Going green with Opera 9.5
Sunday, 29. June 2008, 15:59:20
I got one of the One Laptop Per Child project's XO laptops. I have been playing around with it a bit, but it might suddenly become my work machine...
Posts tagged with "mobile"
While you were out...
Monday, 19. November 2007, 12:56:40
I've been on a travel-meeting-travel-talk-travel jag for what seems like forever (but it was really only three weeks).
While I was away, a whole lot of cool Opera things came out. MathML, Mini 4, A video build with 3D canvas, ...
So in roughly chronological order...
While I was away, a whole lot of cool Opera things came out. MathML, Mini 4, A video build with 3D canvas, ...
So in roughly chronological order...
To be-, or not to be-ta? The mini question
Tuesday, 19. June 2007, 13:25:44
The beta version of Opera mini 4 is out today.
It has some cool features, like the kind of adaptive zoom that the iPhone, and Nokia's browser for high-end phones before it, was supposed to use to revolutionise the web. Except of course that this runs on the $50 pre-paid phone I bought when I realised that I had forgotten my phone, not just on some $500+contract superphone. On the other hand, it is a beta, so it isn't everything that mini4 will be.
I normally run the very latest builds of Opera on my desktop - the internal builds that we get in the development process - so I am not scared of our beta software. I even have my mail in it. But I am not quite so pushy about the phone browser. Mini Just Works™ for the stuff I do (looking up songs and lyrics, buying travel tickets, a bit of reading news, and looking up pointless things at parties).
The new version is nice. I have played around a bit with the "desktop mini simulator" - there is a simulator that runs the same program on a desktop, where it draws an imaginary phone around it so you can get an idea of how it works.
I am not so fond of the zoom thing for everyday use. But then, I hate it on the other browsers I have tried it on, too. When I browse on a mobile, I want something that really really works for mobile, and I don't find it hard to understand the way that things are adapted to best suit mobile. Some usability testing suggested that people prefer having a full-screen mode that made the layout like desktop, so there are plenty of people out there who love it.
Certainly, it can be useful. It is nice to see a mouse pointer on so many cheap phones. It should handle some really badly written systems that are monstrously hard to adapt, too. And it is properly written to dynamically fit as columns wobble around and change size.
Am I just an old fuddy-duddy, wanting things to be the way they were, or is it really easier for someone who uses mobile a lot (It is about 3 years since I first bought a plane ticket on my phone)? I don't know. Even in "old-fashioned" mode (which of course it still does) the new beta feels even faster. Maybe it is just that I am not a very visual person.
One warning (Hey, it is a beta!): in the beta, they have not yet enabled the always-on security that made Opera mini a really cool application for me - one that I use for buying real stuff. So I either have to leave off putting my credit card about until the next update is out, or stay with the current release version. And that is the real dilemma....
... because actually I want to upgrade. Maybe I will just do it on the phone that has Opera mobile with SSL, Password management, Ajax and so on, and leave the cheap phone I bought at a train station with the secured release version for now...
It has some cool features, like the kind of adaptive zoom that the iPhone, and Nokia's browser for high-end phones before it, was supposed to use to revolutionise the web. Except of course that this runs on the $50 pre-paid phone I bought when I realised that I had forgotten my phone, not just on some $500+contract superphone. On the other hand, it is a beta, so it isn't everything that mini4 will be.
I normally run the very latest builds of Opera on my desktop - the internal builds that we get in the development process - so I am not scared of our beta software. I even have my mail in it. But I am not quite so pushy about the phone browser. Mini Just Works™ for the stuff I do (looking up songs and lyrics, buying travel tickets, a bit of reading news, and looking up pointless things at parties).
The new version is nice. I have played around a bit with the "desktop mini simulator" - there is a simulator that runs the same program on a desktop, where it draws an imaginary phone around it so you can get an idea of how it works.
I am not so fond of the zoom thing for everyday use. But then, I hate it on the other browsers I have tried it on, too. When I browse on a mobile, I want something that really really works for mobile, and I don't find it hard to understand the way that things are adapted to best suit mobile. Some usability testing suggested that people prefer having a full-screen mode that made the layout like desktop, so there are plenty of people out there who love it.
Certainly, it can be useful. It is nice to see a mouse pointer on so many cheap phones. It should handle some really badly written systems that are monstrously hard to adapt, too. And it is properly written to dynamically fit as columns wobble around and change size.
Am I just an old fuddy-duddy, wanting things to be the way they were, or is it really easier for someone who uses mobile a lot (It is about 3 years since I first bought a plane ticket on my phone)? I don't know. Even in "old-fashioned" mode (which of course it still does) the new beta feels even faster. Maybe it is just that I am not a very visual person.
One warning (Hey, it is a beta!): in the beta, they have not yet enabled the always-on security that made Opera mini a really cool application for me - one that I use for buying real stuff. So I either have to leave off putting my credit card about until the next update is out, or stay with the current release version. And that is the real dilemma....
... because actually I want to upgrade. Maybe I will just do it on the phone that has Opera mobile with SSL, Password management, Ajax and so on, and leave the cheap phone I bought at a train station with the secured release version for now...
Wii, Austin...
Friday, 16. March 2007, 07:18:27
An entry got wiped by user error. This is a reconstruction made using the best scientific principes available (Who said "Make-it-up"? 
)
)Carpet...
Wednesday, 29. November 2006, 23:57:17
Mini maxi...
Tuesday, 6. June 2006, 13:20:37
Opera mini 2.0 came out a little while ago.
And then my computer died, and I realised why I should have fixed my phone. Last time that happened I was in Canada, and blogging via Opera Mini 1. It was OK - I appreciated having it. The new veresion, on the other hand, rocks. If it's not quite up there with Opera 8.6 for mobile, it is streets ahead of most things.
And the big things have been fixed - I can choose my font size now, and I can download via mini. And they still squeezed it under 100kb. Sweet.
And they got it working on Blackberry. I'm pleased, since I sort of helped there.
If you've never seen it, try the demo (requires java), then think about it running on all kinds of little baby phones.
(Sorry about the marketing spiel style. I was really pleased when the font selection came in, because that was the big accessibility bugbear that I hoped could be solved in the available size. They did accesskey stuff, too...)
And then my computer died, and I realised why I should have fixed my phone. Last time that happened I was in Canada, and blogging via Opera Mini 1. It was OK - I appreciated having it. The new veresion, on the other hand, rocks. If it's not quite up there with Opera 8.6 for mobile, it is streets ahead of most things.
And the big things have been fixed - I can choose my font size now, and I can download via mini. And they still squeezed it under 100kb. Sweet.
And they got it working on Blackberry. I'm pleased, since I sort of helped there.
If you've never seen it, try the demo (requires java), then think about it running on all kinds of little baby phones.
(Sorry about the marketing spiel style. I was really pleased when the font selection came in, because that was the big accessibility bugbear that I hoped could be solved in the available size. They did accesskey stuff, too...)
The right way?
Sunday, 26. March 2006, 01:39:42
The nice thing about a blog is that I get to control exactly what is in it. I also take the blame for anything stupid I say, which makes sense. I resisted writing a blog for a long time. I tried it briefly a couple of times in the late 90's, when there were no real tools, but then spent so much of my time writing for work that I stopped doing it for pleasure. But it's nice to write things when I feel like it. Sadly, I often don't for a lack of time (too many oother things to do) or because I am far away from the computer. I guess that means that people aren't overburdened by reading it.
I'm trying to write some articles. It takes time, which is why I am still doing it late on Saturday night. They're fun, but hard work. And then I hand them in and they get edited. On rare occasions something I write gets published where other people read it. Most recently an article on the mobile web was published by .Net, an english magazine that the general public can actually read.
I got a copy from a friend who had seen it. Naturally, it had been edited a little by the magazine. It may have contained a spelling error, or some tortured sentece they wanted to simplify. Mostly they did a good job, actually improving the way things were said. But a couple of the changes rankled a bit with me. One of them was a question of style - I had written about a scruffy guy looking for a cheap bed on his mobile, which they left alone, and then
It came through the editing process as a girl looking at celebrity gossip in some magazine. It might be true that English readers weren't going to know what a Trabant is, or that the example seemed crazy. But the net effect was to drive a stereotype that I actively tried to avoid. My writing is not free of stereotypes, But I try to avoid some of them for one reason or another.
The other was more serious, and the sense of the edited version was almost directly opposite to what I had written, and something I was very unhappy to see. I immediately asked for a correction, and was told that they would indeed provide one in issue 150, for which I am grateful.
But they could have shown me the text before publishing it. As I said when I submitted the article, I would have liked to review any changes - precisely for this reason. Instead, some number of people will see my name (and picture) next to something that I regard as a stupid thing for anyone to say, and of those people I suspect a good number won't actualy read the correction. If I didn't know that there is quite a lot of confusing or even sloppy journalism around, and people are used to it happening, I would be more upset. But there is not a lot I can do about it.
In theory I can take legal action, pointing out that associating some statement with me is detrimental to my reputation. Since they published text that made it seem like I think Internet Explorer is a good browser, it is probably an easy enough case to make. But it probably isn't that important, and a published correction given rapidly and in good grace is probably better than arguing about it. And arguing about things in court that don't have some clear material importance is only good for lawyers.
So, back to writing some more pieces. One is on the mobile web, again. But they ask for camera-ready copy, in other words presumably all errors are my fault, and they aren't planning to sub-edit it. The other one will probably get sub-edited - I hope that if they make changes I get to see them this time.
I'm trying to write some articles. It takes time, which is why I am still doing it late on Saturday night. They're fun, but hard work. And then I hand them in and they get edited. On rare occasions something I write gets published where other people read it. Most recently an article on the mobile web was published by .Net, an english magazine that the general public can actually read.
I got a copy from a friend who had seen it. Naturally, it had been edited a little by the magazine. It may have contained a spelling error, or some tortured sentece they wanted to simplify. Mostly they did a good job, actually improving the way things were said. But a couple of the changes rankled a bit with me. One of them was a question of style - I had written about a scruffy guy looking for a cheap bed on his mobile, which they left alone, and then
the girl with the heavy make-up and the cute little phone could actually be cursing the Web site that won't let her change her river cruise ticket for a Trabant hire-car in Budapest.
It came through the editing process as a girl looking at celebrity gossip in some magazine. It might be true that English readers weren't going to know what a Trabant is, or that the example seemed crazy. But the net effect was to drive a stereotype that I actively tried to avoid. My writing is not free of stereotypes, But I try to avoid some of them for one reason or another.
The other was more serious, and the sense of the edited version was almost directly opposite to what I had written, and something I was very unhappy to see. I immediately asked for a correction, and was told that they would indeed provide one in issue 150, for which I am grateful.
But they could have shown me the text before publishing it. As I said when I submitted the article, I would have liked to review any changes - precisely for this reason. Instead, some number of people will see my name (and picture) next to something that I regard as a stupid thing for anyone to say, and of those people I suspect a good number won't actualy read the correction. If I didn't know that there is quite a lot of confusing or even sloppy journalism around, and people are used to it happening, I would be more upset. But there is not a lot I can do about it.
In theory I can take legal action, pointing out that associating some statement with me is detrimental to my reputation. Since they published text that made it seem like I think Internet Explorer is a good browser, it is probably an easy enough case to make. But it probably isn't that important, and a published correction given rapidly and in good grace is probably better than arguing about it. And arguing about things in court that don't have some clear material importance is only good for lawyers.
So, back to writing some more pieces. One is on the mobile web, again. But they ask for camera-ready copy, in other words presumably all errors are my fault, and they aren't planning to sub-edit it. The other one will probably get sub-edited - I hope that if they make changes I get to see them this time.
Minis everywhere
Friday, 23. December 2005, 17:36:04
If you've ever had an unusual car, you might have noticed that you saw a lot more of them after you had one. The "yellow mini" effect - until you think about it you don't notice that there are quite a few of them around...
Opera mini is one of the cool things from Opera for mobiles. If you have a pretty fancy phone, you can probably get Opera for it - the full browser, with all the cool things it does, is available on phones from a lot of manufacturers, and if you're really lucky will even be installed by default.
But a lot of people don't spend quite so much on a phone, and get something a little bit more basic. Opera mini is meant for those phones. If you have a colour screen, and it says it can connect to the web or to "WAP", then the chances are it will run mini.
So what?
If you never want to find stuff on the Web when there isn't a browser handy, then nothing. It obviously isn't for you. If you only ever think you'll do it once in your life, then it might be interesting. If you've ever been stuck like me really wanting to do a lot of stuff, it might be exactly what you want.
How does it work?
It's a little piece of code on your phone. The download is smaller than many webpages, and you install that. Then, it runs and gives you a browser. It sends all its communications to a server that does the hard work of figuring out how to display the page, follow the tricky bits of normal Web stuff, and sends back something to your Opera mini.
This is the cool bit: What it sends back is compressed, and can be displayed by the tiny bit of software you installed. Being compressed is cool because it means there is less of it (lots less) and most people have to pay according to how much stuff they receive when doing data on a phone. I find it is about 1/10 the price to run. It's also cool because you can get lots of the Web - lots of things work well on mini, even though the site might be badly designed. You're not just stuck with things that are meant for mobiles, you can look at all the things that are actually out there and interesting.
How do I buy it?
You don't, unless you're a big company wanting to customise it. If you want a copy, and you live in Scandinavia or a couple of other countries there is an official release. But at the moment we have opened up the service to anyone who wants to try it out. I don't know if this will stay open, or how long, but it's a fun thing to try. (Having tried it, I discovered that I actually needed to use it recently for a few days as my only work tool. I was pleased that it worked). You get it by going, with the WAP browser on your phone, to mini.opera.com which will tell you if your phone supports it, and offer a download.
(If you are a company you can offer a version which you customise. Have your people talk to our people... and please say something nice about me to them
)
So it's free. You will pay for the bandwidth you use, like you pay for calls according to how long they are. Your telephone provider should be able to tell you what it costs.
What's the catch?
None! It is perfect - it really does do the dishes!! Oh, wait. No, it isn't perfect, it's a product. There are a couple of things you should know:
You need a GPRS connection. This is what the phone uses to send and receive data (other than SMS). Many accounts have it built in (less so in the USA than the rest of the world), and if you don't you should be able to get it added. You pay for the connection - the more you send or recieve, the more you pay. But not to Opera, it's just your phone bill.
It's mini. It brings more of the Web to phones that don't support any more powerful browser. There are some things that are still beyond what we can squeeze in. But I have been happy to find it works with all the stuff I actually used it for.
And they might close access to it - this is a temporary thing to get some stress testing, although we won't be cutting users off if they have installed and started to use it.
If you're still reading, maybe you should give it a try. Have a look at the Opera mini forum too, for tips and tricks. The developers hang out there as well as lots of users who are willing to share what they've learned.
Opera mini is one of the cool things from Opera for mobiles. If you have a pretty fancy phone, you can probably get Opera for it - the full browser, with all the cool things it does, is available on phones from a lot of manufacturers, and if you're really lucky will even be installed by default.
But a lot of people don't spend quite so much on a phone, and get something a little bit more basic. Opera mini is meant for those phones. If you have a colour screen, and it says it can connect to the web or to "WAP", then the chances are it will run mini.
So what?
If you never want to find stuff on the Web when there isn't a browser handy, then nothing. It obviously isn't for you. If you only ever think you'll do it once in your life, then it might be interesting. If you've ever been stuck like me really wanting to do a lot of stuff, it might be exactly what you want.
How does it work?
It's a little piece of code on your phone. The download is smaller than many webpages, and you install that. Then, it runs and gives you a browser. It sends all its communications to a server that does the hard work of figuring out how to display the page, follow the tricky bits of normal Web stuff, and sends back something to your Opera mini.
This is the cool bit: What it sends back is compressed, and can be displayed by the tiny bit of software you installed. Being compressed is cool because it means there is less of it (lots less) and most people have to pay according to how much stuff they receive when doing data on a phone. I find it is about 1/10 the price to run. It's also cool because you can get lots of the Web - lots of things work well on mini, even though the site might be badly designed. You're not just stuck with things that are meant for mobiles, you can look at all the things that are actually out there and interesting.
How do I buy it?
You don't, unless you're a big company wanting to customise it. If you want a copy, and you live in Scandinavia or a couple of other countries there is an official release. But at the moment we have opened up the service to anyone who wants to try it out. I don't know if this will stay open, or how long, but it's a fun thing to try. (Having tried it, I discovered that I actually needed to use it recently for a few days as my only work tool. I was pleased that it worked). You get it by going, with the WAP browser on your phone, to mini.opera.com which will tell you if your phone supports it, and offer a download.
(If you are a company you can offer a version which you customise. Have your people talk to our people... and please say something nice about me to them
)So it's free. You will pay for the bandwidth you use, like you pay for calls according to how long they are. Your telephone provider should be able to tell you what it costs.
What's the catch?
None! It is perfect - it really does do the dishes!! Oh, wait. No, it isn't perfect, it's a product. There are a couple of things you should know:
You need a GPRS connection. This is what the phone uses to send and receive data (other than SMS). Many accounts have it built in (less so in the USA than the rest of the world), and if you don't you should be able to get it added. You pay for the connection - the more you send or recieve, the more you pay. But not to Opera, it's just your phone bill.
It's mini. It brings more of the Web to phones that don't support any more powerful browser. There are some things that are still beyond what we can squeeze in. But I have been happy to find it works with all the stuff I actually used it for.
And they might close access to it - this is a temporary thing to get some stress testing, although we won't be cutting users off if they have installed and started to use it.
If you're still reading, maybe you should give it a try. Have a look at the Opera mini forum too, for tips and tricks. The developers hang out there as well as lots of users who are willing to share what they've learned.
Me and my little friend
Friday, 2. December 2005, 06:18:24
Mediumgeek wrote a little while ago about being able to hide in the middle of a party by being busy playing with her phone. It seemed like a terrible thing to do - I understand the idea because I am often feeling shy at parties, but I try to avoid doing stuff like that, and talk to people anyway. I like talking to people, but I feel funny walking up to strangers. Which is ironic for someone who ends up talking to strangers so often.
Tonight my laptop is borken, so I only have Opera mini... It works!
Mini blogging
Wednesday, 30. November 2005, 22:34:18
My laptop died. So l am left travelling with a phone as a tool. Lucky for me, then, that I have Opera mini. Sadly for me, even if I write a great blog entry I can't win the phone Opera is giving away - they said employees aren't eligible 
We'll see how it goes. Not cheap, I guess, given the price of data on GPRS, but if I can keep working it's something...
We'll see how it goes. Not cheap, I guess, given the price of data on GPRS, but if I can keep working it's something...Sliding into mobile phones
Monday, 21. November 2005, 23:35:56
I gave a talk in London last week, at the W3C's Mobile Web event there. Lots of the folks were talking about the future, how some day people with super-expensive phones would be able to get the Web to do stuff for them.
In the meantime, I had decided to do some work on my style. I'm not really a great one for design, as many people know. I like pretty simple layouts, plain colours, and I tend not to do much to adjust whatever default style I get (except to make text bigger, which I nearly always do).
(This uses some CSS 2 - the counter won't work on some basic browsers, but the content is still there):
I managed to get the same slides to appear in fullscreen mode (the OperaShow presentation mode), in a different style for normal on-screen reading, and to show them on my phone in a presentationoptimised for the phone. It wasn't rocket science, and I thought I would share how I did it. (Thanks Tommy for the photographic evidence that this works on a real phone running Opera Mini)
(The next bit involves digging into the HTML source code. If you think that's boring, skip to the slides themselves - if you have Opera you can switch from fullscreen (which won't work before December - only the mobile version is uploaded) to small screen rendering and see how it comes out, then write a comment saying "Oooh, Aaaah" and I will be grateful ).
So what did I do? The first thing was to write some slides, to use OperaShow. I originally did this with the online tool, because it made the stylesheet for me. I copied the entire stylesheet into a seperated file, and I edited it a bit. Then I started to look at my own slides. I had some simple XHTML - this is what OperaShow is based on - its structure is the one I got from teh generator, and it works well for me even after hacking around. I added a link to the external stylesheet I had created, and said it was for several media types:
<link rel="style" type="text/css" href="slides.css" [B]media="print, tv, projection, screen"[/B] />Then I added an internal stylesheet:
<style type="text/css" [B]media="handheld"[/B]><[CDATA[ /* Style rules go here */ ]]> </style>(Why the funny extra brackets? Because this is real XHTML, following real XML rules. Just in case someone wants to build a really basic browser that only understands real XML, and skips all the error-correcting that Opera does to make the web that's out there actually work).
What rules do I actually put in? The following isn't exactly the same as the source. I've improved a bit, left out a few repetitive things, but you should get the idea. The first ones are to reduce the margins, padding and so on to something more obvious for mobiles, and remove the big bullets from lists. Stuff like:
ul,ol,ul li { margin: 3px ; padding: 3px ; list-style: none }
There are a number of images used in the screen and projection version. Most of them are more than 50kb, they are fairly large, and they are not really cool for mobiles. Fortunately, they are all styled with a couple of classes. I added a link to a very small, mobile-optimised picture, and gave it a special class that is set not to render in the linked stylsheet. While I was there, I decided to tell a logo image to show itself small (it's not too heavy, but its normal size was much too big), and I decided the first slide was not worth seeing as a slide. Those two things have an id, so I styled them too.
#mwi {width:55px;height:58px}
.r {float:right; padding:0px; margin:0px}
.topleft, .right, #s1 {display:none}
Then I decided I wanted to make the slides stand out a bit. Put a box around them, add a little slide number to each box, like a real slideset (This uses some CSS 2 - the counter won't work on some basic browsers, but the content is still there):
div.slide { counter-increment: slide; }
.slide { border: 1px black solid; padding: 4px; margin: 0px 0px 5px}
.slide:before { content: "Slide " counter(slide); float:right; }
By this time, I was messing around in the depths of stylesheets I never really understood before. (I found things like background images included through the use of data: URIs and all sorts of wierd and wonderful stuff). One of the things I found in the print style was that it put lots of metadata into the print version, but I was too slack to add metadata yet. (I'll dig back in and do that, because it is pretty useful as well as cool to see it printing). But I did use a couple of rules I found to add some simple metadata:
head { display: block; border: 1px black; padding:5px; width:100%}
title { display: block; padding: 0px; margin: 0px;
text-align:center ; font-weight: bold;}
If you look at the real source, you'll see the slight differences. You can look at how the other stylesheets work, too. But you're better off asking a different expert about the details of those - all I did that was special is trim them down to something I can manage, and make the mobile-friendly version work. (Even then, I could have done a bit more... maybe next time I'll explain that instead).Opera on mobile with screen reader
Saturday, 24. September 2005, 15:00:11
I have been wondering for a while about the world of accessibility and mobile systems. There are plenty of them around now that are powerful enough to support some kind of voice-based system, both for input and output. The first phone I had with voice commands was the top of the line in 2000. Now it's an outdated piece of history. And I wish its browser was too, but that is a matter for debate.
But there are people using Opera on their phone with a screen reader - the Spanish (or should I say Catalan?) company Code Factory makes a product called Mobile Speak, which apparently works OK with Opera. (Well, filling in forms is, I am told, a bit painful, but it's a bit painful on mobiles in general).
This is great news. There ought to be more of it. I haven't yet had time to test this setup myself, but I am hoping to do so in the next couple of weeks...
But there are people using Opera on their phone with a screen reader - the Spanish (or should I say Catalan?) company Code Factory makes a product called Mobile Speak, which apparently works OK with Opera. (Well, filling in forms is, I am told, a bit painful, but it's a bit painful on mobiles in general).
This is great news. There ought to be more of it. I haven't yet had time to test this setup myself, but I am hoping to do so in the next couple of weeks...
Location based dis-services
Wednesday, 14. September 2005, 08:22:21
In the mobile world, there is a lot of talk about location-based services. The idea is that you can get information relevant to where you are, and that this will be a compelling feature that will make users take more advantage of the fact that they can use the web on their phone.
This could well be true. But there is also scope for the same mistakes as wre made in the first mobile web services I saw delivered by WAP. Which is that they assumed that they knew what I wanted. Far worse than the pricing models they had (which tended to make the content too expensive to bother), was the fact that it wasn't relevant to me. For all that there are a number of compelling location-dependent services I want ("where is the nearest open pub?" "That is recommended by a friend of mine?"), guessing that what I want depends on where I am is a bad guess.
The only reason I say this is because it keeps happening. A popular search engine that I use has an odd habit of serving a version where the language is based on where the IP number I am using happens to be registered. Working out how to search for information in an interface written in arabic, chinese, greek, hebrew, hungarian and japanese has been quite a challenge over the last couple of years. Luckily, danish, french, italian, norwegian, spanish are not too hard.
Likewise, someone who apparently doesn't travel much came up with a design for an airline I fly frequently. You get to select where you live, and based on that information they tell you where you can fly to from there. This airline knows where I reside, and it knows what languages I speak. But they don't bother looking at the information my browser sends them about which language I speak - if I want to fly out of Norway I get the site in Norwegian. And for some reason the english version of the site doesn't have the same information as the english version I get if I claim to live in England. Slowly the site is getting better. As in, every year it is slightly more usable. I expect to like it some time around 2025 at this rate. (There is another airline I fly frequently, Norwegian.no, which is actually relatively good).
Where I am now is not a good predictor of where I am going to be when I want to use the information. I call people I know, and ask them for information. I think about where I am going to be next week, and try to find out about it. If I am in the travel agent, the thing that makes my phone a useful tool is being able to look up things I will do during my trip. Paying for information about what happens near my travel agent is just annoying (although I do like my travel agent). Looking up what my friends can do in a place I know well, but happen not to be, is one of the things that makes the mobile web useful.
If they get it right. Let's hope...
This could well be true. But there is also scope for the same mistakes as wre made in the first mobile web services I saw delivered by WAP. Which is that they assumed that they knew what I wanted. Far worse than the pricing models they had (which tended to make the content too expensive to bother), was the fact that it wasn't relevant to me. For all that there are a number of compelling location-dependent services I want ("where is the nearest open pub?" "That is recommended by a friend of mine?"), guessing that what I want depends on where I am is a bad guess.
The only reason I say this is because it keeps happening. A popular search engine that I use has an odd habit of serving a version where the language is based on where the IP number I am using happens to be registered. Working out how to search for information in an interface written in arabic, chinese, greek, hebrew, hungarian and japanese has been quite a challenge over the last couple of years. Luckily, danish, french, italian, norwegian, spanish are not too hard.
Likewise, someone who apparently doesn't travel much came up with a design for an airline I fly frequently. You get to select where you live, and based on that information they tell you where you can fly to from there. This airline knows where I reside, and it knows what languages I speak. But they don't bother looking at the information my browser sends them about which language I speak - if I want to fly out of Norway I get the site in Norwegian. And for some reason the english version of the site doesn't have the same information as the english version I get if I claim to live in England. Slowly the site is getting better. As in, every year it is slightly more usable. I expect to like it some time around 2025 at this rate. (There is another airline I fly frequently, Norwegian.no, which is actually relatively good).
Where I am now is not a good predictor of where I am going to be when I want to use the information. I call people I know, and ask them for information. I think about where I am going to be next week, and try to find out about it. If I am in the travel agent, the thing that makes my phone a useful tool is being able to look up things I will do during my trip. Paying for information about what happens near my travel agent is just annoying (although I do like my travel agent). Looking up what my friends can do in a place I know well, but happen not to be, is one of the things that makes the mobile web useful.
If they get it right. Let's hope...
Charles McCathieNevile
er ikke i Oslo
Latest blog posts
A proud member of the My Opera community. | Help | Disclaimer