by janinewarner on February 6, 2010
You’re web site may look great in your favorite browser on your computer, but that doesn’t mean it will display well to everyone else who views it on Macs and Windows computers, using Firefox, or Safari, or Internet Explorer (in any of the many editions which display code differently).
Making your site lo0k good in all the web browsers out there is hard enough, now you have to test your sites on iPhones, Blackberries, and a wide range of other mobile devices.
If you don’t have multiple computers and phones or all the browsers in use on the web today, you can use one of the online simulators covered in this post to test your site — even if all you have is one web browser you can use to access the web site simulators. [click to continue…]
by DaveLaFontaine on January 31, 2010
Designing for the wireless web just got a little more difficult in the short term – but in the long term, maybe a bit easier. Firefox, the browser that now owns the majority of market share just released a browser that works on Nokia’s Maemo platform.
There are other images suggested for this logo on the Flickr page for this group.Reminds me of Rocky the Flying Squirrel a bit.
What this means for designers is that sanity – so long absent from designing for the mobile web – may actually be in the cards for the future. The possibility that the dizzying profusion of browsers could be replaced by something as universal as an open-source application like Firefox has got to be a breath of fresh air to anyone contemplating “mobilizing” their site.
Well, that is, if the general public all decide to download and use Firefox on their mobiles. Which will only be possible if the hardware manufacturers decide to allow users to load and use a browser created by someone else. And if the carriers decide to allow traffic in and out of Firefox. And, and, and…
Well, you get the idea.
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by DaveLaFontaine on January 17, 2010
Get Married magazine uses Microsoft Tag barcodes to add mobile component to print ads.
The ads for high-end wedding related merch all have little custom barcodes that look like this.
Magazines and newspapers have been toying with the idea of “upselling” advertisers by including barcodes or imaging software that allows readers to point their smartphones at a printed page and have the code there prompt the phone to unlock some special content. Rolling Stone tried it with pages that were supposed to do this; never really seemed to get any traction, though.
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by janinewarner on January 7, 2010
Gavin Davies of Box UK makes a great case for delivering tailored versions of a mobile site based on the capabilities of a device, not on the type of device or browser being used.
This approach gets at two of the biggest challenges of mobile web design — how to design for the vast number of different handsets and devices in use, and how to manage the fact that users can change settings, such as turning Javascript on or off at will, which means you can’t assume that just because someone is using a Blackberry that they can view all of the features supported by a Blackberry…
In his thoughtful post, full of links to a great collection of resources, Gavin describes how to use WURFL to determine device capabilities. The approach may seem complicated at first, especially if you’re not an experiened programmer, but this definitely looks like the best way to go if you want to set up a web site that works well on the broadest range of mobile devices.
Read the full article here http://www.boxuk.com/blog/mobile-device-capability-detection
