Tom Hume

So, we've just completed our 9th fortnightly sprint at Future Platforms, it seems like as good a time as any to write an update on where we are.

We had an excellent session at the end of Sprint 8: the team (nearly) unanimously asked for standups to start earlier in the day. We had been running them at 09:45 - basically because I'd felt, despite not being a morning person myself, that this is a reasonable time to be in, thoughts collected and ready for work. So I was a bit surprised to hear everyone wanting to get cracking earlier - but no complaints :)

One other thing that came out of sprint 8 was that the review section of the day (where we run through work from the last 2 weeks) didn't seem too useful: we were asking each member of the team to show off some work, which led to a few folks demoing bug fixes (not that interesting for the rest of the team), and our in-house QA showing off things that look normal. So we resolved to change the format of this section of the day - see below.

Sprint 9 wasn't so good for us. We under-performed significantly compared to our work rate on previous sprints. There wasn't a clear reason why this might be, I suspect a combination of losing 2 members of the team who are consulting full-time for another client (and are therefore less available for project work), and the sprint being 2 days short thanks to a Bank Holiday falling in the middle. We'd factored in the raw loss of time the latter would cause, but not the loss of rhythm.

Joh's been down with the lurgi, so I took on the task of facilitating the sprint 9 retrospective/sprint 10 planning day. The review went much better - this time around, we had our Product Owner (currently Sergio) specifically request what he wanted to see demonstrated... and the whole affair felt much more coherent. QA presented an overview of all the projects we're working on (bug counts, progress, etc.) which seemed worthwhile too - we're going to keep both of these amendments for next time around.

What came up in the retrospective? As they go, this one was quite negative: the pair consulting for another client have felt disconnected from the rest of the company and didn't see much value in contributing to standups where their work has nothing to do with anyone else - particularly when, as it happens, they attend another (Skype-facilitated) standup with the clients team. So we've excused them from these events for the rest of their time consulting - and done the same for anyone else who's working solo and dedicated to a single project.

A few technical items for discussion came out in the retrospective, which we'll be gathering to discuss - mainly specific to MIDlet development or specific projects, so I won't go into them here.

The debilitating effect of interruptions was once more noted - we suggested that team members who repeatedly experience this attend standups and offer themselves as available after these standups - a bit like "surgery hours". We'll see how this goes.

We need to think through how we run projects with external contractors.

Lunch followed, then planning - slightly frenzied as we rushed to gather together the fortnights work. The planning session itself involved only the development team (as they're the only folks collaborating on anything in this sprint, all our design team are on solo projects) and was probably the quickest and least painful we've had to date. We completed planning in around 90 minutes, which is a record. As for why? We had fewer people in the room this time around, the projects we were planning out are reasonably well understood and we're clearly focusing on a couple of areas this time around.

So there we are... better reviews, better planning, but uncharacteristically poor recent performance and still questions over integrating design and development disciplines into a coherent unit.

A lovely Easter weekend:

• 4 days of lie-ins, catching up on sleep I'd bartered away over the first 3 months of 2008;
• 3 films - Invasion, Rendition, and Cloverfield - and I found something to enjoy in each of them;
• 2 and a half books read: finally finished Bruce Chatwins Songlines (which was absolutely fantastic), Presentation Zen, and started on The Player of Games (to my shame, the first Culture novel I've read);
• 1 tech sabbath: I switched off my mobile and laptop for Sunday, and kept them switched off. It felt horrific for the first 12 hours, lovely for the second 12 :)

All that plus a night out with the Good Doctor, Dangermouse Dave's birthday bash and a succession of meals and cake.

So now I'm rested and relaxed - a good thing, with a busy few weeks ahead: our fortnightly planning day on Wednesday followed by a Girl Geek Dinner, Mobile Internet in Berlin the following week, Over The Air in London the Friday after I return, the first "Chatham House" software meet the following week and a trip to Airenjuku London (mob-handed, I suspect) to say au revoir to Chris on the 12th April...

I love this article about conquering the galaxy through self-replicating probes (via Mr Jones, I think). I reminds me of trees. In less lucid moments I've often wondered what it must be like to have to grow somewhere in order to go there.

The talented Mr Rieger and I will be presenting on day 1 of Over The Air, an upcoming conference in London focused around mobile development. Expect a gentle stroll through the night sky, courtesy of the Royal Observatory Greenwich and brought to you by SVG, RSS, microformats, open APIs, the WURFL, iCAL, and the one web.

A small cadre of Future Platforms munchkins will be in attendance for the 2-day event - it's looking like a fun couple of days :)

After another conversation on the WMLProgramming mailing list concerning automatic transcoding and proxies, it occurred to me that the debate hasn't moved on a a great deal. The extremely vocal criticism of transcoder vendors by Luca and others, online and offline, hasn't translated into more restrained and considerate development and deployment of automatic reformatting tools from operators: Sprint, Vodafone Ireland, and others have all launched more of these things.

So in a moment of uncharacteristic optimism I wondered what positive steps might be taken to improve the situation, and two thoughts came to mind:

1. Rather than attacking transcoder vendors and operators, perhaps they and developers could jointly agree a few sensible, easily-agreed-upon guidelines which might lead to a better mobile experience for end-users.
2. Whitelists of mobile-aware are being actively used by operators. Whilst I don't personally think that they're a pleasant solution or one which scales up, it might be useful to provide an aggregated whitelist of sites which any operator could freely download and use to augment their own whitelists - i.e. reduce the burden for individual site owners of adding themselves to the whitelists of multiple operators worldwide. This feels in a way similar to the problem that WURFL solves: handset vendors not supplying details of their devices (clearly A Bad Thing).

So, I've set up a short post - which I'll edit over time - to document the former. The latter feels like something which might be best realised using a wiki, Google docs, or more formal tool.

Feel free to comment here or there, or email me direct. This isn't intended to be an exhaustive list, but rather a set of items on which mobile site developers and transcoding vendors/deployers can readily agree; there are undoubtedly better places than this blog to debate the contentious items.

Avoid reformatting pages which are marked as already fit for mobile consumption

Pages may be marked as mobile-ready in one or more of the following ways:

1. The HTTP response returns the a header "Cache-Control: no-transform"
2. The page is on a domain which starts "m.", "wap.", "mobile.", or ends with ".mobi"
3. The page is on a domain which contains the word "iphone" or starts "i."
4. The page is served with the MIME type "text/vnp.wap.wml", or "application/vnd.wap.xhtml+xml"
5. The contents of the page contains one of the following DTDs:

   <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//WAPFORUM//DTD XHTML Mobile 1.0//EN" "http://www.wapforum.org/DTD/xhtml-mobile10.dtd">

   <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//WAPFORUM//DTD XHTML Mobile 1.1//EN" "http://www.openmobilealliance.org/tech/DTD/xhtml-mobile11.dtd">

   <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//WAPFORUM//DTD XHTML Mobile 1.2//EN" "http://www.openmobilealliance.org/tech/DTD/xhtml-mobile12.dtd">

If a page indicates it has a mobile-ready alternative, use it

If a page contains the META tag below, redirect to the URL supplied in the HREF instead of reformatting the current page:

<link rel="alternate" type="text/html" media="handheld" href="http://example.mobi/" title="Mobile/PDA" />

Allow mobile sites to adapt their own content

The owners of mobile sites may have already taken steps to adapt their content for mobile consumption. It is likely that if they are doing this, they will make use of the User-Agent HTTP header to recognise the handset being used to access their service. In modifying this header, a transcoding proxy prevents the site from using a well-recognised mechanism to adapt its content for the viewing device.

Others

Other suggestions should live here

Removed

I've removed a few suggestions from the list above, but left them here for posterity (and in case there's a good reason to bring em back!):

• do not adapt pictures (suggested by Luca Passani, Russ Beattie pointed out that photo transcoding is a significant reason to use a transcoder, I'd be inclined to agree - any takers?)
• Do not reformat pages that are less than 30kb no matter what (limit can be a bit lower, but only as long as you can positively tell a feature phone from a smartphone) - again, Russ pointed out that RAZR devices, the most popular in the US, have a 5k page-size limit, so require transcoding.
• do not reformat pages with MIME type "application/xhtml+xml", Russ pointed out this is not a mobile-specific MIME type

I'm with Rui on the recent iPhone stats - sure, they show iPhone users doing a lot of web surfing; but whether this is because the iPhone causes its owners to get online more, or whether the kinds of folks who spend half their lives online already are buying iPhones is a different matter.

Anecdotally, it's the latter. I don't know a single normal person who's bought one (no Jack, not even you). Demographically this audience might be the same as the smartphone audience (high earning 18-34s) but I'd wager they're more inclined to come from a tech/media industry background.

At 6 o'clock this evening I dashed from the office up to Brighton station and hopped onto a train bound for London Bridge, to make it to This Happened. It was an absolutely enchanting evening of four talks, each running through the background to a product and its design process. It's late and I only have a few scrabbled notes, but I want to get them down whilst the memory is fresh:

1. Jussi Angesleva on the nasty realities of creating digital wave-patterns which seamlessly(ish) transferred themselves into real water, for an installation in Japan. Interesting to hear about the horrors of doing work which integrates with a space without taking it over (or just sticking up a screen and projecting cute stuff onto it). Cue lots of stories on the pain of cross-continental collaboration or "getting your hands dirty at a distance": edit/compile/test in real life. Icky, and unnervingly familiar: the real world is messy, physical proximity and the ability to have conversations wins out over documentation and electronic tools. Hmm, where have I heard that before?

2. Mr Schulze gave a slightly downbeat and self-effacing version of the Olinda story. It was refreshing to hear that even geniuses have problems balancing consultancy and their own product development, and a bit sad that the beeb can't produce the Olinda radios: I really hope that someone takes the open source designs and builds them (and that a suitable public back-end can be found for the social goodness which lurks backs them up). I wanted to know more about the modularity of the hardware too - Jack hinted at some smarts behind that side of things.

3. Kenichi Okada showed off animal superpowers, my absolute favourite: toys to give children the perspective of animals (giraffe for adult-style height of vision, ant for microscopic sight through "feelers", and bird for a homing instinct). Beautiful looking toys, charmingly simple, wonderfully presented. Timely for me too: I've been thinking a lot about animals recently, and had a blog post on the topic which MarsEdit seemed to drop somewhere :(

4. And finally, Hattie Coppard of Snug and Outdoor ran through their experimental playground kit: incredibly cute, kinda life-size lego. And her slide on narrative and play had my Loco-sensors tingling: arenas, pathways, obstacles, territories, thresholds, destinations and sanctuaries being the components of games. What a beautiful way to envisage outdoor play!
   

All great stuff, all thoroughly recommended. Please don't tell your friends, I think I only just scraped onto the entry list this time around and will be sad to miss the next one :)

If you're in Brighton and looking to try something a little different, you could do worse than head along to one of Mark's taster classes for Holistics. Mark's a good friend of mine and has combined elements of Aikido (from which I know him) with all sorts of other stuff into an unusual melange - and he's doing first the class for free, at various venues across Brighton.