h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Wonders can be done with a piece of paper, a marker pen and sticky-backed plastic!

I reckon TDV could get some small holographic stickers printed to stick on the back of the phones. Some of us might even be sad enough to buy these

Good idea.

Anyone know of a half decent WAP browser for the Mac? I found a good WebTV one for dev purposes, but WAP eludes me ...

I don't quite understand why you need a WAP browser on a laptop. Is this just cut-down HTML to make it load faster, or something different? (Maybe it's pay-per-byte, not pay-per-second)

WML isn't quite the same as HTML, so I'm looking for something to reasonably accurately test WML stuff in while I'm developing web apps on the Mac. As I said, I can now do this for WebTV due to the nice people at http://www.webtv.com but no-one seems to have done a Mac WAP browser yet (I've seen Win9x / NT), unless, of course, anyone knows different.

I got sort of interested in this myself today...a few resources (dunno if you'll have any luck with 'em, but what the hell):

- The Wapalizer (http://www.gelon.net/#wapalizer) is a browser-based WAP emulator; you fire up your browser on your regular PC, tell it what WAP page you want to look at, and it displays it in a graphic of a phone. So I reckon that should work on the Mac. They don't appear to support all WML, though. If anyone just wants to see what H2G2 looks like on a WAP, this is a quick way to do so without installing software.

- WapMan (http://virtuacom.com/wap/) has versions for Palm and Windows. No help for the Mac, alas.

- Nokia has a whole developer toolkit but they don't even say what OS their downloads are for so I'm guessing Windows. Twits.

- Ericsson at least says their download is for Win32, though they say you could get it working on unix or linux...they don't seem to say how.

- Dynamic (http://www.wap.net/devkit/) have a complete set of WAP tools, and Mac is one of their supported platforms. However they are a commercial outfit and bloody expensive.

Not too much help, I'm afraid...sigh...

I will ask Adam to come and tell you. He will probably know. Hang on a tic.

Don't hold your breath - we found a minor bugette that has the interesting effect of instantly crashing any Nokia 7110 that tries to access the service. We'd developed using the various emulators available (BTW, Mac users, the Nokia one runs fine under Virtual PC and the Ericsson, which is Java-based and should therefore run on the Mac, doesn't ). How did we find out? Simple: Give a presentation to 500 people at First Tuesday and watch 2 dozen WAP phones crash simultaneously. Well, that's the bleeding edge for you. Should be fixed by tomorrow (Friday)

Richard

A friend at a certain large London company suggested http://www.gelon.net/ for the Mac, which seems to work reasonably well in Navigator 4 but does naff all in IE 4.5 for some reason. Guess I'll just have to wait for a desktop WAP browser ... I very much doubt my company will fork out for VPC

As they said, the best you can do on the Mac at the moment is fire up a PC emulator and run Nokia, Ericsson or Phone.com's simulators (none of which actually represent what you see on a real WAP-enabled phone ).

Nokia's runs on Java and should be theorectically runnable (at appalling speeds) on a Mac but I haven't had the time (or the fast Mac) to try it out. Ericsson's runs on TCL/Tk which is also available for the Mac, but then it only copes with WAP 1.0, which is of no use to anybody (what was that about never trusting a first version...?).

The Wapalizer (at http://www.gelon.net) does indeed work on a Mac and all you need is a web browser, but it doesn't do a very good job - not even splitting the cards in a deck (WML-talk: don't worry unless you know what it means).

As for geographic availability, the only WAP phones being released in the near future are GSM only. This means they won't work at all in most places outside of Europe.

However, if you do have GSM in your area, all you need is a WAP 1.1 phone such as the Nokia 7110, a standard dialup internet account and the IP address of a WAP gateway that is happy to give you access to wap.h2g2.com.

WAP gateways are not complicated beasts and the software is available for free (I don't have the links on me at the moment - ask me tomorrow) so this won't be major stumbling block for long. I have heard, however, that Orange are limiting the access from their WAP gateway so that you can only access sites that they want you to

More details (and a working wap.h2g2.com!) soon...

Adam

Do you know off the top of your head whether anyone's written a RDF-to-WAP converter...seems like a natural. If not, don't bother hunting, I can do the research myself. Not like I'm gonna be able to use WAP myself for a long, long time. We don't even have cellular service here.

I've set up my Nokia 7110 to say "DON'T PANIC" when you turn it on, aahhhh!. Well I though it was a good idea.

There is a new WAP emulator available at http://www.yourwap.com/ . This is a *Windows-only* client-side application, and a rather large download at 3+ megabytes. But I think it's doing a pretty faithful job of rendering WML, for those without WAP service.

By the way, in my previous post I meant RDF-to-WML or RSS-to-WML, depending on how you look at it...not that anyone will care

Bushwood well done for your common sense!!!!
Hologram stickers, Please.
Presumably people using these sites are computer users, make a sticker yourself on any drawing, DTP, word processing package etc.