Journal Eugenia Loli's Journal: Kelly, MSN Mobile, Royal Flushes
Kelly of osViews has done it again. He once again accuses Thom that he is posting anonymously at his site, while Thom is really not. Kelly's half-knowledge of how IPs and ISPs work really show how this person who runs "OS"views.com has no clue about OSes whatsoever. Instead of the occasional XP usage and heavy OSX usage, the guy doesn't really run or endorses anything else. Anyways, Thom has made a good write up here.
I completely redesigned the Pocket MSN front page in i-Mode cHTML so it's looking better on non-IE PDAs or phones that Microsoft doesn't support. MSN's mobile page is querying the user agent and then sends either a WAP page or an IE HTML page. Thing is, none of their two versions look good, some of the code is heavy and unesessary (hey Microsoft, people are paying GPRS by the KB!!) and the web developer who wrote the HTML version for Pocket IE shows up his idiocy when he declares a gazillion of completely unessasery tables at 240 pixels width. While PocketPCs are 240 pixels width, the guy forgot to take into account the scrollbar! So, I redid the page and it now renders much better on devices that can do HTML. You are very welcome to use this cHTML (non-WAP) version of mobile MSN (don't worry, no info is being stored on my server, it's a plain HTML page). Just make sure you have already signed in on MS' MSN website (check the "save my email address and password" option while signing-in) and then, for any subsequent visit use my version.
To show you how much lighter and cheaper to use my version is, here is the rundown:
MSN Mobile's HTML-only page uses 8.07 KB and with all images it uses 14.7 KBs.
My version uses 4.50 KB for the HTML and 9.25 KBs overall (including images). And if I had taken the time to place all images on my server (resulting in smaller URL text) and properly optimize the gif icons, we would be seeing just 8 KBs of *overall* downloading (including images). And this means 7 cents of savings with Cingular's GPRS ratings ($10 per 1 MB). So if you are checking Hotmail or MSN sites once a day, that would save you half a dollar in a week's time. Might not be a big deal to wealthy people, but it's still a saving and if ALL supposedly-mobile pages out there were properly optimized, per-KB-GPRS-users would be saving many dollars per month over their cellphone bill.
Opera Mini is server-side and does a good job "cleaning up" unessasery code resulting in cheaper GPRS charges, but in the process makes most pages look like ass and as a web developer myself it's a tradeoff that I am not always willing to make.
UPDATE: Check one more comparison between the two sites on my QVGA Linux phone running Opera 7.50.
I managed two royal flushes this weekend in Reno, NV in Video Poker ("Jacks or Better" game). I made about $5 (I only play for pennies, just for fun, I never gamble). JBQ made over $300 clean profit I think. It seems that I would be making some hundrends too if I was playing $5 per hand, instead of the $0.05 that I actually played. But I am a chicken, I would never play for real money. I've seen many starving days in my life to starting now throwing money on bloody casinos.
I completely redesigned the Pocket MSN front page in i-Mode cHTML so it's looking better on non-IE PDAs or phones that Microsoft doesn't support. MSN's mobile page is querying the user agent and then sends either a WAP page or an IE HTML page. Thing is, none of their two versions look good, some of the code is heavy and unesessary (hey Microsoft, people are paying GPRS by the KB!!) and the web developer who wrote the HTML version for Pocket IE shows up his idiocy when he declares a gazillion of completely unessasery tables at 240 pixels width. While PocketPCs are 240 pixels width, the guy forgot to take into account the scrollbar! So, I redid the page and it now renders much better on devices that can do HTML. You are very welcome to use this cHTML (non-WAP) version of mobile MSN (don't worry, no info is being stored on my server, it's a plain HTML page). Just make sure you have already signed in on MS' MSN website (check the "save my email address and password" option while signing-in) and then, for any subsequent visit use my version.
To show you how much lighter and cheaper to use my version is, here is the rundown:
MSN Mobile's HTML-only page uses 8.07 KB and with all images it uses 14.7 KBs.
My version uses 4.50 KB for the HTML and 9.25 KBs overall (including images). And if I had taken the time to place all images on my server (resulting in smaller URL text) and properly optimize the gif icons, we would be seeing just 8 KBs of *overall* downloading (including images). And this means 7 cents of savings with Cingular's GPRS ratings ($10 per 1 MB). So if you are checking Hotmail or MSN sites once a day, that would save you half a dollar in a week's time. Might not be a big deal to wealthy people, but it's still a saving and if ALL supposedly-mobile pages out there were properly optimized, per-KB-GPRS-users would be saving many dollars per month over their cellphone bill.
Opera Mini is server-side and does a good job "cleaning up" unessasery code resulting in cheaper GPRS charges, but in the process makes most pages look like ass and as a web developer myself it's a tradeoff that I am not always willing to make.
UPDATE: Check one more comparison between the two sites on my QVGA Linux phone running Opera 7.50.
I managed two royal flushes this weekend in Reno, NV in Video Poker ("Jacks or Better" game). I made about $5 (I only play for pennies, just for fun, I never gamble). JBQ made over $300 clean profit I think. It seems that I would be making some hundrends too if I was playing $5 per hand, instead of the $0.05 that I actually played. But I am a chicken, I would never play for real money. I've seen many starving days in my life to starting now throwing money on bloody casinos.
