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!

Last week I did a podcast with Brian Prows from MobileBeyond. We went through quite a bit – from how you can mobilize your WordPress blog with our mobile plugin to how in a future release of the plugin you’ll be able to place Mobile Adverts on your blog and make a bit of money out of it.

You can listen to the whole thing on Brian’s website at http://mobilebeyond.net/mobilizing-and-making-money-with-a-wordpress-blog-or-mobile-website/ or have a search on iTunes for MobileBeyond.

Lastly, I must say a big thank you to Brian for first of all giving me the opportunity to do the podcast, and secondly for doing such an awesome job of editing it together!

Let us know what you thought of the podcast – and if you’d like to hear more, tell us what subjects you’d like us to cover!

Content Management Systems – it seems as though they are the in-vogue tool at the moment with every man and his dog developing one or using it to power their website.

If you do a search in a well known popular search engine for “CMS” (and assuming you aren’t searching for the Church Mission Society), you’ll find Joomla at #3. With 139 million returned results that’s not bad by anyone’s standards.

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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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After our last blog post on the future of the mobile web, Wapple has been busy thinking up new ways to get you involved and give you a voice. We’ve put together a survey which will help us to get a better picture of the mobile web through your eyes.

If you’ve ever been browsing on your mobile device and felt that most sites just weren’t good enough or that advertising was too intrusive, now is the time to let people know! On the other hand, if you can’t get enough of the mobile web and think it’s the best thing since sliced bread, here’s your opportunity to shout it from the rooftops…

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For the last ten years I have heard someone, somewhere say ‘this is the year for mobile’. It’s become a standing joke in our industry. From SMS to WAP, it seems everything has been tried and failed. Well now it’s my turn and, at the risk of being laughed at, I am going to tell you ‘this is the year for mobile’! We’ve reached a point where 2009 may well herald the ‘perfect storm’ of opportunity for mobile web development.

It’s a crucial time for all kinds of organisations with a web presence to begin implementing ideas on reaching a wider audience by understanding new ways of working with the mobile web. Some key points to consider are:

• Consumer adoption of new digital devices and services
• Consumer perception of value and trust
• The role played by mobile in stitching digital communications together
• Addressable markets and lost opportunities
• Site usability and design practicality

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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

IE6 Must Die is a trending topic on Twitter right now. The world is demanding that IE6 support is dropped, effectively forcing the hand of anyone still using the browser and hopefully freeing the internet from the hell that is substandard browser support.

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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

The mobile web is a great place for advertising, content, information, social experiences and fulfillment on the go. In fact, what better than the opportunity to connect with users through the device they carry around with them at all times?

Trouble is, developing for mobile browsers is hard if you don’t choose the right tools and technology to help you on the way.

If you’ve ever tried to code for the mobile web in the past (or have been lucky enough to have someone do it for you), you’ll know how hard it’s been to create a mobile site that looks great and provides a great user experience on all mobile devices.

Mobile web development is traditionally very difficult. You are not alone. In this article, I hope to explore some of the troubles encountered and then a really cool mobile publishing solution that will help you develop mobile web sites – your mobile web sites, the way you want them. I’ll also explain how you can do it quickly.

The results will optimize for EVERY mobile browser, perfectly.

Instead of having to worry about a couple of browsers as you would with a desktop browser, you’ve got different screen sizes, firmware, operators, carriers and multiple markup languages to look after – all of which meaning there’s a potential 50,000 devices to support.

That’s a staggering number. If you ever had the problem of making something work in IE6 then multiply that headache by the figure above. It’s brain-splitting to say the least.

There have been tools emerge in the past that have gone some way to helping, but now there is a new service available that has removed all of the problems and barriers to development. It’s called Wapple Architect and by the end of this article you’ll know all about it and how it’s revolutionized the entire web world.

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If you’ve been living under a rock for the last few years and have never heard of WordPress, it’s a free to use, open source publishing system.

It’s one of the biggest and best around, with over 5,000,000 people publishing hosted blogs on wordpress.com and millions more using software they’ve downloaded from wordpress.org.

I’ve done a lot of research to discover that very few of these sites actually render well on mobile, here are a couple of screenshots of what a popular WordPress site looks on my Nokia N73:

http://ma.tt

As you can see it doesn’t look that great and is totally unreadable and usable on mobile. It also took 2-3 minutes to load and cost me a small fortune in data charges.

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Fact: People are accessing your website URL on their mobile phone!

The latest stats suggest that 5% of traffic to websites now get hit by mobile browsers, even if you promote a separate URL for mobile web.

What do you want them to see? The actual website that takes 20 minutes to load and scrolls to about 10 times the width and height of the mobile? Not likely. They’ll want to see a mobile specific version, running off that single domain, perfectly optimized to whichever handset they’re using, yes, even if they have an iPhone. Read more

Last week something exciting happened inside the colourful walls of Wapple – the latest version of the mobile site was launched. Below are the obligatory before and after screenshots and at first glance you’ll probably notice that they look pretty similar. However, all is not as it seems because underneath the bonnet – everything has changed.

Built with Canvas

Built with Architect

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