Bruce Lawson’s personal site

Just when you thought you could soon forget about IE 6 and all its charming idiosyncracies, Microsoft have announced that they’re launching IE mobile in China, using IE 6 as the rendering engine.

IE 6 was released in 2001, and was has been called the 8th Worst Tech Product of All Time. And now, in 2008, with their desktop browser nearly at version 8, “Microsoft has brought the ‘full rendering engine of IE6 to the phone’”.

Lucky China.

I work for Opera, which makes a modern browser for phones and desktop, but this is a personal opinion on my personal blog and does not represent official Opera position - you know the blah blah.

Thanks to all who emailed; the Indonesian earthquake was on a different island, and we were unscathed. In fact, we didn’t know it had happened until we read the emails!

I rue my nervousness about the trip; Indonesians have been delightfully hospitable. I’m glad I had experience of living in Thailand before I embarked on this university tour. It prepared me for the delicate art of South-East Asian smalltalk, formal speeches of welcome, the formal presentation of souvenir gifts by a VIP, and meant that I packed proper shoes, trousers and shirts—which leave me a sweating mess after an hour, but I know that the effort is appreciated.

Meanwhile, I’m just about off to bed. After two different universities, a press interview and a two-hour commute through a storm in gridlocked Jakartan traffic (not to mention Zi Bin breaking the zip on his only pair of trousers and losing his Mac power cable—presumably unrelated misfortunes, but you never know with these Mac fanboys) this bottle of Bintang beer is one of the finest bottles of beer ever brewed by man.

Cheers!

Actually, that’s a lie. She’s staying at home, and I’m typing this as I look out of my 16th floor window at a panorama of the Jakarta skyline.

After being here a few hours (most of which I spent asleep after 15 hours in KLM cattle class, on which I can never doze), Jakarta seems much like Bangkok. The language on the billboards is different, and there are more ladies in hijab, but there is a similar skyline of high-rise hotels, overhead freeways and the air is filled with the roar of motorcycles and the impatient beeping of gridlocked cars. It’s 28 celcius, not too humid, and overcast as it’s the tail-end of rainy season. I already feel at home.

Breakfast was an eclectic mix of Japanese miso soup, fresh papaya, fresh guava juice, Korean kimchi with Indonesian noodles in chicken and coconut sauce.

As today is a de-jetlagging day, and my 42nd birthday, I’m going to have a long massage and a few hours in the pool. We move to another town near Jakarta late afternoon in time for an early start tomorrow when our hectic schedule for the Opera Indonesian university tour begins. I’m looking forward to hanging out with Zi Bin and Putri, Opera’s Indonesian marketing diva.

The Web is very slow here; gmail is practically unusable, and it’s taken me 45 minutes to download my (admittedly ludicrous number of) emails, so I’m adjusting my presentation to mention Opera’s low-bandwidth mode in the mail client and the ability to ignore specified threads.

Yesterday, the family turned out to watch Marina defend her title of British Champion at light contact kickboxing.

This year she was in a higher weight category with more people in it, and still managed to come third place. She was beaten for silver by Amber (who she beat last year) in the fight videoed below. Marina has the red headguard.

Personally, I thought Marina should have won this fight, as she knocked Amber over a couple of times, but I accept that I’m not entirely objective.

The gold went to the world champion, Lauren. Congratulations to all, especially my little champ!

Because I’m just TOO DAMN SEXY for just my own site, I’ve been leaving little deposits on other sites, too.

It may be of interest to you that WCAG 2 and mobileOK Basic Tests specs are proposed W3C recommendations.

On a less techy note, I interviewed Veerle Pieters and she basically told me there’s no hope for me as a designer. That’s another illusion shattered then.

And, because it’s not all me me me, Richard Rutter pointed out the minutes of a 23 October W3C meeting where Mozilla, Opera, Microsoft, Nokia and others discuss proper Web Fonts (not DRM-ridden proprietary stuff). We need this to happen on the Web.

Any Turkish speakers in the house? I’m very rusty, and a comment about my song “Closing My Eyes” reads “‘Closing My Eyes’ dinliyorum….çok çok güzel… ve beni çok eskilere götürdü.. seninle duygularımı paylaşmak istedim… iyi geceler…..”. A random machine translation says “I listen. It really really to beauty . . . and moles numerous veterans took . . .. . I wanted . . . to share the feelings of a year Good nights. . . . “.

The “moles numerous veterans took” part is slightly baffling.

It’s always a pleasure to visit Oslo, particularly in the snow. As usual, I managed to mix business with pleasure, having a dozen or so back-to-back meetings and delicious meals of horse steak and a pint of Aass (which is disappointingly pronounced “orse” and not “arse”).

One of the reasons to visit was to meet up with Lars Erik, who heads the team that makes the core Opera rendering engine, Presto. The cool thing about Presto that I didn’t know when I started at Opera long, long ago in June is that it’s the same in all our browsers. So if you’re looking at a site in desktop, Opera Mobile, Opera Mini or Opera on a device such as a Nintendo Wii, DSi or other things such as an Internet Photoframe, you get the same rendering. Of course, the UI is different and the Mobile editions don’t have Desktop’s mail client etc, but the core rendering engine is the same. The stuff that’s coming is truly exciting.

Another reason to go was to get some media training from Tor, our lovely PR guy. As long-term readers will know, I’m the kind of guy who calls a spade a “fucking spade”, and have already made a few errors simply by talking to journalists like I’d talk to developers. It’s a hard, hard job to be honest and true to yourself while not making your boss facepalm himself every time your name shows up in Google. Fortunately, Opera isn’t a control freakish company so I didn’t get too many volts with the rectal probe.

My main reason to go was possibly the hardest gig I’ve ever had to do: fly in, as the English n00b, to tell the Oslo office what developers think of the product they build. Since I joined the company, I’ve been soliciting or simply harvesting feedback on Twitter, blogs, mailing lists and the like, and presented it to the company. Some of the good stuff, all of the bad stuff. Thank you to each of you who’s taken the time to let me know what you think—I reported it all. And all of it will be looked at and wherever possible, built into the roadmap for Opera 10 and beyond. All of it. (Don’t stop it coming, either!)

And I didn’t get lynched, which is always a bonus.

Oslo pictures, including a shot of the mysterious Jan, proof that Obama uses Opera, the welcoming Opera receptionists and David-not-Dave’s subterranean lair are available for your delight. You can even enjoy automatically generated 3D maps of Oslo. Or Paypal me £20 and I’ll send you some genuine Oslo snow (contents may settle in transit).

I didn’t have a phone and needed one to demo Opera Mobile and Opera Mini, so decided to get the sexy Samsung Omnia.

I took a while to get hold of; they’d all been sent back to Samsung, one operator said, because of software problems. I perservered, and eventually got one. It costs £35 a month with 600 minutes of talk, 250 texts, free landline calls, and free data (fair-use policy applies). The shop promised me free satnav, but Vodafone then told me that wasn’t the case.

It’s a nice shape; it feels robust and sturdy. The screen is nice and big, responsive to the touch and sound quality is good. But despite its excellent specs, I haven’t been able to get 100% comfortable with using it. I don’t hate it; it’s a very useful and versatile beast, but I can’t get to love it. Elliott Kember (of Carsonified) showed me what the problems were: basically, the problems are down to Windows Mobile.

I’ve never owned a Smartphone before, so Elliott put his iPhone and my Omina next to each other and we compared them. Now, I wouldn’t have an iPhone; the price, the low specs and the fact that I can’t have the browser I want rule it out for me. But it’s undeniably a much better user interface than the Omina.

For example, when entering a new contact, the iPhone switches automatically to the numeric keypad for entering a number, and to the text keypad when you enter a name. This is obviously the correct behaviour, whereas the Omnia defaults to the text keypad, meaning there’s an entirely spurious step of selecting the numeric keypad. What a waste of time.

There’s also the annoyance that when you’re speaking, the keyboard locks and if you need access to the keypad during a conversation (to select a menu item on an automated “triage” phone system, for example) you have two keystrokes to make before you enter your selection. I know that this can be changed using some options, but proper testing with real people would have resulted in better defaults.

Opera is great on the Omnia; it’s responsive and renders perfectly. But the rest of the machine doesn’t feel 100% right to me—and I’m a Windows user.

The user experience of the iPhone is very good, and applications like AirMe, which upload straight from your camera to Flickr are just the way I think software should be (although that one isn’t made by Apple, ironically). But the fact that you can’t choose a wallpaper, a ring tone, a carrier or a browser spoil it.

So there still isn’t a phone perfect for me. Perhaps I should have done as Stuart Langridge suggested and wait for a phone that can run Opera Mini on Android.

Down in the tube station this morning, I heard a busker playing “Dancing Queen” on the Didgeridoo. I thought, “Now that’s aboriginal”.

I’ve been quiet lately as I’ve been gallivanting. Last week was exhausting but amazing, as I toured with Eric and Roberto from Opera giving talks at English universities on an Opera Education university tour.

Rather than just pimp the company and bore the audience rigid, I gave 45 minute talk about why and how you should use Web Standards for any-device development, and took the audience on a lightening tour around SVG, CSS 3 and (mostly) HTML 5. (The talk needs a labs build of Opera that includes support for the video element.) Grab the talk Web Standards for the Future on the Opera Developer Network blog.

Feedback shows that we got the balance right—in fact, some people actually said they’d like to hear more corporate information! People also caught on to my personal excitement about the subject matter. I’m really excited about using Standards like SVG and CSS media queries to build the mobile web. Our figures from our Opera Mini servers for September 2008 show

• Egypt now has more mobile web use than Germany
• Growth rates are soaring: Libya saw 3780% growth this year
• Overall, Africa experienced a usage surge of 180 percent over the past nine months

And what’s also fascinating is that across the world people want the same kinds of sites: free (as in open and uncensored) information sites like wikipedia and the BBC, search, social networking and news. There is little difference between Poland, Indonesia, America and Egypt.

Coupled with the interesting work coming out of the w3c Mobile Web for Social Development, I think there’s a really exciting potential to use standards to help bring about change for good in the world. Or you may say I’m a dreamer. But I’m not the only one. (I’m also one of the pacifists in the browser war—and declared that War is Over, too.)

Anyway, thanks to all who came to see us and went for a beer—as well as to old friends Simon Mackie, Ian Lloyd and Jon Hicks who came out for a bevvy. And even to Elliott who made me fall out of love with my Omina.

Mobile widgets

Yesterday, I visited the Smartphone Show at Earls Court to deliver a 5 minute “speed dating” presentation about Opera Widgets. (90 mins, 12 tables, people come to a table, listen for 5 minutes until a whistle blows and audience moves on to next table.)

The presentation Opera Widgets: uses, development and standards won first prize for best product pitch, as voted for a panel including representatives of Samsung, Symbian and Nokia. I’m a bit surprised, as my talk was for developers and so I’d dressed in no-name jeans and a hoodie (more Naomi Klein than Calvin Klein) and then found myself surrounded by sharp-dressers.

Here’s me getting the award. I didn’t blub.

Oslo, Indonesia

Next week, more quietness as I go to Oslo to do an internal presentation to Opera employeers “What developers think of Opera” (so please let me know what you think in the comments or by email). Then it’s off to Indonesia to talk more about Standards, the developing world, SEO and the like.

The Wedding

Me and the brood had a lovely day out at the nuptials of Rachel Andrew and Drew Mclellan. There were so many geeks there, it looked like an @media conference with added bridal loveliness. Here’s my photos of Rachel and Drew’s wedding.

And I didn’t blub.

Yesterday I was writing a presentation about web accessibility to deliver at Southamption University as part of an Opera Education university tour, and decided to include an example of a site that was a business for disabled people.

The example I used was of soundsdirty.com, a website full of erotic mp3s for the visually impaired. (Previous safe-for-work write-up.)

They had movies with subtitles and audio description. They had an excellent visual design statement:

This site uses cascading style sheets for visual layout. This site uses only relative font sizes, compatible with the user specified “text size” option in visual browsers. For a detailed overview of how to change font in your browsers please visit the ‘customize site’ link (access key U)
If your browser or browsing device does not support style sheets at all, the content of each page is still readable. The site has the ability to quickly change the font and background color to a high contrast black and white page layout. This feature is recommended for partially sighted, dyslexic and color blind users.

They had the most interesting access keys I’ve ever seen:

• Access key E - Erotic Stories
• Access key F - XXX Films
• Access key X - Sex Sounds
• Access key M - Member Stories
• Access key D - Doctor Erotica

And even a panic button:

The site contains a ‘Blank out link’ (access key Q). This feature jumps to a blank page and will stop all assistive technologies. This feature can be useful if you need to get off the site quickly!

And now the domain name goes to one of those stupid “this domain has been acquired for a customer” placeholders.

I really hope it hasn’t gone .. well, tits up, as it was a good and memorable example of web accessibility. And it gave me the opportunity to title a slide “sounds dirty, code’s clean”.