Jaiku
I’ve been playing with the new Jaiku beta for the last few days, and I like what I’ve seen so far. The phone app is pretty killer for me, I like the way it’s done quite a bit. The fact that it picks up the mode my phone is in and will show me yellow when my phone is on silent… slick, very slick.
There are some things that are weird and I don’t really like. Why can’t I get an RSS feed of the “overview” page that forms my default home screen there? That’s the one I want to subscribe to, not my own Jaiku feed. I could aggregate the feeds of my friends on another system and use that, but why make me do that. You have the info to form the page, give me the feed. And the page for my Jaikus is great, but relatively mobile unfriendly. It’ll render on my Nokia browser, but looking at the page that comes across with my headers set to mobile clients makes me think that they’re not doing anything special on the fly for mobile. I don’t see anything explicit that I can do to ask for a mobile version. And I love the idea of a badge for my page (those of you reading this on the actual web instead of as a feed would see that I’ve replaced the Twitter badge with a Jaiku badge, so Jaiku folks feel free to rock on with your bad selves), but there’s only one version available as an image. Why is that an issue? Cause I want to put the badge on the mobile version of my blog as well, where an image works but javascript inclusion generally does not.
Overall a fantastic job. I think mobile friendly homepages and more image based inclusions are really needed to completely close up the loop on the mobile side. But I think it’s definitely the best effort I’ve seen to date.
March 4th, 2007 at 2:52 pm
Thanks for feedback! Unfortunately, you are right with all the complaints :)
We are not yet optimizing the pages for mobile, but it is a requirement from a number of parties, and we are working on it. In addition, there will be more RSS feeds available in the future. At least I hadn’t thought about the fact that image patches are the best for mobile browsers, so thanks for pointing that out.
The current Jaiku Mobile for S60 will be accompanied by a Java version, which we are testing at the moment. Now that we’ve done the porting from S60 2nd to 3rd edition + a number of backend improvements, it is much easier for us to implement new mobile features. We believe that the next major S60 release will have a couple of killer features; at least we have been waiting for them for months :-)
March 4th, 2007 at 4:42 pm
Great to hear it, the S60 app is fantastic right now. Happy to hear there’s even more coming!