The mobile web has really been exploding with new sites lately. The most interesting one I’ve seen is 411Sync, a site with an easy to use and very flexible API that lets content providers do mobile mashups of all sorts of query based services like driving directions, transit schedule lookups or even just plain old RSS feeds. Oliver Starr at Mobile Crunch already did a great write up of Sync411. I just want to add a little to what Oliver … Continue reading
YubNub is a web app that has been generating a lot of buzz ever since Jon Aquino created it a year ago to win a Ruby on Rails programming contest. If you haven’t heard of YubNub (Ewok for “hooray’, BTW) it’s a “command line for the web”. Just like the MS-DOS > prompt or a *nix shell, you type commands into YubNub and wonderful things happen – or not – if you mess up. As the web takes on more … Continue reading
The wml version of Google mobile search used to have a “Go To Url” option that let specify the url of a website. Google then returned a copy of the site transcoded into wml. The transcoding wasn’t very fancy, everything except text and links was stripped out. Still, it let you view any site on a wml-only phone. Google still offers the transcoding functionality as part of their mobile search portal for both wml and wap2 but the ability to … Continue reading
I just visited the MSN Mobile homepage and saw two new items in the menu, Windows Live Mail Beta and Windows Live Search Beta. I did a web search and it turns out that they aren’t really that new having been out for over a month, but they seem to have been more or less ignored so far. The Microsoft Live Mobile team has a blog (NOT Firefox friendly) called Mobile access everywhere! which seems to be the best source … Continue reading
Parts 1, 2 and 3 of this 4 part post covered four mobile transcoding sites. Back in part 1, I defined mobile transcoding as “an application (usually a web service) which when given a request for any web page, does some sort of on-the-fly edit of the page to make it usable on the small screen of the a mobile device.” In this, the final installment, I look at one more transcoding engine, AOL and try to summarize what I’ve … Continue reading
Revised 14-Oct-2006 to reflect improvements in both these transcoders. Skweezer has resolved it’s formatting and performance issues and now resizes images. Google has also added image resizing. I now consider these two transcoders esentially equal and the best currently available. Parts 1 and 2 of this 4 part post covered four mobile transcoding sites, WAP sites which reformat desktop web content to make it more usable on the small screen browsers of phones and PDAs. This entry looks at two … Continue reading
Part 1 of this series of posts covered two mobile transcoding sites, loband and Phonifier. In part two we will look at two more, IYHY and MobileLeap. In case you missed Part 1, I define a mobile transcoding as “an application (usually a web service) which when given a request for any web page, does some sort of on-the-fly edit of the page to make it usable on the small screen of the a mobile device.” IYHY IYHY is another … Continue reading
There’s been a lot of buzz lately about Mobile Transcoding which I define as an application (usually a web service) which when given a request for any web page, does some sort of on-the-fly edit of the page to make it usable on the small screen of the a mobile device. The promise of transcoding is that it will allow any web site to be viewed on any handheld device. I really don’t think a machine translation of a site … Continue reading