Opera Mini 4.1 beta

Opera Mini is already aiming for its next release - 4.1 - and its beta is already out. If you follow this blog you know that I'm an user and fan of Opera Mini, but I'm still using Opera Mini 3, since Opera Mini 4 doesn't have an option of having the "mobile view" sliced in pages, like Opera Mini 3 has, and v4 eats too much memory trying to load an huge page at once, failing to do so and stoping me of using it to browse in my Motorola E1 cellphone.

Now that Opera announced the beta version of Opera Mini 4.1, I just had to try it. It comes with great new features:

• autocomplete of URLs
• offline access
• search for text within a web page
• download and upload files

The default search engine switched from Yahoo! back to Google (which is great, for me at least). Also, it is way quicker (enhancements were made server-side), and consumes a lot less memory (so, 4.1 fixes my issue with 4, and is going to replace my Opera Mini 3 installation). Yet, Opera Mini 4.1, even in "mobile view" mode, is slower than Opera Mini 3.

Regarding to the "beta" state of this release, like what happened with Opera Mini 4, beta really means beta: just to test out all this things, but nothing more than that, I had to fire up the browser four times because it kept crashing. So, it's still not to use, but I'm surely upgrade as soon as the final version is released.

Choosing a cellphone 2008

It's time again: two years ago I choose which computer I would carry all the time would be, and now it's time to choose a cellphone again.

This time, and after a really quick grep, I came out with this possibilities:


Motorola E1000 - UMTS 2100, Bluetooth v1.1
Motorola E1070 - UMTS 2100, Bluetooth v1.2 with A2DP
Motorola V3XX - HSDPA 850 / 1900
Motorola K3 - HSDPA 2100


If you have any experience or thoughts about any of this cellphones, please leave me a comment. I'm particulary interested in knowing

• how does it behaves while being used as a modem, via bluetooth
• how does it's embeded browsers behaves,
• how does Opera Mini behaves there

Thanks!

Thoughs on Opera Mini 4

For frequent readers of this blog there's no surprise on the fact that I am a fan of mobile computing: I use a cheap mobile phone (Motorola E1 Rokr) as a modem, SSH client and as a web browser. To do so I use a simple setup: the mobile' stock functionality to work as a modem, MidpSSH as a SSH and telnet client (BTW, if you know of any alternative to this one that lets you choose the port instead of assuming the default ports for this services, I appreciate), and Opera Mini as a mobile web browser.

I use Opera Mini as a web browser for the cellphone since more or less one month after I got it, and I was kindly surprised by it: it obviously surpasses the poor browser that comes stocked with the cellphone. At last years' XTech I talked with an Opera guy working on Mini and talked about some flaws I thought it had, but I was happy with the browser, and, as I told him, I believed Opera Mini would be the mobile browser of choice (Opera Mobile isn't for me, like any other non-free_as_in_beer browser) at least until the Mozilla Foundation didn't start a serious effort in the field. At the time I was using Opera Mini 2, which was quickly replaced by Opera Mini 3: a not-so-major improovement in terms of usability, and with a change that I didn't like: the default search engine (that can't be changed) is Yahoo! Search (which - sorry - I can't get used too, as I also talked about earlier on this blog, regarding to search I'm addicted to Google). But, overall, it was a nice update, and I started using the mobile browser more and more... And relying on it for a great number of things.

Opera Mini 4 promises a cool few number of things. I've tried the first beta but it was too unstable, I've tried the second beta but, while better, was still worse (in terms of stability/usability) than Opera Mini 3. One cool thing Opera guys decided to do was to make Opera Mini 4 another application and not just another version (which lets Opera Mini 3 cohexist with Opera Mini 4 in the same mobile phone), and each time another beta version comes out you'll be prompted to upgrade (I hope they'll do this until the final version is out). I wasn't using Opera Mini 4 much, but...

This past week I started to really need to use a ill designed web application that didn't work on Opera Mini 3. Opera Mini 4 beta 2 was having some issues, but since it prompted me to upgrade to beta 3 I did it, and not only it solved my problem (now I can actually use that application, even if some stuff doesn't work) but it solved most of the problems I had with previous versions.

Opera Mini 4 comes with a really nice set of features, like "web view" vs. "mobile view", landscape view (gives you an horizontal screen instead of a vertical one) and fullscreen, giving you more active area and content displayed. I decided that that's what I really wanted/needed, so I decided to ditch Opera Mini 3 and starting to use Opera Mini 4. Well, now I have a bigger problem: Opera Mini 4 is completely useless for some of the websites I visit the most with Opera Mini 3, I only know it when it is too late, and I'll need to restart the browser if I stumble across one of those websites. What makes it worse is that it happens because Opera Mini 4 misses one Opera Mini 3 critical feature: the division of pages in "mobile view".

Let me explain: when in mobile view we're viewing stuff as Opera Mini 3 did. Opera Mini 3 seems the amount of data to display, and if it is more than a certain value, it breaks that content into several pages. That makes you able to load a webpage with hundreds of Kb's of data, because it will load just the first set, and then when you go to the next page or the previous page it loads that set. That actually means that not only navigation (while in a set) is quickier, but, more importantly, it means that you can load a 1Mb page because it will split it in chunks with certainly less than 100K each and display each one at a time. If you try to load that page in Opera Mini 4 what will happen is that you'll browser will try to load all that 1Mb of data... and make your cellphone run out of memory.

So, dear Opera Mini coders, can you please give me that wonderful feature back? Please? If you don't do it I'll have to keep being a user of both Opera Mini 3 and 4... And pray that you don't decide to take Opera Mini 3 out of air for when I switch to another cellphone.

Mobile Firefox

Two years ago I was talking with some Opera folks about browsers and the rising of the mobile browsing market. I told them that, while I was an Opera Mini user, I was really sad with that fact, because I would rather use an Open Source browser. We further discussed about the state of MiniMo: a project that few of you will remember but that stands for "Mini Mozilla", had two developers, and then only one. Of course it never went far. What surprises me is that today I'm reading about Minimo dyeing... and Mozilla creating a new project: Mobile Firefox. YAY!

Now, the not so good news: they're aiming to a minimum requirement of 64Mb of RAM. Now, that's really a lot more than Opera Mini requirements... And more than what my actual mobile phone has :-(

Read the announcement at http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/schrep/archives/2007/10/mozilla_and_mobile.html.

Opera Mini vs. iPhone

Whatch the video or download it as Flash or Ogg theora here.

This publicity comes with the release of the beta version of Opera Mini 4. From the example videos of it, it seems that they took lots of ideas from Nokia's Mini Map, from which they heard about for the first time at XTech'06. Advantadge goes to Opera, even if they're late, since Opera Mini runs on (almost) every cellphone, while Mini Map only runs on Nokia's S60 phones...

Is Web 2.0 with usability or not?

BBC quotes Jakob Nielsen, while he says, basicly, that Web 2.0 is with a creepy lack of usability. People are more interested in doing fancy things than actualy making them work well. And... Not only I agree with him, but also am having this discussion with several people in the Web 2.0 world for more than two years. Of course that telling this also pisses a lot of people, and we got a R/WW post saying basicly, that none of that is true, and that Web 2.0 has a lot of usability. I'm sorry, I'm not going to use this space to bash anyone, to talk about who's right and wrong or doing publicity to 37signals. I'm just going to pick some examples to show what I mean with lack of usability.

1. Have you ever tried to post a comment in TechCrunch using Opera Mini? Well, you can't...
2. ...which reminds me the whole issue of "mobile versions" and "mobile portals". When you need to do a web version of your web application to run in some browsers (mobile or not), you sure usability problems. Remember, a mobile device is also a computer with an web browser.
3. YouTube was a given example of usability by R/WW. Excuse me? IMHO the only way you can use YouTube in any Operating System besides Windows, Mac OS, Linux and Solaris (like any BSD, for instance) is by downloading the video (using something like youtube-dl or a GreaseMonkey script), since it heavily depends on Adobe Flash, which licence does not permit its use in any Operating System other than those refered above;
4. XHR. You know? XMLHttpRequest, that thingie most use in an AJAX implementation. While I think there are great things that are achieved with this, XHR is still NOT a standard (see status and help changing it), and so several web browsers does not support it. Using it is taking usability off your web application.
   
5. Another example of bad usability is taken from an example of "good usability" given on R/WW: NetVibes. You say they have great usability, but their website says:

   We currently support Mozilla Firefox 1+, Microsoft Internet Explorer 6 and 7, Opera 9.02, Safari 2+.
   

   I'm sorry, but if you only support some web browers, then you do not have usability.
   

Now, I could be hours ranting about this, but I think that it's kind of useless. People are still exited with Web 2.0, so excited that they don't really care. And while they don't care, you can tell them whatever that they won't listen to you.

If you're a Web 2.0 developer and really care about usability, please, PLEASE, prove me wrong. I would love to see, for instance, more people working with W3C.

Caveats in the Social Web

After my last blog post where I told you that Social Web has some issues, like freedom, let me talk you a little more on the issue.

I use lots "social webapps", I even revamped my planet today (I use Planet Noori as my RSS reader, but several people also read it, and a Planet has several advantages like the fact that it is easily reachable and readable by serveral devices like my cellphone with Opera Mini). But using third-party social apps have caveats.

My planet used to be on Ning, but it didn't give me the flexibility I needed, so I changed back to my own instalation and setup of PlanetPlanet.

Yesterday Google News was messed up, as well as Blogger was (that's why I didn't write anything here yesterday).

Merankorii's webshop (Merankorii is my musical project) was made using MyShopify: an AWSOME webapp to create an e-shop really easy. The problem is that it has a considerable downtime of several minutes per day. "Jaded Pixel does not warrant that the service will be uninterrupted, timely, secure, or error-free."

So, what am I talking about? Well, simply that it is easy to agree on start using some services and rely on them without having any "insurance" on the availability of the service. It's basicly the same problem that you have on relying on 3rd-party API's. Have you ever read Google's Privacy Policy? Doesn't bother you that all the operations you do on blogger, including authentication, is being have in plain text (http instead of https)?

This isn't to be a big post talking about the Social Web, but simply aims to make YOU think.