Great new updates in DeviceAtlas 1.2

What a week at dotMobi and we are still not done with the updates. In fact we just completed the update of DeviceAtlas to version 1.2 and there are quite a few changes.

We start with an improvement in the way data is treated. The different sources that contribute to our database now have a more advanced weighting system and you should see the results immediately even on the top 10 devices linked in homepage. This has taken quite some time to design and we will be tweaking it over the next few weeks. This is also the first step to enable us to get many more contributions and evaluate them appropriately.

While we were working on our data we also took the time to integrate some new properties. We started adding information about platform and Operating System as this was one of the most requested set of properties. Reference to the usable screen is now also available and we think this should help our developers to improve the layout of their pages, after all this is the year of the Mobile Web, isn't it?

We also thought the API's needed an update, so we started from PHP that we did not feel was exactly up to speed with the other flavours, so now we have a completely new version fully object-oriented. Version 1.2 is not backwards compatible and will require some minor changes, but all the old functions have been replicated with new methods and it should really be a matter of search and replace. We feel like this version is far more consistent with the other API's and provides a consistent speed upgrade so we decided to release it as soon as possible.

All three API's now come with a set of exceptions that should help you better understand if anything wrong happened. Try-catching has never been more important if you want to make your applications behave nicely to mobile devices.

W3C DDWG, we have been active members, we've been editors of the main documents and now we come with a preview of the Java API. The library is a preview simply because the documentation has not been turned into a formal Recommendation, but we are confident the final version will not be very different. This is a chance to take a peek at the future of standardization and interoperability. Of course we do not want to leave our developers out in the cold so both our original API and the new implementation will be supported.

Since we also want to have a nice look on our site, we added more device images, so browse around and you'll see them.


Wow, what a release!


PS: did you hear about Python? Did you hear about Google Application Engine? Well, stick around, because we have something that will be ready in the next couple of weeks for you.