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  • Mobile Design - Posted by Ronan_Mandel on 01 Jul 2008
  • The mysteries of mobile data plans or It’s all about Page Weight
  • So I have to make a confession (seems like I’ve been doing that a lot recently…) For the first time in my life I received a mobile phone bill with data charges on it. What you say? Are you some sort of imposter? Have you not been using mobile data all these years? Well, here’s the thing: I’ve been using it for free (we’ll, it’s all been on the company’s dime that is) so it never really hit me how much it really cost.
  • Mobile Design - Posted by James Pearce on 24 Jun 2008
  • An "essential" document for mobile web designers
  • We've often maintained that 2008 will be the official "Year of the Mobile Web". But I've always thought that it's also the year when it comes out of the technical shadows - and web designers start to take it seriously. Mature mobile web design has been a long time coming, of course held back by usual gripes like browser capabilities, device diversity and network speeds. But life moves on, and now it's time to make the mobile web look amazing.
  • Browsers - Posted by Cyril on 05 Jun 2008
  • 240x320, the new standard screen resolution
  • I've had this theory for the last few months, and so I've decided to put it to the test. Today, most of the new phones you can buy have a screen resolution of at least 240x320 and are fully web xHTML (WAP 2.0) capable. When I see all the new models constantly coming to market, it's clear that the common screen width is definitely shifting to 240x320 pixels.
  • Usability - Posted by Ronan_Mandel on 21 May 2008
  • WebKit by any other name… or How I found a use for JavaScript
  • I’ve been doing a great deal of thinking lately about JavaScript/ECMAScript and the mobile web. What I’ve been struggling with is the need or value for it when it comes to sites which are organically created for mobile. Sure there’s a need to support JavaScript as fully as possible for providing a ‘full web’ experience and managing existing content, but when it comes to designing for the mobile context, is there really value for it?
  • Usability - Posted by roto on 29 Apr 2008
  • Mobile Internet User Experience
  • Having Internet access on mobile devices is about the freedom to utilize Internet anywhere, anytime. The more our daily lives are interlinked with the Internet, the more important it is to have Internet access whenever you need it. So far, the user experience has not been good enough to encourage the masses to start using the Internet on mobile devices.
  • Usability - Posted by ronan on 16 Apr 2008
  • Viewports on mobile browsers
  • Is it any wonder that users of low-end phones don't browse the web that much? Take a look at this photo of a Nokia 6131 in the default web browser. By my very crude calculations, the percentage of the overall screen area actually used by the browser to display useful content is a mere 65%. Why the gaping void between the bottom of the viewport and the menu? Why throw away so many pixels for the scrollbar? By the way, the browser was configured to use "Full" screen size.
  • Browsers - Posted by ronan on 19 Mar 2008
  • A snapshot of the mobile web
  • One of the nice side effects of crawling the mobile web for find.mobi is that we have a good idea of exactly what is out there. One thing that find.mobi does which is a bit different to the other mobile search engines out there is that it captures screenshots of mobile web pages as it crawls. As an experiment (with a tip of the hat to Russell Beattie's annual phone model images 2008 2005 2004) I pulled a selection of find.mobi's thumbnails and assembled them into a contact sheet. Preview below, higher resolution versions in page attachments.
  • Browsers - Posted by admin on 14 Feb 2008
  • Mobile Web Design - Beyond Simple XHTML Pages III
  • In recent years, widgets have been widely popularized due to the success of Yahoo! Widgets (http://widgets.yahoo.com) and Mac OS X Dashboard (http://www.apple.com/macosx/features/dashboard). Widget, a term that traditionally refers to operating system GUI components such as dialog boxes or pop-up windows, is also used to describe small, lightweight applications that run within a local client. These “micro” applications are very compact in both physical size and file size and usually perform only one or two simple functions.
  • Design Patterns - Posted by ronan on 08 Feb 2008
  • iPhone web design patterns
  • We've been putting some more features into find.mobi recently. One of these features is a new skin designed specially for the iPhone. It may seem strange to have an interface that has a version tailored to one particular device but when you think about it makes sense. Our find.mobi interface already had 3 different versions, for high, medium and low resolution phones.
  • Usability - Posted by Cyril on 12 Dec 2007
  • Find favicons
  • The favorites icon, that little icon displayed next to the URL bar in most PC browsers, can be quite useful for mobile. It allows identification of a site in only 16x16 pixels and just hundreds of bytes. Most favicons are unique, and despite being too small to accommodate text or a complex logo-type, users can identify a site more quickly by its favicon than by reading the URL.