.KEYWORD mobilemag
.FLYINGHEAD INTERNET TECHNOLOGY
.TITLE Inside the world’s first mobile magazine network
.FEATURE
.SPOTLIGHT figalt mobilemag-cover.gif
.SUMMARY On Tuesday, August 17, 1999, ZATZ:Pure Internet Publishing (that’s us!) and AvantGo, Inc. announced the availability of the world’s first mobile magazine network, available mutually through ZATZ.com and AvantGo.com. This is the first time that a complete network of magazines has been made available for mobile device users. In this article, we’ll take you through some of our experiences in setting up this capability, some of the design decisions we made, and some of the discoveries we made once the service went live. For you webmasters out there, this article will also help prepare you for implementing your own mobile delivery systems.
.AUTHOR David Gewirtz
Like you use a Web browser on your desktop computer, people are now using a variety of Web browsing technology on handheld devices. This is not our technology, but, like desktop browsers, these handheld browsers are available to anyone on the Internet for free. One such product is called ProxiWeb. It’s a Web browser for your Palm device. It literally lets you browse a Web page on your PalmPilot, as long as you’re connected to the Internet. Another is the Windows CE-based browser from Conduits (at http://www.conduits.com). Another product, called AvantGo, allows you to download a series of Web pages to your Palm organizer or Windows CE-based device for offline browsing.
On Tuesday, August 17, 1999, ZATZ:Pure Internet Publishing (that’s us!) and AvantGo, Inc. announced the availability of the world’s first mobile magazine network, available mutually through ZATZ.com and AvantGo.com. ZATZ, as most of you know, publishes PalmPower Magazine, Windows CE Power Magazine, and DominoPower Magazine. This is the first time a complete network of magazines has been made available for mobile device users. If you want to subscribe, visit http://www.zatz.com/mobilenetwork/mobile.html. But first, read on.
Using our patent-pending ZENPRESS technology, we’re able to automatically generate content from each of our online publications into an appropriate format for handhelds, and then send that information directly to AvantGo for free distribution to AvantGo’s more than 300,000 subscribers.
In this article, we’ll take you through some of our experiences in setting up this capability, some of the design decisions we made, and some of the discoveries we made once the service went live. We’re going to be publishing substantially the same article to all three of our publications because the topic should be of interest to each. For PalmPower and Windows CE Power Magazine readers, the ability to deliver mobile publications opens new uses for your machines (and if you want to reach other users, you might know how it’s done). For DominoPower readers, most of whom operate Lotus Notes and Domino-based Web sites, this will help prepare you for implementing your own mobile delivery systems.
.H1 ZATZ Mobile Network now available on AvantGo.com
"We are pleased to be offering the network of ZATZ publications on AvantGo.com because ZATZ is an authority when it comes to covering the handheld market, providing tips and information for device users and developers," said Felix Lin, AvantGo’s CEO. "With strong relationships between AvantGo.com and content partners like ZATZ, we are achieving our goal, which is to make it easier for individuals to access the information they want and need – any time, anywhere."
Over the next year, we expect to introduce many more online technical, creative, and general interest magazines. Because the ZENPRESS editorial production system automatically builds the mobile magazines at the same time it’s building the online publications, all future commercial ZATZ magazines will "mobilized" and available for handhelds.
Here’s a short quote I gave for our press release:
.QUOTE The Internet really took off when desktop browser technology like Netscape Navigator and Internet Explorer became widely available. AvantGo has introduced what we consider to be the first viable off-line and wireless browser for mobile devices. With millions of mobile device users (and with most of our readers being these users), it made a lot of sense to not only create mobile magazines, but to build a true network that takes advantage of handheld devices. And that’s how the world’s first mobile magazine network came to be.
We’ve written a bunch about AvantGo. We also awarded it a Product of the Year award last year. Basically, AvantGo offers a service/product combination. On the product side is a piece of software you download to your Palm device or your Windows CE-based computer. For all intents and purposes, this is an offline Web browser (meaning, it’ll let you read Web pages that have been downloaded to your handheld device).
On the service side, AvantGo offers a central subscription hub, where you can sign up to have the Web sites of your choice downloaded to your handheld. In a sort of retro "1996-we-want-to-be-like-TV-and-PointCast-is-so-cool" use of terminology, AvantGo calls the Web sites you can download "channels".
When you visit their hub, located at http://www.avantgo.com, you’ll notice you can sign up for "optimized channels," "user-contributed channels," and those channels you define yourself. Optimized channels are those channels that have been specifically put together to work with AvantGo and handheld devices. Generally, what AvantGo calls "optimized channels" on their site are also those Web sites that have some form of linking agreement with the company.
A "user-contributed channel" is one where another user decides that a given Web site would be nice if it were available for download. The upside for this is that any publication, including, say Upside, could be downloaded if some user gave it enough thought to configure it on the AvantGo site. The downside is that while AvantGo does its best to make something "handheld friendly", it really isn’t unless custom modified (as we’ve done with our publications). In fact, someone had graciously contributed a user configuration for PalmPower’s news center, but it also tried to download our logo and formatting. It worked, but it wasn’t quite pretty.
Finally, you can define your own channel that you alone access. You specify a URL, a "link depth" (how far down the spider will scan to download pages, and the next time you do a synchronization, your channel gets downloaded. We used this feature heavily while developing, testing, and beta-testing our Mobile Edition technology.
.H1 Why we chose AvantGo
At ZATZ, we thought long and hard about what formats to support. In addition to AvantGo, there’s the Palm VII’s special Web clipping format for Palm device users. For Windows CE-based users, there’s Microsoft’s own Mobile Channel format.
We’ve decided, for now, not to support the Palm VII wireless service directly. Given the current pricing structure for data transmission offered by Palm.net, we felt strongly that we didn’t want you to incur excessive download costs to retrieve our publications. Instead, you can download the latest updates to PalmPower at your next sync using the AvantGo client on your Palm VII. The PalmPower information will still be available to you, but you won’t have incurred a considerable extra expense.
We’ve also decided, for now, not to support Microsoft’s Mobile Channels. While the Mobile Channel technology seems excellent, it’s not cross platform. From a development perspective, Mobile Channels seemed much more work. When you’re building an AvantGo channel, you’re really just building an ultra-simple Web page. But when you’re building a Mobile Channel, you need to build a special Channel Definition File, which adds considerable complexity.
Since we publish a magazines about Palm devices as well as Windows CE devices, we wanted to develop one mobile edition that could be used across all devices. Since the AvantGo technology did that, we decided to support it. Were the AvantGo service and client not available for free, we might have felt compelled to choose differently.
.H1 Generating mobile content
When we first started our online publishing business, we started to think about what we’d need to get the journals produced on time with our small staff. After just a small amount of time thinking about this, it became readily apparent that traditional page production tools such as Front Page would just not be up to the task. If we chose to use such a page production tool, the nightmare scenario of trying to find one missing tag among hundreds of thousands of lines of HTML at midnight before a journal was due would almost undoubtedly become a reality sooner rather than later. In other words, we needed to automate.
Now, honestly, we didn’t want to build an automation tool. I was convinced that there ought to be something out there that would do the job for me. So I put a person on the project of locating something that would do what we needed – but we didn’t find anything that would do the job. What we didn’t find was a tool that suited an editorial focus. By degree, I’m a computer scientist and a programmer, but my staff is not. Our people have good writing skills, good editing skills, and good organizational skills – all fine characteristics of your typical editor. But they were just not programmers. We needed something that would let them be editors and not have to become programmers.
For example, I needed something that would let them decide when to break a page and when to not break a page (in other words, split an article into two or more parts, and let the editor decide where that split was to occur). I needed a tool that would help them decide what would be a feature article and what wouldn’t. These are all editorial-level decisions and shouldn’t be hampered by the need to do programming to produce an issue of the publication.
What we needed was a tool that editors could communicate with on an editorial decision-making level, as opposed to a tool that would communicate with editors as though we were (or needed to be) programmers. We found nothing that would do that. In the spring of 1997, it became apparent that we were going to need to build something. This "thing" became ZENPRESS, the tool we use to produce our publications.
We’d been publishing articles about AvantGo in PalmPower and Windows CE Power on and off for a while. But I really didn’t think all that many people would want to read a magazine on a little tiny screen. But one day, we were going over our Web server logs and we decided to check out which browsers were used most. It turned out that AvantGo was used 23% of the time to read PalmPower pages (it was much less for the other two publications). But since we didn’t have an optimized version of PalmPower, 23% of our readers were reading a poorly formatted, hacked together version of the magazine.
We decided to extend ZENPRESS (which, effective in early August, achieved "patent-pending" status) to generate handheld content. We figured we’d build something that the "die hards" could use to read on their handhelds and we’d get some experience and probably an article (this one, in fact!) out of it.
Here’s where it gets interesting. A Web page built for a desktop browser that might support 800 dots by 600 dots that can each be one of 16.7 million colors is obviously going to need to look substantially different on a handheld device that’s 160 dots by 160 dots and black and white. Yes, I know that many Windows CE-based devices support color, but we had to design for least common denominator if we wanted everyone to be able to read our publications.
Also, while you might have a 20 gigabyte hard drive on your desktop, you might only have a total of one megabyte of memory on your handheld. As a result, we needed to create Web pages for handheld systems that look and feel substantially different than those that would be viewed on a desktop computer.
In particular, we had to reduce images to black and white or eliminate them entirely. Eliminate the use of color. Perhaps use shorter text. And, if readers were going to be using something like AvantGo where they’d be mobile and not connected to a network, we’d need to make hypertext links respond in a different way.
Since readers wouldn’t be wired to the Web anymore, we would need to restructure our links so that when a reader clicks on something, it takes him or her to an internal piece of information instead of trying to look something up on the Web.
One key decision we made was to eliminate graphics throughout the entire publication. We decided that every byte used for a graphic (even if it was our own logo) could be better utilized downloading more content. For example, by not forcing a user to download a logo, those spare bytes could be used for an extra article or
