Who You Calling A Jesse?

I caught an announcement for a preview of Deepfish (IE for windows mobile) and it got me excited. Why? It renders like a desktop browser. The browsing experience appears to be a big improvement on the Nokia Webkit based browser that you find in the newer Nokia devices (and is really cool for being out for a long while now). Currently it doesn’t look like it will be a better experience than what the Safari browser in the iPhone promises but the point is the browser experience is getting much better for mobile devices.

I am not entirely convinced the desktop experience is a good thing for mobile devices over GSM or CDMA given the outrageous data plans we have in North America (although they are getting better in the US, not so much Canada). With dual mode (wifi + GSM or CDMA) devices it could be very cool. As this technology/experience improves I am reminded once again of the 1990’s and the web. Will developers even bother with the older WAP based slow browsers given most phones are replaced/dead/broken in two years or so? Do you take the time and invest in a stripped down site or do you just work on detecting the smaller screens and making some marginal improvements instead of big changes?

Figuring out if it is worth the effort is a tough call. Almost all the project participants here don’t use their devices for the web largely because they have a laptop nearby and the devices do not do what they want. What they want is the same experience they get on the PC. I think it is a good sign for RIA’s though. They might not need a J2EE version in the near future.

I am hoping to get my hands on a Windows mobile device running Deepfish this afternoon. I will report back if I do…

Adobe announcement of an announcement today is the big unveiling of their CS3 product line. Since Photoshop CS3 beta appeared in December there has been a lot of talk about the changes in the Adobe line but my thing is the Creative Suite CS3 Web Edition. More specifically I am interested in Dreamweaver CS3 and Contribute CS3.

I have been using both on campus here for a while and I can say they are both very nice upgrades from the previous versions. Adobe highlights the features of Spry integration for Dreamweaver but I have to say the new CSS based layouts that come with it are going to be the #1 hit. The templates are just basic layouts that offer a designer/developer a sound starting point to build a web site. The code is just amazingly simple and full of comments so you can easily understand what is going on. It is sorta what the campus CLF here was supposed to be but with no real style just straight structure.

That is not to say the Spry features aren’t cool either. Adobe has come a long way since last May with Spry and I think Spry integration will offer a lot of people a stepping stone into the tricky world of DOM scripting and AJAX. Spry stuff should be used wisely mind you ;) I am a bit worried that people might use it and not think about accessibility or usability but time will tell.

Contribute on the other hand… Version 4 was released what feels like just last month. This new version is a CS3 release and like all the other products is a universal binary for mac users. That along with the updated CS3 branding, blogging, integration with FLV, IE 7, Firefox, rendering improvements, and some other general clean up make the latest version of Contribute a lot more attractive to update from version 3.

I am really excited about these updated tools. It should be interesting to hear what other people think once the try copies are available for download (no idea when that will be).

“A moderated forum for members of the University of Waterloo community to discuss post-secondary affairs and campus issues” is now live. It is a sort of letters to the editor meets a blog thing and will hopefully be the place where some good opinions are posted (good or bad) from students, staff, and faculty. It is hardly an earth shattering web application but it does mark a positive move on the part of the university and I am glad to have had some role to play in that.

Last term we started building an application that would act as a letters to the editor replacement for the old campus newspaper the Gazette. We got a working app done fairly quickly but it sat around for a while as people had other things on the go (the 50th Anniversary build up put off a lot of projects). We sat down a few weeks ago and pulled together the final parts and now it has the support of the top admin at the university.

It is a Ruby on Rails app that was started last term by Sasha Papo. Catherine finished it off nicely but we know there might be a few odd things going on. If you notice anything, let me know. Big thanks to the co-op students who worked on it.

Update: yes I forgot to link to UW Opinion, I fixed that ;)

Last week I mentioned a bit about the redirect script based on HTTP_USER_AGENT we use to send mobiles to a special version of the home page. This week I have some basic documentation written along with the PHP for download that we use on the mobile.php version of the home page.

Essentially all we are doing is parsing content from the static site and generating a mobile friendly version that is just content in smaller chunks. They are identified by their div class or id. Have a look at the documentation and let me know if anything needs more explanation.

It certainly isn’t perfect but it is pretty cool. Our big Ruby on Rails app, UW Events version 2.0 is now running in production with only a couple hiccups this morning. This long awaited update has:

• upcoming.org integration
• Facebook integration
• email and SMS reminders
• personal events – things that don’t need to be approved and appear in your own ical feed
• some profile information so the email and SMS work – it will only be used in UW Events, if that bugs you, don’t use the feature
• improvements in the search
• live-ish preview on the submission page and some tweaks on its layout

As with the previous version we have hCal all over the place, some hCard in the footer, and a simple approval process. After a few bug fixes and creating a mobile version, we are going to leave it alone for a bit unless something big is broken. Over the next few weeks we will fix some CSS oddness but beyond that we are done for now ;) We will have it in RubyForge by the end of April though so if you want new features, that will be your chance.

There is a pretty cool Ruby project that will consume April so look for that in May!

If anyone with a UWdir username/password wouldn’t mind, I could use some help testing out the next version of UW Events. It is at eventsbeta—please log in and:

• Try out facebook integration (we can pull your events from facebook)
• Try out upcoming.org integration (we can post and pull your stuff from there)
• Try out reminders – I think we have a server problem here
• Submit events
• Subscribe and add events to your personal iCal feed

For those without UWdir stuff you can poke around too but there is a lot less to see. The code is going to ruby forge after this is done so it will be free for anyone to use.

Let me know what you think.

Update: bugs have been fixed up to the point I made my comment (#6).

If you go to the UW home page in a Blackberry or Nokia device you will notice that you get a very different page than what you see on your laptop. I mentioned this change back in January. A few people have asked about how we are doing that and given a post on the quirksmode blog suggesting a similar idea I figure I should post the code for all.

In a PHP script that is included in the top of the index.php file, all we do is:

1. $ua = $_SERVER[‘HTTP_USER_AGENT’];
2. if (stristr($ua, “Windows CE”) || stristr($ua, “AvantGo”) || stristr($ua, “Mazingo”) || stristr($ua, “Mobile”) || stristr($ua, “T68”) || stristr($ua, “Syncalot”) || stristr($ua, “Blazer”) || stristr($ua,’BlackBerry’) || stristr($ua,’Opera Mini’) || stristr($ua,’Nokia’) || stristr($ua,’SymbianOS’ ))
3. {
4. $DEVICE_TYPE=”MOBILE”;
5. }
6. if (isset($DEVICE_TYPE) && $DEVICE_TYPE==”MOBILE”)
7. {
8. $location=’http://www.uwaterloo.ca/mobile.php’;
9. header (‘Location: ’.$location);
10. }

A bit of a headache was getting the right info for the user agent. Each device displays odd information that either tells you the browser or the device or the OS. A little trial an error was needed here.

Then in the mobile.php (uses the xhtml-mobile10.dtd) file we have minimal links but when clicked they parse content from the main index.php page. No duplication of content, just optimized. I will post more on that later ;)

It now looks like web folks are stuck testing at least three browsers to make sure their sites work. For February on the UW home page, IE was splitting 72.5% of users 60/40 between version 6 and version 7 while Firefox had 24% usage. Safari is a distant third at 2.18% but it is the only other browser above a half a percentage point of users.

What I think is more interesting this month is the platforms. Mac has a good hold on 4.8% and MS Windows 94.36% but Vista was 0.63% of Windows users for the month. Windows 98 has more at 0.75%. A look ahead at March so far has Vista up to 1% of Windows users so it is gaining ground and is probably something web folks on campus are going to need to consider for testing by the summer.

Since I am looking ahead… Firefox is up to 26.55% of users for March so far. No idea why Firefox has jumped in usage over the past two months but it is a good sign ;)

I was asleep at my RSS when I noticed Macworld has it from Adobe that CS3 will be available announced March 27th. This is pretty cool. For Mac users the added bonus is the promise of big speed improvements on your x86 machines. Looking forward to having some updated tools around…

Update: Adobe says it is just announcing it, it will be available in the spring sometime. Tsk Macworld for getting me excited.

The third BarCampWaterloo is over and even though we didn’t get over 30 people attending (I think we hit 30), half the people were new and came because they heard it was a lot of fun. So after organizing three BarCamps here is what I have learned:

• food is good, it can make the day, but people still enjoy themselves if there isn’t any
• getting the word out is hard, takes some time and effort
• the people that attend are all open minded and a lot of fun
• the space makes the event
• six hours goes by really fast
• sometimes powerpoint/s5/keynote is a good thing
• ad-hoc speaker organization works

Will there be a fourth? I certainly hope so. I think Simon and I have learned a lot about it and community interest outside of campus is really starting to build. The next one will certainly let us know what kind of traction BarCampWaterloo will have.

We have already starting planning the next one and it looks like early May is the target. Our goal should be to get 50 people attending/participating.

Final reminder that BarCampWaterloo is tomorrow. Thanks to some great support for this BarCampWaterloo there is going to be plenty of snacks and refreshments with some pizza for lunch. Plenty of geek fuel to keep everyone happy and chatty. Look forward to seeing everyone tomorrow… if you didn’t sign up on the sight please do so and if you really don’t want to bother that is ok too, just helps with food planning ;)