most iPhone sites look pretty decent in Firefox already, the main thing that makes some of them look a little funny is a css property or two it doesn’t support, for example -webkit-border-image which has become pretty popular for sites only targeting WebKit since it’s pretty handy. Some sites also use -webkit-border-radius, which is supported on Firefox, as -moz-border-radius both of which follow the border-radius specs as part of CSS3, but are still namespaced for the moment.

For once we don’t have to learn another silly markup, and be limited by lack of JavaScript which has made the web a better place… for the most part (think Gmail, Google Maps, etc.).

It’s some very cool stuff. I’m really interested to see what comes.

iPhone/iPod touch SDK On The Way

Posted on 10/17/2007 by Robert

Readers know I’ve been big on Apple opening up the iPhone/iTouch to developers since the beginning. Apple finally came through announcing a SDK will be made available, though not until early next year. It specifically noted Apps will work on the iPod touch as well. About time. All of a sudden these devices went from being cool, but not really worthwhile to having massive potential. Still missing on the iPhone is 3G, but that’s coming, and likely in an ’08 refresh of the product line.

Gizmodo has an interesting banner on top of their coverage of the announcement. Notice the positioning of the Firefox logo. This comes pretty soon after the announcement of the Firefox Mobile effort. Provided the SDK provided is good enough, I think there’s a pretty good chance we will see a Gecko product on the iPhone in the not too distant future. For quite some time it will likely be Minimo based and very simple, not the more robust plans which require Mozilla 2.

On a side note, I’m surprised nobody has managed to get Linux running on the iPod touch yet. I thought that would have happened by now. The iPhone would be somewhat pointless since getting the phone functionality to work would be a real battle.

Some sort of simulator/emulator to aid development would also be interesting, though I don’t think that’s very likely.

Overall it’s great news. Lets see that SDK already!

Below is what was posted on Apple’s site today

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