Information Technology | Prepys' Homepage

Learning to build mobile sites, from WAP to JQuery Mobile

May 28, 2013May 28, 2013 Max Limpag Leave a comment

EASY, POWERFUL FRAMEWORK. JQuery Mobile allows non-programmers like me to easily and quickly build powerful mobile Web apps and sites. (Photo by Max Limpag)

About ten years ago, I built a WAP (Wireless Application Protocol) mobile news site. This was at a time when the cellphone to aspire for was the Nokia 7110, a slider phone made even cooler when a similar device was used in the Matrix movie.

At that time, the Sun.Star website signed a content agreement with Smart for SMS and WAP news and they needed a WAP mobile site. Nobody among the website staff then knew how to build a WAP site. Being a sucker for always trying to learn new stuff, I volunteered to build it.

I finished the WAP site in time for the launch after a 3-day development marathon done after I finished my work at the Sun.Star Cebu copy desk, fueled by more than a pack of Marlboro reds a day (I was still a heavy smoker then) and guided by a phonebook-thick Wireless Markup Language (WML) reference for the Artus Netgate.

Updating was by manual editing of codes but somebody later hacked a rudimentary content management system to simplify changing the content in the WML files.

Boy, was it ugly. I don’t know if people still recall browsing using WAP but the system was a limited, text-based interface to mobile information.

WAP sites were made of decks of WML cards. And since phones then did not have the memory spaces that we have now, the cards could only contain limited characters — enough for a headline and about 3 paragraphs of the article. You go through this deck of WML cards as you navigate the WAP site.

Here is a snippet of the main page of the site with a sample of 2 cards. What it did is flash the text “22 papers all over the country” and then “12 affiliates online” before opening the “Enter” screen where you could click to go to the menu of viewing news, events or movie skeds.

<?xml version=”1.0″?>
<!DOCTYPE wml PUBLIC “-//WAPFORUM//DTD WML 1.1//EN” “http://www.wapforum.org/DTD/wml_1.1.xml”>
<wml>
<!– SUN-STAR WAP –>
<card id=”splash1″ ontimer=”#splash2″ title=”Sun.Star Network” newcontext=”false”>
<timer value=”10″/>

<big>22 papers all over the country</big> 

</card>

<card id=”splash2″ ontimer=”#splash3″ title=”Sun.Star Network” newcontext=”false”>
<timer value=”10″/>

<big>12 affiliates online</big> 

</card>

</wml>

WAP. The Sun.Star WAP site, built during the heydays of the Nokia 7110. WAP was built on decks of cards contained in WML pages. (Photo by Max Limpag)

I was reminded of this card interface when I started studying last week to build mobile websites and HTML apps using JQuery Mobile.

JQuery Mobile allows you to build multi-page mobile sites or apps on a single HTML file by breaking it into “pages,” akin to the WML cards.

But the similarities end there. JQuery Mobile is so much more powerful and yet still simple to use for a non-programmer like me. I cannot code, not even if my life depended on it. What I can do is cobble together frameworks to build stuff that I need for my projects.

To study JQuery Mobile, I built a mobile Web app for the Sun.Star Cebu central newsroom.

I wanted to revive the newsroom’s Style Guide, which advises Sun.Star Cebu journalist on usage and style in writing. The documented is a bit dated, it was written back when the paper still preferred the shorter spelling of words and thus used “kidnaped” instead of “kidnapped.”

But I still find the document useful and wanted ready access to it. I already set up a newsroom wiki to host the style guide in our local intranet but I thought it would be much more useful if it could be turned into a mobile app that a Sun.Star journalist can consult on the field.

I went through the JQuery Mobile API documentation, which is available online and as an iPhone app, and built a mobile Web app for the Style Guide. After I finished the guide, I realized I could just expand the app to make it even more useful to Sun.Star Cebu journalists by including writing tips and embedding our Twitter timeline so everyone would know the latest updates of the official @sunstarcebu account.

It says a lot about the power and simplicity of JQuery Mobile that a non-programmer like me was able to build what I wanted built in less than a day. I’m now looking into turning it into a native Android, iOS and BlackBerry apps (crossing my fingers).

As a journalist who grew up and started working before I had access to the Internet, I am continually amazed by this empowering ability of Web technology.

Open source technologies like WordPress (which just celebrated its 10th year) and JQuery Mobile are empowering to independent community journalists like me (my InnoPub persona), who do not have access to a dedicated development team.With the world going mobile, frameworks like JQuery Mobile are such a big boost for startups and smaller companies.

Share on Facebook Retweet this

The post Learning to build mobile sites, from WAP to JQuery Mobile appeared first on Leon Kilat : The Tech Experiments.

Why Flickr is awesome again

May 26, 2013May 26, 2013 Max Limpag Leave a comment

Share on Facebook Retweet this

flickr

A free terabyte of storage. A thousand gigabytes. That’s how Flickr announced it was back in the photo hosting game.

Last week, Yahoo chief executive officer Marissa Mayer announced that the Internet pioneer is giving users of its photo sharing service Flickr a terabyte of free storage. That amount of free space boggles one’s mind.

To show it off, Flickr has a slider on its homepage that allows you to calculate how many photos you can store in your free allocation, depending on the resolution. If you store 8-megapixel pictures, the resolution of the iPhone 5, you could store up 436,906 photos.

‘Enough for a lifetime’

“That’s enough for a lifetime of photos — more than 500,000 original, full-resolution, pixel-perfect, brilliant photos. Flickr users will never have to worry about running out of space,” Mayer said in her post on Yahoo’s Tumblr, a platform that the company purchased at about the same time they announced the changes in Flickr, for over a billion dollars.

To put that free storage into context, the biggest free online storage I was able to sign up to is the 25 gigabytes I have with Box.net for signing up via an Android phone. A regular Box.net account offers only 5gb of free storage. Dropbox also offers 5gb of free storage with opportunities to increase it by inviting friends to use the service.

Reaction to the announcement is close to the response to when Gmail announced it was offering 1GB of storage to its free e-mail service on April 1, 2004. The announcement was made at a time when people had 2MB of storage for their free email accounts. But then years later, the other email providers also ramped up their storage. I think that would also happen in the photo storage service sector. Google, for example, already offers unlimited photo storage but only for standard size images of 2048 pixels at the longest edge. Here’s hoping they would remove that size limit.

Yahoo also announced a redesign of what had previously been an abandoned web property, adding the ability to share photos in full resolution and lifting the 200-photo limit imposed on the photostream of free members.

As soon as the announcement was made, I opened my Flickr account again after months of not visiting it. The most recent time that I reopened it was when Yahoo! released its Flickr app for the iPhone. I was given three months of Pro upgrade for free but was told that at the expiration, the 200-photo limit on the photostream would be imposed again.

Old Skool member

The Flickr of old is the poster child of what went wrong in Yahoo. The site was a trail-blazing service that had a strong following among its users. After it was bought by Yahoo, the service suffered.

I was part of the so-called “Old Skool” members, what the company called those who joined before it was purchased by Yahoo. I joined Flickr in August 2004 and used it not just for hosting personal photos but also those that I used in my blog.

Many bloggers also used Flickr for mobile posting because the service allowed you to automatically create a new photo post every time you email it an image for uploading.

But after years of stagnation, users left the service in favor of new sites and applications. For a time, I transferred to Zooomr, a similar service that was built by a teener out to prove that he could create a Flickr clone. That site, along with many of my photos, is now gone.

Sites like Instagram and Path then took over the photo sharing service while Flickr lay abandoned by Yahoo. Mayer referenced what happened to Flickr in her announcement of the purchase of Tumblr, “we promise not to screw it up.”

The Flickr of new is the poster child of a resurgent Yahoo.

When the company announced Mayer’s appointment last year, somebody spoke for the Flickr faithful by putting up a one-page site at dearmarissamayer.com asking her to make Flickr awesome again.

I think the site speaks for many of us when it now says: Dear Marissa Mayer, THANK YOU FOR MAKING flickr AWESOME AGAIN. ♥ the internet.

Share on Facebook Retweet this

The post Why Flickr is awesome again appeared first on Leon Kilat : The Tech Experiments.

iTunes gives me the Blues

May 26, 2013May 26, 2013 Max Limpag Leave a comment

Share on Facebook Retweet this

MUSIC ON THE IPHONE. I wanted to copy 4 albums on my Mac into my iPhone and iTunes insists on backing it up first, syncing things before sending the files. I went through the process for close to an hour to find, while I was already out on my run, that the files weren’t copied.

There is a special place in Inferno for iTunes.

A few minutes to my Saturday run this week, I decided on a change in music. I usually listen to NPR podcasts or Bob Dylan, Nina Simone and Amy Winehouse while running but yesterday I wanted to listen to The Lumineers and Madeleine Peyroux.

I listen to songs on the BlackBerry Z10 because its storage is expandable with a memory card (unlike that of the iPhone) and it’s easier to manage songs there — just a matter of mounting the phone’s memory card as a storage drive and adding or removing the songs.

But for running, I prefer using the iPhone because of RunKeeper. The BlackBerry Z10 has an equivalent app — Sports Tracker — but it often hangs and force closes in the middle of your run. Several times, it also stopped tracking the mileage.

I planned to start running at 5 p.m. and attached the iPhone to the MacBook Pro to sync the albums a few minutes before that time.

Manually managing songs on iTunes

Upon detection of the phone, the system went through its cycle: opening iTunes and syncing things and then opening up iPhoto to prompt me to import images on my phone that I haven’t backed up yet.

Because I configured iTunes to manually manage songs and playlists, I had to choose the albums for syncing.

The system then went through that maddening linear process of backing up the files, transferring apps, synchronizing things before transferring the songs.

Since the backing up of files took too long (this was at about 5:10 p.m. of my 5 p.m. run), I decided to cancel it thinking, mistakenly, that the files will still synchronize after the backup is canceled. Wrong.

I did a quick search on “how to add music to iphone without iTunes” and did a cursory browsing of the results. Most involved installing apps in Windows but I didn’t want to deal with it.

I decided to restart syncing again (20 minutes after I was supposed to start my run) and went out for a short run “for warm up,” I told myself. I left the phone to sync and came back after about 10 minutes. It was still on Step 1 of 7, “Waiting for sync to start.”

I decided to give it more time and started my run in earnest. I went back 13 minutes later to find that it was on Step 2 of 7, still “Backing up.”

I continued running and came back in about 20 minutes to find no notifications on iTunes whatsoever. Thinking the sync had completed, I quickly detached the cable, attached the earphones and went out the door for my “long” run.

I sent a few text messages and was already nearing the gate of the subdivision when I opened the music app.

After more than an hour of trying to sync 4 albums of less than 50 songs and it wasn’t there. The only songs available on the phone were part of “The Very Best Of John Lee Hooker.” Curse you, iTunes. I love listening to John Lee Hooker but I looked forward to listening to the other artists for this run. I also found that iTunes had reinstalled some of the apps I uninstalled from the phone.

John Lee Hooker is an influential blues guitarist, singer and song writer.

But there’s no use crying or cursing over unsynced songs. I went on with my run with John Lee Hooker, Boggie Chillin’.

Well my mama she didn’t ‘low me, just to stay out all night long, oh Lord
Well my mama didn’t ‘low me, just to stay out all night long

Midway into my run I was still cursing iTunes. I never use it outside of backing up my phone. To play songs on my Mac, I use Clementine. Android and BlackBerry makes management of songs so much easier: you can just add or remove song files directly to and from the phone memory or memory card.

And as if taunting me a third way into my run, the phone played the song that got me searching for John Lee Hooker in the first place:

It serve you right to suffer
Serve you right to be alone
Serve you right to suffer
Serve you right to be alone
Because you’re still livin’
In days done past and gone

Share on Facebook Retweet this

The post iTunes gives me the Blues appeared first on Leon Kilat : The Tech Experiments.

Nobex is a great BlackBerry 10 podcast app

May 23, 2013May 23, 2013 Max Limpag Leave a comment

Share on Facebook Retweet this

Nobex Podcast and Radio app

There aren’t many BlackBerry 10 apps that compare well with those for Android and iOS. While using some BB10 apps, you get a foreboding feeling of something about to crash it tingles. Take the Sports Tracker for BlackBerry, an app that tracks your run or bike ride using GPS. Midway into your run, it hangs and at times closes and you lose your mileage log.

But not the Nobex Radio and Podcast app.

The podcatcher app for the Z10 and Q10 is not only among the best made-for-BlackBerry 10 apps in the BlackBerry World, it is also at par with some of the best apps in other platforms.

In fact, I now prefer using Nobex on the BlackBerry 10 over Stitcher Radio on the iPhone or Android to listen to podcasts. It does the podcast playing task as well as the apps in other platforms and more.

Nobex offers granular control over episode downloads – allowing you to manually choose and queue episodes to download. It also makes it easier for you to browse show archives and download these to your device.

Nobex is also integrated with the BlackBerry Hub and you get an alert whenever any of the shows you subscribe to has published a new episode.

The Nobex Radio and Podcast app for BlackBerry 10 offers granular control over downloading of podcast episodes.

What I don’t like about the app, however, is that it does not have a system that allows you to put up a playlist of episodes (albeit a minor annoyance). Playing stops after each podcast episode and you have to manually select another show.

Share on Facebook Retweet this

The post Nobex is a great BlackBerry 10 podcast app appeared first on Leon Kilat : The Tech Experiments.

On Keeping A Notebook

May 23, 2013May 23, 2013 Max Limpag Leave a comment

The impulse to write things down is a peculiarly compulsive one, inexplicable to those who do not share it, useful only accidentally, only secondarily, in the way that any compulsion tries to justify itself.
Joan Didion – On Keeping A Notebook

The post On Keeping A Notebook appeared first on Leon Kilat : The Tech Experiments.