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...
User-Agent Switcher for Safari 4
The User Agent Switcher plug-in for Firefox has been a GREAT add-on and we all love it. 1 year and 27 weeks ago Ronan wrote a really simple, but useful configuration file for it that is available here on mobiForge (if you use Firefox it's a MUST: User Agent Switcher config file). more...
Location, Location, Location
Location based services (LBS) has been a buzz word and a hype since birth of mobile services. I'm not saying that it is a failure! more...
Getting started with the ready.mobi API
Ready.mobi is a well known page testing tool offered by dotMobi. When you supply a page URL to ready.mobi, it evaluates how well the page is likely to display on mobile devices by testing against the Mobile Web Best Practices, and dotMobi compliance rules. more...
Kind of a "sunshine transcoder story"
I guess many of you have been following discussions on various attempts by network operators to transcode desktop web sites and squeeze them on to a mobile device, without respecting the intentions of content owners. The case I'll be talking about is the TeliaSonera case, and their "SurfOpen" service. First time around, the launch caused an uprising among the content owners forcing TeliaSonera to go offline with SurfOpen. Now SurfOpen is launched again with a more reasonable approach. 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...
Character Encoding Issues and the Mobile Web
Character encoding, the binary representation underlying every symbol in documents delivered to mobile devices, is often treated as an afterthought in mobile Web development. Many developers simply rely upon ISO-8859-1; not a bad choice, as this encoding efficiently supports all important Western European languages, has long been available in the mobile and fixed Internet, is widespread among low-end phones, and is the default encoding in the HTTP standard. 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...
An Operator Decides to be Polite…
Say what you will about the network operators with whom we have to play in the mobile space, but every now and again they do think of the developer community before implementing changes that may impact us all. Case in point, our friends over at AT&T devCentral recently sent out an announcement to the developer community about changes that will be coming as a result of some modifications to their gateway. more...
