PHP 4 Mobile

How to create an optimized version of your website for the iPhone in symfony 1.1

2008-06-13T12:46:03Z

Symfony blog have a very interesting article to help you create an iPhone version of your website. This is made easy with the new native support for different mime types introduced in Symfony 1.1.

symfony 1.1 introduces native support for different formats and mime-types. This means that the same model and controller can have different templates based on the requested format.
Thanks to the new format support in symfony 1.1, developing websites that supports Web Services, API or the iPhone has never been easier. Supporting a new format is as easy as creating a new set of templates

S60 PAMP manager

2008-02-03T16:46:02Z

As soon as the PAMP stack have been released, the first applications to work with it started showing and S6 PAMP manager is probably the first open source application released in this matter. S60 PAMP manager is a file manager, viewer, and editor designed for PHP development using the PAMP (Personal Apache MySQL PHP) stack for Nokia S60-based mobile phones. The application will simply let you manage your phone documents right from your PC using WLAN connection. Application released under GPL license. Some known issues include :

* When uploading a file, it has to be at least 1201 bytes or it won't work. So add some padding lines if needed.
* Editing/uploading from the phone's built-in browser won't work ($_POST problems? not sure yet).
* Not 100% hacker-proof yet. Need to add some checks to the filename to be uploaded/edited.
* No support for directories; this is intentional!

PAMP, Personal Apache MySQL and PHP Released for Symbians

2008-01-20T17:29:31Z

We were talking about PHP on Symbians in the latest editorial, today PAMP is already here ! The new acronym is for Personal Apache MySQL and PHP (PAMP) is an experimental project by Nokia to provide an open source personal web server for their S60-based mobile phones.

Two packages are available c and e, I don't know who will install this on c, personally I have a 2Gig memory card and all applications goes there. You can install PAMP using PCSuite or simply by copying files to your memory card.

The downloaded package itself include Python, PythonScript Shell, Pips, Open SSL and PAMP itself; and everything is about 7.5MB. After installing PAMP, you can find details on the connectivity settings on the website so you could connect to your mobile server using WLAN.

MobileGCAL Takes Google Calendar Wireless

2007-05-08T19:28:22Z

PHILADELPHIA April 2007 - Finally, we have complete control over our calendars. MobileGCAL.com has developed a free service to allow Google Calendar users to access their calendars from their mobile device. Prior to the development of mobileGCAL, Google Calendar was accessible in limited form via text messaging. With the implementation of mobileGCal.com Google Calendar integrates with almost all mobile devices without any software to download.

The advantages of using mobileGCAL.com and Google Calendar are that it allows users to communicate in real time with a web-based calendar that helps them maintain detailed information about appointments, on one or more calendars, from either their desktop or mobile device. Additionally, users that grant others access to their calendar can view, add, delete or modify appointments from their location and have them accessible for everyone that has permission to that calendar. The development of the program makes paper calendars obsolete.

DeepFish, "Enhanced Browsing for Your Mobile Device"

2007-03-29T16:03:34Z

DeepFish is a new Microsoft mobile technology which aims to provide a better mobile browsing experience. Enhanced is what it claims to be! Because I just call it a bug fix edition of the rendering engine of Internet Explorer for mobile with new zooming features. But how enhanced is rendering normal web pages correctly on mobile devices ?!

The demo shown in video is realized with msn.com website, the only new things I saw in this demo is that Microsoft is showing its own bugs in a demo video (That's how IE mobile currently render webpages). Otherwise opening a website of 300kb even if you render it correctly and open it fast, that is 300kb !! And that's too much for mobile browsing, I don't know how the current solution can handle such size in memory, I'm waiting my copy to test it, but my old Imate become very slow before opening any page. I finished by give it to mom, because I'm sure she will never surf the web with it. Anyway this is just a preview with very basic feature and tons of limitation :

As a technology preview, Deepfish is early in its development cycle (still a few releases from beta quality). As a result some features are not implemented or are only partially implemented. Currently, the technology preview does not support ActiveX controls, AJAX, cookies, Javascript, and HTTP POST.

Seriously DeepFish : Go fish !

YouTube to Launch Mobile Site, ToGo !

2007-03-27T20:49:37Z

YouTube is getting ready to launch a new mobile edition of their video service, this is going to be big in my opinion with the whole database that they have optimized for mobile phones. Currently the service located at http://m.youtube.com is showing nothing but a "This page is not available." message with a very small logo of Youtube 51x19 pixel, dark background and a css file. Following the css file I can guess that there will be listing of videos (obvious) with description, links, rating and each video will have its own page with more details, creation date, maybe also the file size, and duration.

GigaOm reported that :

The mobile site when it goes live will have around 800 "editorial picks" of videos to choose from. It's kind of an experiment to see how well things go and how good of a response the company gets, the spokesperson explained to us. Though, the end goal is to create a truly mobile YouTube experience with eventual access to the entire video catalog.

Wall4PHP Mobile Framework

2007-02-27T19:18:12Z

Wall4PHP is one of the framework that I recommend to mobile web application developer for the number of useful information that you may find inside it and related to different models of mobile phones. WALL4PHP is implementation of WALL, Wireless Abstraction Library, originally created by Luca Passani for the Java platform; for PHP. The main purpose of Wall is to generate a generalized markup language which help the web application to be compatible with most available model in the market.

Wall is used like a template engine, the sample below for example will show your user agent :

WURFL, Wireless Universal Resource File

2007-02-11T08:19:32Z

WURFL is an open source project which aims to collect information regarding wireless devices' configurations, capabilities and features. The main scope of this file is to collect as many information as we can about all the existing wireless devices that access WAP pages so that developers will be able to build better applications and better services for the users.

Many developers of mobile website know this resource but many don't know it at all, while I find it very important for mobile application development to know the capabilities of the device so you can better serve content for it. The file is XML formatted about 4.26Mo, you can download a compressed copy from WURFL website.

My Modified AdMob PHP Class

2007-02-10T21:16:58Z

I used in my code a modified version of Admob code that you can find the original on admob website. The idea that I never use print inside my applications, so i wrote it as a PHP class, the original code is a little bit modified. To use it simply replace $admobs variable with your own and enjoy!

/**
* Mobile Advertising PHP class
*
*/
class mobileads {

var $admobs = 'a1458adcf8cca66';

/**
	* Return Admob code - Original code from admob.com
	*
	* @param	mob_mode	change mode from "test" to "live" when you are done testing
	* @param	mob_alternate_link	use this to set a default link to appear if AdMob does not return an ad.
	*/
	function admob($mob_mode = 'test', $mob_alternate_link = '') {
	
		global $_SERVER;
		
	  //used for ad targeting
	  $mob_ua = urlencode(getenv("HTTP_USER_AGENT"));
	  $mob_ip = urlencode($_SERVER['REMOTE_ADDR']);
	  
	  if ($mob_mode=='test')
		  $mob_m = "&m";
	
	  $mob_url = 'http://ads.admob.com/ad_source.php?s='.$this->admobs.'&u='.$mob_ua.'&i='.$mob_ip.$mob_m;
	
	  $mob_contents = implode('',@file($mob_url));
	
	  $mob_link = explode("><",$mob_contents);
	
	  $mob_ad_text = $mob_link[0];
	  $mob_ad_link = $mob_link[1];
	
	  if (isset($mob_ad_link) && ($mob_ad_link !='')) {
		  //display AdMob Ad
		  $result = '<a href="'. $mob_ad_link .'">'. $mob_ad_text . '</a>';
	  }
	  else {
		  //no AdMob ad, display alternate
		  $result =  $mob_alternate_link;
	  }
	
	
		return $result;
	}

}

WikiMobs, Wikipedia for Mobile Phones

2006-12-18T22:32:43Z

WikiMobs is the free encyclopedia optimized for modern mobile phones. Totally web-based you don't have to download nothing, just access wikimobs.com from your mobile browser then enter the keyword you are looking for. WikiMobs is optimized to display limited pages to limit bandwidth usage, you'll see on top of pages the content displayed in sections and you can navigate to the section you want to read more about the topic you are looking for.

I have noticed many services providing this service, but WikiMobs is in my opinion the best web-based Wikipedia for mobile phones. The service is very new at its very early stages and currently at the version 0.5 beta. There will be certainly more features coming in the future, let me know if you have any suggestion to optimize the service and make Wikipedia access more easier from your mobile. Should I mention that it's written in PHP ? :-)

Opera Mini, Version 3 To Invade The Mobile Market

2006-11-28T22:41:51Z

Today released the version 3 of Opera Mini, the free java-based browser by Opera for Mobile phones. I was using previous versions of Opera Mini and today I'm sure that I'm switching totally to opera. The long awaited version of Opera Mini came with tons of new features and improvements, time to upgrade and profit fully from mobile browsing thanks to this great gadget.

Wikipedia Goes Mobile

2006-10-16T09:03:33Z

Slashdotted today : "Webaroo has added Wikipedia to their services on mobile devices. There have also been open source efforts to deliver it to the iPod (also check out the wiki) or a PDA. I guess if I were still a bartender, this would be a necessity in solving bar disputes before they escalate to fisticuffs."

Great initiatives I think, if we know that Wikipedia requires 6 GB of free space, 10 GB recommended. Bringing wikipedia to mobile devices will certainly be very helpful especially if its based on offline usage. The only think that still worry me, why should I have 6GB of wikipedia on my mobile device while it's not something for daily usage, and I'll never need to know all information available together ? Webaroo is available for Windows Pocket PC 2003 SE and Windows Mobile 5.0 for Pocket PC, in addition to a windows desktop edition.

Widsets, a New Mobile Experience Just Launched !

2006-10-03T12:19:45Z

I was trying today Widsets, a new great mobile experience to keep you in touch with all web communities in a very cool way. After registering, Widsets send an sms with download link for the software. I have find a version available for my Nokia N80 about 144Kb in size. The software is great, simple in use, and very user friendly. The interface is based on the widget concept, very practical and could be easily extended to allow lot of features, some of the great widgets you can find technorati widget, Flickr images, Pop email reader, Puzzle and memory game, ... etc. And you can not only access to a very large library of widgets, but you can also creat your own and personalize with their online widgets studio. Excellent service, totally free, just give it a try and enjoy it !

You can get traffic alerts, news, blogs, gossip, restaurant reviews, weather reports and loads of other stuff that you would normally get through a web service. And if you can't find web services you're interested in, we provide you with tools that you can use to create your own services and access them directly from your cell phone. And it's so easy, you'll be able to do it without breaking a sweat.

eBay goes mobile with Opera Mini

2006-06-12T06:23:41Z

Opera and eBay.de announced in a press release the availability of a special edition Opera Mini designed to bring eBay mobile edition to mobile phones in Germany. eBay Germany has 20 million customers, making it the largest eBay community outside of the USA. In total, eBay has more than 193 million registered users worldwide.

"With this pilot project our users will get a new eBay browsing experience on their mobile phones," says Björn Behrendt, Senior Manager Platform Solutions, eBay Germany. "We are excited to provide our users with full access to all of eBay's auctions on their mobile phones - whenever and wherever they are."

Google News for mobile devices Launched

2006-03-01T07:48:57Z

Google have just launched Google News for mobile phones, just after launched the personalized google home page for mobile. The new service allow you to read top headlines or news in categories. The page include 4 of the latest news headlines with a link to expand and read more, then the common categories US, World, Entertainment, Sports, Sci/Tech, Business and Health, with a mention in the bottom page showing the latest update time. Currently available for english version only.

Today, Google announced the availability of Google News for mobile devices, further demonstrating Google's focus on making the mobile phone a more convenient and reliable device for accessing useful and relevant information while on the go. Whether waiting in the doctor's office, riding the train to work or standing in line at the local market, mobile phone users will now be able to search and read the latest headlines quickly and easily on their web-enabled mobile devices.