Campaign was gone, and now Communicate?

Campaign was long gone, words on streets were “ITP will take over their license and operate”, some said it’ll somehow come back, and then Communicate’s website goes off for redesign and then fades away. So are we left with only press releases? No interactive discussions, comments, and proper coverage, no more fun.

I haven’t read Communicate for more than three months, I have no idea if it’s still out there or not, and Campaign, well, you all know. As much as one would love to read blogs, I can’t find really amusing Media related blog for the middle east to replace those fun reads on Comm and CampaignME.

What do you read nowadays? Alternatives?

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Present using your mobile

If you’re going to present a work progress to your client and ain’t got a MacBook you’re possibly sticking near to your Laptop to press the space bar. Today I tried a new trick, I controlled my slides using my mobile, with a Bluetooth connection, I could sit near the people and do the drill. Totally cool, pressing “6″ for the next slide, “4″ for the previous.

All I had to do was turning my Laptop on and sit back with my people. I launched Powerpoint, went through my slides, then turned the Bluetooth RC into mouse controller mode and maximized Firefox and navigated through the site we’ve made. That was impressive for everyone.

Everybody was like, wow, we didn’t know this phone could do that, and it kindda’ stole the thunder from our work too!

It ain’t the phone, it’s a little software called Bluetooth RC and it costs as little as $12.95. It does magic.

Drawbacks! I received an SMS while presenting, well, Flightmode disables the Bluetooth radios as well so no chance but having it on(I just found a way to disable GSM network while phone is on). Another is the fact that I had to convert my Flash presentation into Powerpoint.

Note: Do not count on the trial version, it’s limited to only 6 clicks and it’ll stop after that.

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The Web for the “Now” Generation

The new tag line or the catch phrase for the new OperaMini beta 4 is “The web for the Now Generation”. At the first glance I read it as “for the New generation”. Got back and I was wondering why was the “N” in capital, then read it as it was–Now. It can’t be a typo, not cuz Opera wouldn’t make mistakes but “New Generation” has been repeatedly used and absued for the last decade. Time for something new, “Now Generation”?

First thing that came to my mind was the “Play Now” technology that comes with Sony Ericsson Mobiles. Which got me to the idea of having thins Instantly, PlayNow is a pay per listen service via a media player in SE phones. And now “Now Generation”. A generation that wants everything instantly and can’t wait.

If my reading of the phrase and their objective is right, then it’s all about having it instantly. Neat! The all “Now” style is hot and portrays the right “Now” attitude and demand from the web-users on Mobiles.

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As small as 90KB, Opera Mini Beta 4

It’s amazing how a 90KB software could do so much using as little as possible of your processing cycles and storage spaces on your mobile. All possible by the power of Server-Side HTML rendering and optimization used in Opera Mini, with Beta 4 it’s gone all wild and now it supports Intelligent Zooming too!

A piece of software you’d never regret downloading using your mobile data bandwidth, guess what, 90Fills using your Wap Connection and 180Fills using your 3G Connection on Etisalat’s SIM card. How much was the price for the full version of Desktop Opera back in the days? Remember? And now, the best of the best in the Mini class is out and for free.

It’s in Beta, you’d receive many java.io.IOException erros, well, it’s still beta, but to my amazement, background images and images that are smaller than 5KBs do not get optimized thus giving you a cooler experience. All in all, in general, a mini version of what’s gonna’ be available on the full version of the Opera9 Mobile. Can’t wait for that.

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Webkit is everywhere

First in S60 browsers, then come iPhone, and now even Windows. The past couple of days marked zillions of posts in the blogosphere and tech News portals on Windows version of Safari browser.

How big of a story is it?

• Check out Windows Safari on Technorati.
• Or check out how much have been written on it in Google Blog Search.
• On del.icio.us

Some have called it yet another browser to test on, some said it’s just a Safari port to get Windows users familiar with iPhone’s browser. While the reasonings and current feedback is all too general.

I’m using it right now and it’s really faster than FF and IE7, not faster than Opera though. Will keep me busy testing it and see if it really works like the Mac version of it.

This Safari release is really a shock and was totally surprising, never expected that was coming at all!

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Microsite: Honda Legend

Microsites featured here are usually the hot ones, the ones that make you like the cars for it, but Honda gets it really wrong with a lower than average microsite for Honda Legend ‘07.

2008 is going be the year Honda Legend hits back in the UAE market after being discontinued for more than five years. So it is going to be an important year for the Legend, such a car.

As for the website, nothing new at all in terms of interaction or anything creative at all. Seems like it’s been a while most of the car microsites come in black and shades of gray and implement the same navigation actions and presentation styles. Boring.

No Music? Unpleasant hover sounds. Intro video is really low-res. Lower than average work.

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Flickr was blocked, so our work

The worst feeling you could get while working with people abroad is when you get embarrassed because of irrational decisions at your residing country. We were sent a dozen of Flickr links to photo shoots taken by our partner Ad Agency in UK, but we could not access the previews due to the blockage of Flickr by our ISP. Unbelievable!

Just wondering, until when this nonsense is going to continue?

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ITWeekly, please!

It’s unbearable to have no choice nor alternative to doing what you don’t like, reading a highly valuable magazine using a really hard to use interface and so turning off. ITWeekly digital is so not for reading, changed me from an enthusiastic reader to a turned off reader who reads the magazine just because there’s no alternative.

Digital. Just think about it, what was it when it was a nice simple readable website? Or just because it wasn’t drag n’ drop it was Analog?

I don’t think people who enjoyed reading ITWeekly are still loyal readers, I believe the ones who keep on reading the magazine are the ones who really have to read it.

ITWeekly, please do something about it or just give the old version back, it was readable.

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Lorem Ipsum in Arabic

I was about to complain about not having an Arabic “Lorem Ipsum” kind of dummy text. Last week marked a heavy Arabic text need at work where we needed to stuff a number of paragraphs while designing interfaces. We managed to get some text from News portals or even write it ourselves. Just when I thought it was time to rant about not having Lorem Ipsum in Arabic, well, guess what, there is.

And here is the Arabic Lorem Ipsum, and to my surprise it is made for non-Arabic speakers.

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Opera 8.6 and Minimo show down

UIQ enabled mobiles come with built-in Opera Mobile v.6, a lot of changes and updates have been made since then but only for S60 series of Nokia and Windows Mobile. So here we’ll play a little bit and test the latest available Opera and will see if Minimo is really the Mobile “Firefox”.

Opera 8.6 Mobile

The start screen is a simple screen with a number of links and a Yahoo search box. Although Opera usually supports Google on this version the search partner is Yahoo!.

Opera supports tab browsing, it supported it even in version six, the version that comes built-in with Sony Ericsson P990i and M600i. Supports a great deal of JavaScript and AJaX. Understands the mobile profiles and CSS media attribute. Highly mobile friendly.

Just like the WM Internet Explorer, it supports three kind of views:

1. Single Column
2. Desktop View
3. ScreenFit

It works fine with Mobile Optimized web pages and displays them right.

Minimo, the Mobile Firefox?

Just because it is hosted at Mozilla and uses the Mozilla engine doesn’t mean that this browser is really good, however, it is impressive. Tabbed, Toolbar-enabled rather than menu based interface. It’s so slow though.

It is really bad with background images, it displays them with wrong colors, it is basically a disastrous process of browsing pages with many graphics and stylings.

Worst of all, it does not understand the “media” attribute of CSS link reference, thus, it treats bot Screen and Handheld as the same profile and renders the same way.

Both of the browsers were made for Windows Mobile, Opera is really advanced and matured and it is obvious, it is incredibly Fast, faster than the Opera built-in in Sony Ericsson’s UIQ based mobiles. Minimo comes out really slow, it takes 2,3 minutes to load given an average Windows Mobile. After loading, accessing the UI is really slow as opening a new tab would take relatively long.

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