Nulaz Blog

It’s always good to cross things of your todo list (on the right).
Although the actual crossing of items doesn’t work yet (any wordpress guru’s around?) we did just launch our Hyves widget.
Hyves is the biggest social network in the Netherlands (where we are based), and now you can show all your hyves friends where you are!

If you are a current Nulaz user, you can add the widget by clicking “Import friends->Hyves->Add Widget”. We agree this path is a bit confusing, and in the new site that we plan to launch in a bit (yes, another new site!), widgets and other webservices will have a much bigger role.

We believe in openness, and this is a small first (baby) step to show your location in other places than just within our web and phone clients. Many others will follow! For now, have fun with the widget!

Somewhere in the last week Vodafone introduced their WTE(Web Translation Engine) in the Netherlands and Germany.

This has several drawbacks, most of which are outlined pretty well by Luca Passani.

A good example of what happens, and why it is wrong from a user perspective, can be found here.

For example, we can no longer automatically detect which device a Vodafone user has on our download page. Something that is quite important for our application since we currently have 31 different versions and need to redirect the user to the right version. When a user manually has to select his phone model, he doesn’t know how fast to shut down his browser.

However, the most important problem for us and any phone developer using http for communication with a server is not described anywhere: Not all HTTP traffic is used to download web pages. HTTP is a transport mechanism. It’s THE mechanism for the web, but it is not only used by web browsers; it can also be used for other applications that need to transfer data. It is also the only protocol guaranteed to be working for Midlets, so it is the one we use in Nulaz.

What happens is that our application requests some information from our server; let’s say to register a new user. Vodafone is only required to transfer these bits back and forth. But, they see an HTTP request, guess it must be for a browser and decide to add their headers and footers. Our application receives data that it is not supposed to and fails to register the new user.

Ok, so we think this is stupid, but wait! Vodafone actually has a valid reason that makes sense. They translate normal web pages so they can be better viewed on mobile devices; especially old mobile devices. It so happens that we have a Nokia 6230i lying around here with a screen resolution of 208×208 pixels. We tried to go to the site of one of Hollands biggest banks, abnamro.nl. This is not a mobile page so Vodafone will make it more readable for us. Look at the picture to see the result.

Not only do they not redirect properly, but their “usability improvement” is covering half the screen. So what little screen space I have is actually taken up by this crap. Thanks Vodafone for caring!

Vodafone claims there are some workarounds that should allow data to pass through their server unmodified. We tried all, and none of them actually worked.

We did find an ugly unsupported hack (sending all our data as PNG images). This did require us to ignore half of the request to our server since the gateway duplicates every request. We don’t know if and for how long this stays working. It is probably only a matter of time before this workaround is optimized away.

If a major ISP started doing this (inserting their content in others web pages), there would be riots. The mobile web unfortunately is still too small for any real action to occur, but some people are pretty pissed. We know we are, and so are our customers!

So: If you are a Vodafone customer, who uses Nulaz, but it stopped working, we are really sorry. We are trying (using workarounds and by trying to get on Vodafone’s White list) to get everything up and running again, but it is not a simple issue to solve. Thanks for your patience.

… and I guess Martijn is really happy with the Nokia Tablet he won as well.