Software Blog  RSS News Feed  What's This? Select a topic from the list below. Topics are ordered by date with the eight most recent at the top. Show All Articles July 19th 2010
iPhone App Development
We are moving on from AJAX applications to the development of iPhone apps (and apps for other smartphone platforms). There are many challenges in making this move, some of which are described here. July 18th 2009
Facebook Security Issues
Facebook has serious problems with its attitude to privacy, so much so that they appear to be in breach of Canadian privacy laws. Any action by the Canadian government will however be limited to just a small part of the wider problem. Facebook has to go much, much further. This article makes some suggestions on how I think they should clean up their act. July 5th 2009
Multi-Language Support
Translations of complete web pages have come a long way from the early days of Babelfish, although they still leave a lot to be desired. But what if you only need to translate individual phrases? Should you construct the phrase in English and then use Google Translate or do we need to do something more sophisticated? November 4th 2007
Working From Home
Working from home is becoming easier and easier as computers, the internet and mobile phones become more sophisticated. Why then don't more people (and more companies) embrace it? July 8th 2007
Using AJAX In Practice
AJAX is a powerful programming tool that is without doubt the future of the internet. However, until the search engine and browser developers catch up with the new reality, there are a few gotcha's you need to be aware of. April 22nd 2007
Web Design Trends
Web pages are moving away from fancy graphics to dynamic interactive sites with added value for users. To develop such pages, web developers need to be able to program in a variety of different languages. If you can't program, there soon won't be a place for you in the web development industry. March 19th 2007
More On Mobile Devices
Mobile devices become smaller and more multi-functional with fewer buttons and bigger, touch sensitive screens. Those of us with limited short range vision should be getting worried by these developments. Perhaps the science of haptics wil be our saviour. February 25th 2007
Censorship On The Internet
Some censorship of the internet is necessary. I fully support the removal of child pornography for example. But insiduous censorship by special interests is slowly creeping over the internet and eroding free speech. These special interests include web site owners who censor forum posts and business owners who deliberately remove competitors ads from public listings. |
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INTERNET SURFING ON A BLACKBERRY |
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Since the mobile web browser is going to become more and more popular, I decided it was time to embrace the revolution and take a look at what mobile surfing is all about. I went to a local phone dealer where I was given a demo on a Blackberry. Surfing to some of our sites quickly revealed what I had suspected. They took an age to download, broken up graphics filled the screen and the sites were really hard to read on the very small screen. Combine that with the horrendous cost of mobile surfing and I quickly decided not to buy a Blackberry or equivalent just yet.
 But then I got to thinking that it was developers like me who should be doing something about this situation so I took a day out and developed a mobile version of the Crowfoot Crossing site. This site is a directory of stores in the Crowfoot mall. It gets several hundred visitors every day and it contains the sort of information that mobile users will find particularly useful. The information about each business is stored in a MySQL database and I use PHP to get at that data. If you want to see what the mobile version looks like and you're not running from a mobile device, there is a link on the home page or you can click on this link to the mobile version. Just scrunch your browser window up small to get the proper effect.
 First off, I used a browser detection script from the PHP Manual that uses Gary Keith’s php_browscap.ini to find users of mobile devices so I could automatically redirect them to the mobile version of the site. I tested this script by downloading a copy of the Blackberry simulator. You need both the device simulator for whichever model you choose as well as the MDS simulator for web browsing. This is a huge download for what it essentially just the simple task of seeing what a web site looks like, but it is effective and easy to use and much cheaper for testing than the real thing. I strongly suggest you get at least one of these simulators and use it in your site testing just like you would with IE, Firefox and the rest.
I then cut down the graphical content of the site, the number of pages and the amount of text, all to the absolute minimum that was useful. I junked the Google Adsense ads, simplified the menus so they were text only and made everything so no Javascript was required and no fancy DHTML features were used. Although the Blackberry and other mobile browsers support Javascript, it is usually disabled by default and is anyway limited in what it does. Rather than navigating the potential minefield of having features work on some browsers and not others, I decided it was easier to program around it and just not use Javascript at all.
I had to redo the map that shows where each store is located because the one on the main web site uses an invisible div to locate the store and positions it with some Javascript. Even with Javascript turned on, this didn’t work on the Blackberry. So instead, I draw an arrow directly onto the graphic using PHP functions, save it in a temporary location and then download it to the browser.
As a final touch, I made the store phone numbers clickable so that users can call the store directly just by clicking on the number. This uses the construct <a href=tel:+1-403-111-2222> which seems to be supported by most mobile devices. The tel: construct is recognized by IE, Firefox, etc. but to make it work, you presumably have to have VOIP or similar on your computer. Since the message you get if those browsers don’t know how to dial the number is likely to be a tad confusing for most users, I decided not to implement that on the main site yet.
So, was it worth the effort? Will we be seeing more websites optimized for the mobile user?
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| Comment by Steve on December 22nd 2006 | | | A really good article, answers questions which I had not thought of. I have to agree with you regarding the cost of browsing using a BB, until the browsing companies bring down the price I see the average Joe not passing it by.
Steve
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