Rob Allen's DevNotes

There's a recent post by Peter-Paul Koch called The iPhone obsession about how Mobile Safari is being treated by web developers as the only web browser to develop for. PPK likens this to how we all used to only develop for IE6. Unfortunately, the article has lots of hyperbole and iPhone hate which significantly detracts from the actual message.

The fundamental point is that Mobile Safari is not the only web browser available on phones and if you are serious about providing mobile web to your users, then developing for the other 85% should be part of your modus operandi.

However (and there's always a however!) it's not easy. It's trivial for me to have multiple web browsers and multiple operating systems on one computer for testing. It is not trivial for me to have 10 phones with different browsers and screen sizes. We don't do enough mobile work to justify the costs.

What actually annoyed me was Rentzch's response. Rentzch started by saying that Koch's argument was "stupid/lazy/undisciplined" and then goes on to say:

I see a quiet revolution of mobile developers waiting for other phones to catch up to the iPhone.

and

I think mobile developers intuitively grasp that accommodating the insufficient software+hardware of non-iPhones out there will only prolong the status quo, extending needless suffering for developers and users alike.

That's exactly what we all said when we wanted Netscape 4 to die because IE was so much better. Rentzch has made Koch's point for for him whilst trying to disagree.

For what it's worth, I think that any mobile device manufacturer who wants web developers to develop for their device's browser, should provide hardware that doesn't need a plan. It doesn't even need to be a phone. Mobile Safari is the easiest mobile browser to test against as it's available in the iPod Touch.

This is very off-topic, so feel free to skip!

Received a round-robin today via email. As I don't send on such things, I thought I'd mention it here as I'm getting fed up with the price of petrol, especially given the profit that the big oil companies have recently announced:

Received from a good friend so leave the rest to you!

See what you think and pass it on if you agree with it.

We are hitting £123.9 a litre in some areas now, soon we will be faced with paying £2.00 a ltr. Philip Hollsworth offered this good idea:

This makes MUCH MORE SENSE than the 'don't buy petrol on a certain day' campaign that was going around last April or May! The oil companies just laughed at that because they knew we wouldn't continue to hurt ourselves by refusing to buy petrol. It was more of an inconvenience to us than it was a problem for them. BUT, whoever thought of this idea, has come up with a plan that can really work.

Please read it and join in!

Now that the oil companies and the OPEC nations have conditioned us to think that the cost of a litre is CHEAP, we need to take aggressive action to teach them that BUYERS control the market place not sellers. With the price of petrol going up more each day, we consumers need to take action. The only way we are going to see the price of petrol come down is if we hit someone in the pocket by not purchasing their Petrol! And we can do that WITHOUT hurting ourselves. Here's the idea:

For the rest of this year DON'T purchase ANY petrol from the two biggest oil companies (which now are one), ESSO and BP.

If they are not selling any petrol, they will be inclined to reduce their prices. If they reduce their prices, the other companies will have to follow suit. But to have an impact we need to reach literally millions of Esso and BP petrol buyers. It's really simple to do!!

...(snip boring bit)...

If this makes sense to you, please pass this message on.

PLEASE HOLD OUT UNTIL THEY LOWER THEIR PRICES TO THE 69p a LITRE RANGE

It's easy to make this happen. Just forward this email, and buy your petrol at Shell, Asda, Tesco, Sainsburys, Morrisons, Jet etc. i.e. boycott BP and Esso

I'll write about something a bit more on topic soon!

If it takes off, I expect everyone will be talking about hoosgot over the next weeks and months. The idea is to allow you to ask the world if anyone has got what you want maybe help you find what you are looking for, given the international nature of the web.

All you have to do is include "hoosgot" (pronounced "who's got") or "lazyweb" in your blog post or tweet and it'll pick it up. (Is it just me, or is that pronunciation a stretch?). You can follow it on Twitter, but I suspect that it'll be tweeting a bit too regularly for me though unless hoosgot works out what's a question, what's an answer and what is just commentary (like this post!).

Assuming that they sort out the filtering, It could be useful for anything that doesn't require UPS in nature. i.e. asking for device drivers for esoteric hardware or to find out answers to stuff such as "hoosgot a good receipe for dairy free banana milkshake?" I can't see questions such as "hoosgot a spare washing machine that I can borrow?" working outside your own circle of friends and freecycle and craigslist has that covered anyway.

Definitely worth keeping an eye on to see where it goes.

Another one to chalk up to a doh! moment...

I'm checking out my wife's website to my new MacBook and get this error message:

svn: In directory 'website/gallery/piccies'
svn: Can't move source to dest
svn: Can't move 'website/gallery/piccies/.svn/tmp/prop-base/IMG_0013-thumb.jpg.svn-base' to 'website/gallery/piccies/.svn/prop-base/IMG_0013-thumb.jpg.svn-base': No such file or directory

I'm pretty sure that there's no problem with the subversion repository as I've been using it for months with no problem so I asked a friend to check it out on his Windows box... which failed with the same error. We thought at first that linux was allowing something illegal to occur which Windows and Macs weren't. Then we thought about the other differences between Linux and Windows/Mac OS X.

After a while. It turns out that there are two files in the directory: IMG_0013.jpg and IMG_0013.JPG. One svn mv command later and the problem is solved.

It would have been nice to have had a better error message though!

jwz on 29th Oct 2007:

When (WHEN) your backup drive goes bad, which you will notice because your last backup failed, replace it immediately. This is your number one priority. Don't wait until the weekend when you have time, do it now, before you so much as touch your computer again. Do it before goddamned breakfast. The universe tends toward maximum irony. Don't push it.

Some very good advice. I just back up my "cannot afford to lose" data at the moment. If I lose my hard drive, I have a good day or so of reinstalling and re-setting-up to look forward to. It's probably worth the £100 or so for a new hard drive.