As a former Opera employee, I naturally follow what they’re doing very closely. Today they released what they call State of the Mobile Web: First Quarter, 2008. It’s good to see them releasing this information, and I hope it will put some more focus on Opera Mini, which really is a very neat web browser.

As for the stats, there are a couple of highlights.

WAP is crap

Not only does it rhyme, it’s true as well. Back in the mobile web stone age, someone thought it would be a good idea to create a whole separate Internet for mobile phones - and so the Wireless Application Protocol was borne. I’m really bringing the hate here, which is probably uncalled for, because back then there really wasn’t any browsers that could render web pages they way they were meant to be. I think perhaps there was Opera for the Nokia Communicator, but that was a high-end device.

It wasn’t really until Opera Mini was released, that you had a good browser for mobile phones, and even with that you didn’t get proper web pages - it used small-screen rendering (and still does by default for smaller screens). If I’m not mistaken, full screen rendering didn’t come until late last year … I might be wrong though.

But it’s nevertheless good to say that people now have a good browser available for viewing normal web pages, without shelling out for an iPhone or high-end smartphone.

Social is okal

Uhm… Ok, that didn’t make any sense, I don’t know what “okal” means - let’s make it a new word meaning “popular”. As you can clearly see from the stats, social networking sites are popular on the phone, just as on the desktop, I would assume.

The phone itself is a social device - you call your friends and send messages to them - so perhaps it’s only natural that we use the browser for social networking, since that’s what we’re used to. Or perhaps it’s just a way to feed our addiction to social networks… I’m leaning towards the latter, although the former is a nicer thought.

Having a good browser is a good first step, but there’s still a barrier between the web and the phone, since the browser runs in it’s own little sandbox and has difficulties being completely integrated with the phones features. There’s ways around this on most phones, but when you’re in a J2ME sandbox it’s a little more difficult, unfortunately. I hope this will change soon.

The era of mobile content

One comment Jon writes in the report, is that “there should be no difference in the information that is available to you whether you use the fastest computer or a refurbished mobile phone”. While I agree that web pages should generally be available on phones, his statement is formulated in a way that makes it seem like one shouldn’t make content adapted for mobile phones. This might just be a misinterpretation, though.

I think absolutely there’s room for making information available in different ways, depending on what kind of device you’re using. Are users accessing the same website on different devices looking for the same thing? Imaging someone accessing the website of an insurance company - if you’re using a desktop browser you might be looking around for good deals on insurance, while if you’re using a phone you might be standing on the side of the road with a broken car looking for someone to call.

This example is kind of silly, but I think it serves its purpose and illustrates my point. The good thing is of course that you no longer have to create WML pages to reach your mobile audience, you can just do small and subtle changes to your layout to make it easier for them to reach the information they need. The articles on dev.opera.com might be a good start for learning more about this.

I look forward to seeing more reports from Opera, and hope they’ll include even more information and statistics.

While the OLPC XO-1 is an extremely neat machine, it’s no speed monster. The activity I use the most is the Browse activity, which is based on the Gecko engine, used by Firefox and others.

Apologies for opening up a can of worms here, but the OLPC version of Opera is really superior to the Browse activity. Not only is it a lot faster (and can load pages the Browse activity had problems with), it has tabs and is easier to configure - which might make it less suitable for children, but certainly a lot more usable for grownup children like myself.

It can even be configured to be usable in handheld mode, making the OLPC w/Opera the ultimate handheld device for lounging about in sun surfing your favourite web pages.

Unfortunately, the Opera version available for the OLPC is 9.12, and there’s been a lot of changes since then. However, several Opera employees recently got themselves OLPCs, so I expect that to change very soon.

Last year, Håkon Wium Lie (CTO at Opera Software and inventor of CSS) offered to order OLPCs for interested Opera employees. For those of you who don’t know, Opera is headquartered in Oslo, Norway (yes, Europe…), and I believe they didn’t (still don’t?) have the “give one, get one” program available outside of the United States.

In any case, it took a while for them to be shipped, but he finally got them, and handed them out today! Price per laptop, including shipping (100 OLPCs do actually weigh a bit), came to 2000 Norwegian kroner ($393 or €255.9).

We booted them up, played around with the mesh networking - things worked really well, but it is a little slow. I did expect that, though. First impressions are good, it’s a neat little device. I can’t wait to lounge in the parks of Oslo, reading feeds and surfing around on the Internet. The screen worked really well in the sun.

It came with a charged battery, which was really great … Most devices do not, and you have to wait for it to charge before you can use it. Not with the OLPC - just insert the battery and boot up.

More pictures.

Well, it’s about time … Yesterday, Opera released an alpha version of Opera Dragonfly, their new developer tools.

I haven’t tested it much yet, but it looks promising. It is written in Javascript (those crazy Operans and their lust for web technologies ;)), and supposedly BSD licensed, although there’s no reference to the license in the source files.

The source is not available as a packaged download, you can just go to https://dragonfly.opera.com/app/, view the source and download the necessary components. To change where Opera downloads the developer tools, just go to opera:config, and change the Developer Tools URL. It’s just a web page with some special permissions, iirc.

This is only an alpha, but it’ll be interesting to see what comes out of it as it evolves.

Yet another thing I saw at proggit: Jason Kester writes about how using too much magic in your software is bad, i.e. frameworks that abstract much of the dirty details and make software development easier.

Now, wether you use tons of framework or still write all your SQL yourself is your choice, but this got me thinking about something I read somewhere recently - shortage of new hires in the job market can cause innovation. I’m sure you didn’t see that one coming, so let me explain.

The core of this idea is simple - there is still lots of work to be done, even if (or perhaps especially if) it’s difficult to find new employees. Thus, innovation comes out of necessity: if the workload doesn’t diminish, and you can’t find new employees, you’ll have to innovate to make work more efficient, as to increase the work each employee can do. Apparently, this happened in Sweden around the time Ericsson was built up. Is this what is happening in software development now? I don’t know.

What I do know is that software development is here to stay, and there will probably be a lot more of it in the future. Without “magic” we’ll still be writing our own SQL statements for every single little query 10 years from now, and that’s just not efficient work.

No magic? I say more magic.

There was recently a link on proggit that caught my attention: I’m Going To Scale My Foot Up Your Ass, by Ted Dziuba. In his post, he complains about too much talk about scalability in popular news sources for software developers these days.

The core of his argumentation is the fact that most developers most likely develop applications that are not going to be used by millions. And he is right, of course. Perhaps there is too much focus on scalability and parallel processing - not that many developers need it to build the next website for their clients.

But it’s interesting. Instead of discussing which templating language is best, discussions about scalability trigger the engineer’s heart, and tickles the brain. Did we start in this industry to be mindless consulting drones?

Let’s continue discussing it, and perhaps - just perhaps - sometime in the future when we’re all working on Internet scale applications, we’ll know what to do.