Category Archives: Mobile Web Development

Net Magazine’s “20 HTML5 Sites that changed the game” – Many Work Well In Mobile Browsers

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Net Magazine.com

Thanks to Opera’s Bruce Lawson (@brucel) sharing the link on Twitter I discovered Oli (@boblet) Studholme’s “2011 in review: 20 HTML5 sites that changed the game“ piece on netmagazine.com. It’s a great showcase of pages that exploit new web technology to good effect.  I first saw the link while browsing with the Android 2.3 browser on a Motorola Photon and was surprised and pleased that both .net magazine and many of the showcased sites (HTML5 for Web Developers, Move the Web Forward, The Boston Globe, SoundCloud, Anatomy … Continue reading →

Blogger Mobile Templates Now Support Opera Mini, Symbian Anna, N9 and BlackBerry OS 6.0

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Prepaid Phone News Mobile

I covered Google Blogger’s Beta mobile page templates in depth when they were rolled out last January.  They work well and look great and go a long way toward making the often unruly Blogger sites usable with a mobile browser.  At that time I lamented that the only iPhones and bada and Android devices were detected and served the mobile formatted pages. You can force Blogger to use the mobile template by appending ?m=1 to the end of the URL of any page … Continue reading →

ScientiaMobile Launched: WURFL has Graduated

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Launched today ScientiaMobile sells and supports commercial APIs and tools based around WURFL, the Wireless Universal Resource File. For those who are really new to the mobile web game, an explanation is due. The remaining 99%, already know that WURFL is the de-facto standard DDR (Device Description Repository), i.e. the open-source framework which lets developers map HTTP requests to the device profile for the device which requested the page. With WURFL, you can easily learn what browser is in use via … Continue reading →

Update: Fixed! – Thematic (In)Consistency Hall of Shame #3 – Microsoft Bing

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Bing Search Blog

Update: sometime after this item was published, Microsoft fixed the bug discussed here that caused links to items on Microsoft corporate blogs to retun HTTP 404 (Not Found) errors when accessed with mobile browsers. -> Last week Microsoft announced the launch of Bing Deals, a Groupon inspired feature of Bing Search.  Created in partnership with The Deal Map, Bing Deals aggregates money saving offers in your area from Groupon, Living Social, Restaurant.com and other sites. The announcement was made on … Continue reading →

An HTML5 Test For Mobile and Desktop Browsers

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HTML5test.com - Android 2.2 Browser

I recently discovered Niels Leenheer’s HTML5Test.com.  It’s another test suite that attempts to measure a browser’s support for components of the HTML (formerly HTML5) and CSS3  draft specs.  Like the W3C’s Web Compatibility Test for Mobile Browsers – version 2 this one assigns a numeric score representing the browsers overall compliance with the specs. It shows pass/fail grades for each individual test as well. As Niels points out, his test is not complete and doesn’t cover all the fetaures of … Continue reading →

Update Fixed! – Gawker’s Redesign Lands It In My Mobile Thematic Inconsistency Hall of Shame

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Lifehacker Desktop

Update 22-Feb-2011: I’m happy to report that Gawker Media has fixed the issue of deep links not working in mobile browsers sometime in the last couple of days. I don’t know if it was in response to my post or something that happened independently but either way, Thanks Gawker! -> It’s been been nearly two weeks since the big Gawker Media redesign on the online hand wringing over it shows no sign of winding down. On Feb 8th Gawker, Gizmodo, … Continue reading →

PrepaidPhoneNews.com and Blogger Mobile Tricks

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prepaid phone news desktop

I’ve launched a new blog, prepaidphonenews.com, covering the US pay as you go mobile industry from a user’s perspective. The site grew out of a series of posts I wrote on WapReview that compared the various operator and MVNO prepaid offerings for both voice/SMS only and data users. Those posts have consistently been among the most popular on Wapreview so I decided to spin the prepaid coverage off to a dedicated site. Prepaid Phone News is also an experiment in … Continue reading →

Update: Fixed! Thematic (In)Consistency Hall of Shame – Softonic

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Update: sometime after this item was published, Softonic fixed the bug discussed here that caused mobile brosers following links to items on the Softonic blog to be redirected to Softonic’s mobile appstore. != It happened again.  I was happily reading the Twitter timeline in my mobile browser.  I saw a tweet with a link provocatively titled “Five reasons to give up Firefox”.  That sounded like the start of an interesting flame war so I clicked the link – and wound … Continue reading →