Opera University Tours

Yesterday I went to a talk on HTML5 that Opera Software presented at San Francisco State University as part of its University Tours program. There were about 30 other attendees, almost all of them students. Opera’s Anne van Kestern was the main speaker who spoke on HTML5 which is now a draft W3C standard and has partial support in all the major browsers except IE. HTML5 has a lot of cool stuff like the open standards video player built into … Continue reading

Content is King on Mobile Too

I attended Mobile Web Megatrends today in Berkeley.  The one day conference was organized by Ajit Jaokar and included an amazing 18 presentations packed into one day of total mobile web immersion.  A highlight of the day was meeting a couple of mobile experts, bloggers and authors I’ve enjoyed reading for years, Barbara Ballard and Michael Mace. There were a lot of great talks and Q&A  at the conference.  It’s impossible for me to cover them all in even a … Continue reading

Avoiding Yahoo and Google’s Transcoders (When You Want To)

Transcoders, web services that convert full websites to a mobile friendly format, can be great.  If you are trying to use a site like The Economist‘s that doesn’t have a mobile edition on a phone with an, ahem, limited browser like a RAZR V3, a transcoder is the only way.  You can bring up Google on your RAZR, search for “The Economist”, click the first result and get something that will load on your phone and is readable if not … Continue reading

Orkut Forcing Opera Mini to Mobile Version

It looks like Google’s Orkut has pulled a Friendster and is forcing Opera Mini users to the mobile version of the site. There’s nothing wrong with using browser detection to redirect mobile browsers to a mobile friendly site BUT there needs to be a way to get to the full version if desired. Many of today’s mobile browsers including Opera Mini and Mobile, some versions of Netfront and S60 Webkit are capable of loading almost any site on the web. … Continue reading