The most common mistakes in smartphone sites according to Google
Google are paying ever more attention to the mobile market and so, developers pay attention when the Big G is making recommendations. Google recently published a document on the main mistakes people make when working on mobile websites for smartphones. If you look through the list you can definitely recognize a cornerstone of Google's approach: focus on the end user. Or put another way, "adopt the approach you want but be aware of your audience". more...
Introducing Prism, a tool for testing device adaptation
Due to the multifarious nature of the mobile web, developers tend to spend a lot of time testing their work. If your site is designed to adapt to multiple different devices this effort is multiplied because you need to ensure that your detection is working correctly across multiple devices and that your response is appropriate in each case. more...
Future of the Mobile Web Whitepaper
We're very happy to publish this paper arising from the The Future of the Mobile Web event held at the Dublin Convention Centre in January 2012. We covered a lot of ground and the paper is a serious attempt to capture all the topics covered from HTML5 to responsive design to device detection and many others. We found it to be a very worthwhile process to listen, validate our ideas and learn from others in the process of writing it. We hope it is useful to a wider readership also. more...
Meet goMobi - A New Content Mobilization Platform
Here in dotMobi we've just launched our latest product. The culmination of months and months of hard work by the dotMobi team has resulted in the release of our spanking new content mobilization platform: goMobi. You can find all the official blurb over at http://gomobi.info along with some videos of our CEO and CTO talking about the product. What I aim to do here is to give an overview, from a developer's viewpoint, so that you can find out what there is in goMobi to appeal to the developer in you. A quick introduction more...
Testing Mobile Web Sites Using Firefox
Before you ever begin testing your mobile site to determine how it looks on handsets, you should make sure the functionality of the site is working as you expect. This is not always straightforward, as you want to approximate the mobile environment as closely as possible. Fortunately, Mozilla Firefox supports some great extensions that can make testing your mobile sites a piece of cake. This article explains how to set Firefox up to act as a first pass test environment for your site. more...
The dotMobi WordPress Mobile Pack
The dotMobi WordPress Mobile Pack is a complete toolkit from dotMobi to help mobilize your WordPress site and blog. It includes a mobile switcher to select themes based on the type of user that is visiting the site, a selection of mobile themes, extra widgets, device adaptation and a mobile administration panel to allow users to edit the site or write new posts when out and about. more...
AT&T Gateway address updates
Well our friends at AT&T are up to changes in the network again. Happily they were kind enough to send out a message with a heads up about new network addresses that are coming from devices on their network. more...
A Very Modern Mobile Switching Algorithm - Part II
This article follows on from last month's Part I, where we discussed some of the principles of handling mobile users and switching their experiences. If you haven't read it yet please do so before we dive into some of the technical ideas and implementation details. more...
A Very Modern Mobile Switching Algorithm - Part I
An important question that most web developers ask when developing their first mobile web site is "how do I distinguish between mobile users and desktop users?". Although this seems like a simple enough question at first, of course there's more to it than meets the eye. In fact, what do we even mean by 'distinguish'? How we distinguish their requirements? Their desires? The services they expect? The browsers they happen to be using? more...
The Mobile Web is alive and well in Startup Land
dotMobi was at CrunchLudd last night and we got to talk to plenty of cool web startups from Dublin. I'm imagining there might have a similar event 12 years ago for print, media, graphic design and CD-ROM startups. And a ranting sponsor (who perhaps looked a bit like me) from the fledgling Internet industry kept telling them that the web would soon change their world. more...
