Mobile Web Junkie

With Mobile World Congress kicking off today and a whole hall called ‘App Planet‘ [I guess 'Planet of the Apps' would have looked like a typo...] it’s a great day for another story with two ways of publishing to mobile going head to head.

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/28744c96-176a-11df-87f6-00144feab49a,dwp_uuid=4dce8136-4a24-11da-b8b1-0000779e2340.html?nclick_check=1

So, lets be clear once again. Installed apps are OK but they’re expensive, tied to a particular OS, distributed through crowded and controlled channels, hard to spread virally and, well, so 2009.

Web Apps for mobile are cheap to develop, OS agnostic, browser independent (if you build them using Wapple technology), free to distribute and easy to spread. Oh, and this really IS the year of the mobile web so if you want to live in the now then mobile Web Apps are the only place to be!

I am pleased to say that since my recent rant, the BBC have started to render correctly for my Android handset. I have the mobile version again. I am happy.

Transcoding web pages into mobile web pages does not work.

There’s an ongoing debate on the subject of mobile web transcoding, so here’s our take.

Let’s be clear on our language here though. Transcoding videos for mobiles is essential and very good, but doing it to your web output is bad. Really bad.

A reliance on an automated process that takes HTML output and reformats it to mobile markup is a deluded one. Computers are really bad at recognising diverse visual patterns (that’s why we all use CAPTCHA to protect from bots) and you don’t get much more diverse than web design. If a transcoder has been taught your web layout, you’ll find yourself tied to that web design or face losing any learning invested in the system.

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Right now, I feel like the blind man telling my own future.

If the BBC don’t start recognising my Android handset as a mobile browser again, I’ll go elsewhere. I’ve had enough of navigating their full website through my small screen and I want the mobile experience back.

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Konny Zsigo of the MDA recently posted an insightful article into the ‘to iPhone or not to iPhone debate.

It seems to have attracted a lot of flames. Blimey! Time for Mobile Web Junkie to dive in…

Read the  article. It’s great.

If you’re trying to make money, dump your iPhone strategy

Then the comments but in case you feel too much pain before you get as far as my comment, here it is, just for you:

Wow, what a lot of hate in the comments. I really think that a lot of you need to read back what you’ve written and see if it’s truly in the spirit of constructive debate.

I would suggest that every single flame has been posted by iPhone owners. A trait I’ve noticed is that as soon as someone jumps onto the Apple train they feel they have a fight on their hands. I guess it’s a complex caused by Microsoft constantly trumping Apple in the OS battle. Read more

Thanks to Jakob Neilson, the world is suddenly waking up to the idea that to make the web useable on mobiles you have to make the web for mobiles.

http://www.useit.com/alertbox/mobile-usability.html

We’ve been saying this for years and I wonder what took Jakob so long to discover the mobile web anyway? Maybe he was on a really long phone contract and only just got an upgrade. Or maybe his handset was so cluttered he only just found the browser.

Either way, he’s on board now and whether you subscribe to his somewhat draconian dismissal of everything pretty over everything useable you will certainly recognise the importance of such an influential character entering the affray. Read more

Mobile Internet is a tricky platform to develop for unless you use the right tools and have the lowdown on what works and what doesn’t.

As there are so many different devices out there in the worldwide marketplace any developer will meet a number of challenges. This mainly concern varying screen sizes, a number of markup languages and device inconsistencies and capabilities.

Obviously, developing mobile internet applications that work across the widest range of devices should be paramount to any serious developer or designer. If your site cannot be viewed on any percentage of mobile browsers then it is unlikely to meet its full potential or any at all.

Often, brand integrity is as important as user experience. This is especially true where mobile marketing meets customer engagement but it is also important to ensure that users have a good experience on even the simplest of sites.

Some older phones have incredibly small screens, while newer smartphones are being released with increasing Read more

We received the following comment from Jeff Miller on the ‘removing scrollbars‘ article.

“Your site doesnt even show up on any mobile phone, other than maybe an iphone. But doing a test on your site it show up very bad on other phones which most of the world use. it only scores a 3/5 on ready.mobi and its very hard to navigate on phones. Obviously you are not the mobile web junkie but the wapple (wurfl rip off hosting solution) for iphone junkie.”

Ouch. Oh well, there’s always one… The reply got kinda long but turned out to be quite a good read. So I thought it would be nice to post it as an article. Here it is: Read more

Scrollbars are a pain on web and they are even more of a pain on mobile.

If you’ve ever had to develop a website that does anything imaginative with it’s width then you will have encountered the inclusive / exclusive discrepancy amongst browsers. For example, should your page length exceed the vertical size of a browser window, a vertical scrollbar appears – trouble is some browsers feel the need to subtract the width of the scrollbar from the width of the page – causing horizontal scroll on the page. Read more