Our top 3 support requests: 3

Number 3: PIN problems

PIN number requests for My Mobizines are still a major issue. We (currently) need to verify that you're making a request from your own handset (I know you know it's your handset, but frankly I don't think we've been properly introduced).

We've noticed that we're getting loads more requests for PINs for new Nokias because of our NCD distribution deal. Those Nokias get everywhere.

This process isn't quite as reliable as we'd like: international bulk SMS turns out to be a bit like sticking a message in a bottle and letting it float out to sea. So while people in the UK get PINs no problem, we have difficulty getting PINs through to countries as diverse as India, the USA and China. Which are, obviously, quite big.

For now if the PIN doesn't arrive your only option is to email help@mobizines.com but we're dropping the PIN requirement in the next release of the software (which wshould hit the street ina couple of months). This should make registering from places we don't have decent SMS coverage easy.

My Mobizines for mouseless devices

Rich just showed me the coolest thing ever.

When we were putting My Mobizines together for the website we decided that it would be the coolest thing ever if we made the interface all drag and drop and Web 2.0ish. (I've now recanted and a more accessible version is in the works, but bear with me).

About that time Robin bought himself a PSP "for research". The website rendered OK but of course the PSP is mouseless: there's a pointer but you can't drag. So I hacked in the ability to triple click a Mobizine icon to subscribe. All was happy, the PSP project was kind of forgotten, and we went back to drag and drop as a metaphor - but triple click remained.

Scroll on six months and mouseless browsers are popping up everywhere. We tested My Mobizines on the Wii and - with triple click - you can indeed subscribe to a Mobizine.

And now for today's discovery: Rich just brought his brand new N95 over and showed me My Mobizines running on it in zoom mode. Triple click an icon and - bingo - Mobizine subscribed. This is obviously really bizarre as the point of My Mobizines was to provide configuration of your mobile device from a web browser, and here was a mobile device configuring itself.

I think this says more for the clever people at KDE, Apple and Nokia for making the N95 do proper web than my coding (no, the Javascript isn't obfuscated: that's how I code). It also says an enormous amount about the rock solid frameworks My Mobizines is built on: prototype by Sam Stephenson and script.aculo.us by Thomas Fuchs et al. As I side note I made a right tit of myself at a conference yesterday when I met Ryan Singer from 37Signals and I utterly gushed over prototype and the great stuff 37Signals has given the community. Oh well, sometimes its good to be a fanboy.

SMS getting lost on the way to India and Pakistan

...lost before they reach Bombay

We seem to be having trouble getting the SMS that contains the registration PIN for My Mobizines through to India and Pakistan. We get a send receipt back from our SMS provider but it looks like somewhere down the chain the SMSes get forgotten about and they never end up at the phone they're intended for.





We're looking at a new registration method that will remove the need for the SMS step, but if you do get stuck, send us an email at help@mobizines.com (we already get all the world's spam on that address so I'm quite happy posting it here) with your phone number and we'll try to sort it out.