DIY Touchscreen Analysis
The success of the iPhone has triggered the adoption of touchscreen systems in a wide range of mobile devices, and a bevy of new gadgets equipped with capacitive sensing technology have now hit the market. MOTO has years of experience developing products that use capacitive touch, and we’ve tested many of the latest devices. Our conclusion: All touchscreens are not created equal. 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...
Accesskeys: Thinking about them in a QWERTY world
Interestingly enough, in this time of excitement and interest in building apps for mobile phones, Google did a refresh on their web apps for iPhone and Android. Go figure, seems like the mobile web isn't dead even on high end, high power devices. Even more, it would appear to make sense to build mobile specific web interfaces even for fully functional WebKit browser based devices. Imagine that! more...
Handset Market Share Data (why it matters)
With Mobile World Congress and CTIA now behind us, it's difficult to not get hot bothered and drooly about what new handsets are going to be on the market. Don't get me wrong, hot, new, fully functional and super sexy are all good things to have in a handset, especially in these otherwise gloomy times. However, as a developer it's important to remember to not get too carried away in the excitement, and here's why. The handset sales figures for November and December in the US were recently released, and a look at them reveals something telling for how one might (or might not) target content development. 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...
Effective Design for Multiple Screen Sizes
So you're a designer and have been tasked with the design of a mobile web site. Chances are, unless you're designing for only one device you're quickly going to be faced with a common problem experienced by designers who work with mobile devices; figuring out what screen size to actually design for. For instance: 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...
The Best and Worst of the Mobile Web
Our sister-site mobiThinking.com has just published an eBook on "The Best and Worst of the Mobile Web". In it there are examples of winners and sinners, those who do it right, and those not quite right, and why! So now might be a good time to fire up your mobile browser and let us know if you agree. more...
Mobile and Desktop Switching Icons
On this page we provide icons that you can use to indicate to your users that they have a choice between your mobile and desktop versions of your site. There are a few variations on the theme, and each comes with a gray scale set too. They are available in either 16x16px or 64x64px. They are free to download, use, distribute, and modify. Samples included below. Enjoy! more...
