Newsletter June 2009

Welcome to the mobiForge newsletter June 2009. This time:

1. Battle of the Superphones
2. Location, location, location
3. Widgets
4. Mobile Web development with ASP.NET
5. Augmented Reality
6. DeviceAtlas Personal coming soon

Battle of the Superphones

This month saw the launch of the Palm Pre, perhaps the first serious iPhone contender since the original iPhone launched two years ago. In this post we pit the browsers of these two super devices side by side, comparing their Web browsing capabilities to try to determine which is the better browsing device. Which one comes out on top? Read more to find out.

Location, Location, Location

Location aware applications are becoming the norm rather than the exception, and now even mobile browsers are supporting the Geolocation API. This means there will be more location enabled Web sites in the future. In this great post by Jon Arne of MobileTech we get a look at the changing landscape of Location Based Services. He talks us through the various different ways to get the location of the end user browsing a mobile site and treats us to code samples demonstrating the different APIs and approaches. Plenty here to get your LBS juices flowing.

Widgets

There's quite a stir about widgets at the moment. Ron Mandel of Adobe returns to guide us through the Widget universe. (Thankfully this time he doesn't get sidetracked with bad or questionable development practices along the way!) Ron fills us in on the biggest widget platforms out there, including Opera's Widgets, Yahoo! Go, Nokia's Widget Run Time (WRT), and the Netfront widget engine.

Mobile Web development with ASP.NET

Find out how to build ASP.NET mobile Web applications using the ASP.NET flavor of the HAWHAW framework. HAWHAW is a comprehensive framework, containing, among other things, a tag library (WALL alternative anyone?), and which incidentally has been used to build a mobile version of Wikipedia. This article starts off with a simple Hello World mobile Web page, then goes on to demonstrate the integrated mobile controls, and also covers form processing.

Augmented Reality

Bring your mobile campaign to life, virtually, with the insider's guide to augmented reality. The latest campaigns from Nike, Fanta and Ford use virtual reality to wow the younger generation. Get the low-down on the futuristic technology that's causing a sensation. (Via mobiThinking.com, our mobile marketing sister site)

DeviceAtlas Personal coming soon

And finally we'll close off this month's newsletter with a top tip about an exciting new DeviceAtlas development coming your way. It is provisionally known as DeviceAtlas Personal, and makes the task of device detection on your Web site even easier than before. With this new service request headers are sent to our servers on the fly, and we send back the device information you are interested in, so you never need to worry about updating the database or hosting device detection code yourself. And even better, DeviceAtlas Personal is free. More details to follow, but feel free to let us know what you think on the Device Atlas forum:

http://mobiforge.com/forum/dotmobi/deviceatlas

That's it for this month. We have plenty more lined up for next month including J2ME and Android content. As usual, if you would like to get published on mobiForge, or if you have any feedback, please get in touch; we'd love to hear from you!

See you on mobiForge!

Ruadhan, Jo, Ronan, Andrea, Claire, and all the team at dotMobi