mobiForge Recent Content

Future of the Mobile Web

mclancy — Fri, 03 Feb 2012 12:13:12 +0000

Last week we hosted an event loftily entitled "The Future of the Mobile Web" at the Dublin Convention Centre.

Server-side device detection used by 82% of Alexa top 100 sites

ronan — Wed, 11 Jan 2012 14:53:12 +0000

About 82% of the Alexa 100 top sites use some form of server-side device detection to serve content on their main website entry point. As you descend from the top 10 to the top 25 and top 100 sites the percentage of sites using server-side detection falls from 100% to 96% to 82%. This is an interesting fact given the all of the recent discussion in the blogosphere of responsive design using client-side techniques such as media queries.

Future of the Mobile Web: Request for submissions

mclancy — Fri, 06 Jan 2012 14:35:53 +0000

Dear mobiForge community,

We have invited a number of colleagues and opinion formers from across several different verticals to a forum event in Dublin on January 26th next to discuss some of the most pressing issues, trends, opportunities and challenges in today’s mobile web environment. People from companies like Adobe, Cloud Four, Nokia, Yiibu and others will be coming along.

The idea is to build towards a consensus on current technology, facts, fictions and opportunities of the mobile web in an environment that is increasingly noisy and hype filled.

Mobile web content adaptation techniques

ronan — Tue, 01 Nov 2011 17:20:17 +0000

Introduction

This article will help you pick from amongst the many techniques for building a mobile website. It doesn't describe how to do it, rather it instead tries to help you to pick the right approach. Before we begin it's worth clarifying exactly what the goal of the exercise is. Generally speaking, people who are looking to build a mobile site fall into two categories. They're either:

Displaying Status Bar Notifications in Android

weimenglee — Tue, 20 Sep 2011 13:59:05 +0000

Developers of Android are no doubt familiar with the Toast class, which displays a little pop-up containing whatever message you want to display to the user. However, the Toast pop-up will automatically dismiss itself after a while, making it useful as a tool to provide timely feedback to the user (such as informing the user that a file has been saved successfully), but not a really good tool to use for some asynchronous action (such as telling the user that an incoming SMS message has arrived).

The best of breakingdevelopment conference

ronan — Thu, 15 Sep 2011 09:45:40 +0000

As many of you know, the breakingdevelopment conference took place in Nashville, Tennessee over the last few days. It appears to have been a really seminal conference with 13 leading mobile web developers speaking.

Others have already put together summaries of the conference but I thought I'd link to what I thought were the most interest presentations.

Importing & Exporting Documents in iOS

weimenglee — Tue, 09 Aug 2011 12:13:57 +0000

One of the common tasks that an iOS developer has to do is to import or export documents from his iOS application. For example, suppose you are developing a document reader and you want to allow the user to import documents into your application so that it can be read offline. Also, your reader might also support the exporting of documents so that other applications can make use of the document.

In this article, I will walk you through the different techniques you can employ to allow documents to be imported or exported from your iOS application.

Creating the Project

Preserving User Preferences in Android Applications

weimenglee — Mon, 25 Jul 2011 16:32:04 +0000

Often you need to store personalized information for each user of your application. For example, your application may require users to logon to a secure server for authentication. In this case, the user needs to supply his credentials, such as a login name and a password. The first time the user uses your application this information will be entered by the user, but subsequently it would be useful for your application to “remember” this information somewhere so that it can save the user the trouble of entering the same information every time he uses your application.

Device Diversity

ronan — Thu, 07 Jul 2011 11:08:36 +0000

As dotMobi brings DeviceAtlas to the cloud Ronan Cremin, Director of Engineering at dotMobi, charts the increasing complexity of the device landscape for developers in the first of two pieces looking at device fragmentation.

In the beginning the web was a much simpler place. By the time the web was becoming a mainstream media in the late 1990’s there was only one device through which you accessed it: the humble desktop PC, running one of just a handful of browsers.

Responding To Inbound SMS Messages

mokil — Fri, 25 Feb 2011 09:50:52 +0000

In our last article, we created the basis of a messaging system, allowing us to receive inbound messages using keywords and shortcodes. We’ve also previously seen how we can send SMS messages. It’s time to bring everything together and create a simple messaging system that can process inbound SMS messages and send back responses to those messages.

The Current System

Web Access in Windows Phone 7 Apps

weimenglee — Fri, 07 Jan 2011 18:02:25 +0000

In previous articles, I have shown how easy it is to get started in Windows Phone 7 programming using Visual Studio 2010 and the Windows Phone Developer Tools. In this third installment of the series, I will continue the exploration of Windows Phone development. This time I will focus on one key development topic: Web access. Unless you are writing a Hello World application, chances are that your application will need to connect to the outside world.

Building Location Service Apps in Windows Phone 7

weimenglee — Wed, 15 Dec 2010 09:39:33 +0000

In my previous article on Windows Phone 7 development, I showed how you can quickly get started using Visual Studio 2010 together with the Windows Phone Developer Tools. In this second article in the series, I will discuss a topic that is garnering a lot of interest in recent years -location services. Location services usually involve two key components - getting your location data and displaying your location on a map. Hence in this article, I will first show you how to display a map in your Windows Phone 7 application and then use the Location Service APIs to obtain your current position.

Receiving SMS Messages via Shortcodes & Keywords

mokil — Mon, 01 Nov 2010 14:31:14 +0000

Back around 1998, more and more billboards started to display some odd messages, along the lines of "Visit us on the web at www.companyname.com". This was a major shift in advertising and gave marketers another avenue to explore. It was, of course, the beginning of the Internet's move from academia to the mainstream, and the proliferation of Web sites seemed to happen almost overnight.

Introduction to Windows Phone 7 Development

weimenglee — Mon, 18 Oct 2010 08:49:50 +0000

By now, you should already have heard of Microsoft's new Windows Phone 7 mobile OS. And while many developers are busy developing for Android and iPhone, Microsoft is hard at work, developing its killer mobile OS that could give the competitors a run for the money. Before you dismiss Microsoft as a serious contender in the mobile space, think again. The new OS is now a total rewrite of the older Windows Mobile platform, and sports many features that you have come to expect of a modern mobile operating system.

DeviceAtlas & jQueryMobile

daniel.hunt — Sat, 16 Oct 2010 06:00:00 +0000

The first Alpha release of jQueryMobile was announced today, to great fanfare, and the mobile web world is already on fire with the thoughts of what this will mean to them.

A little bit of background...

Originally developed by John Resig, jQueryMobile's big brother "jQuery" is now in use by pretty much anyone who implements advanced JavaScript capabilities on their site.

Mobile Apps vs. Mobile Web

ronan — Thu, 07 Oct 2010 12:19:22 +0000

With all of the buzz around apps & app stores it would be easy to assume that mobile apps have unstoppable momentum and that the mobile web is taking a back seat. It's worth taking a step back to see how this is all going to pan out. Will mobile apps dominate completely and overwhelm the mobile web or does the mobile web still stand a chance?

The breadth and diversity of the mobile web

ronan — Thu, 23 Sep 2010 13:19:40 +0000

For a mass medium to really get traction and achieve critical mass it is important that creating content is as easy as consuming it—the growth of the medium tracks the availability of the content creation tools. In the early days of the web hackers used home-grown web servers to serve content and a copy of Vi to author it. It wasn't long before Apache and other web servers eased the job of serving the content but the creation of good web content remained the preserve of experts.

Mobile Web Development & Device Detection

daniel.hunt — Thu, 23 Sep 2010 10:02:06 +0000

Peter-Paul Koch, also known as @ppk, has posted a three part blog-post on the State of mobile web development [ one | two | three ], in response to Mike Rowehl's recent (correct & justified)

The goMobi Challenge is on!

VanceMan — Mon, 20 Sep 2010 09:27:48 +0000

UPDATE:*** Given that it’s been a very hot summer this year, we decided everyone needed a few days to regroup for the goMobi Challenge. Since we want to see just how personalized you can make a goMobi site, we’re giving you a little extra time to show us your stuff. We’ve extended the contest through October 17, 2010.

Calling all app developers - get the recognition you deserve

ruadhan — Tue, 14 Sep 2010 13:52:20 +0000

That's right, Ireland's first and only dedicated apps awards, The Appys, are coming to town. These awards were set up to give the best apps developers the recognition they deserve. The competition is open to all, so if you've developed an app on any platform, or have been involved in the development of an app, then you can enter. The categories are:

Best augmented reality/location services app
Best business solutions app
Best "branded" app
Best gaming app
Best media app
Best social networking app

Handling SMS delivery receipts

mokil — Wed, 01 Sep 2010 15:54:49 +0000

Recently, we looked at how to send SMS messages using a standard HTTP POST-based API. As was intimated at the time, most APIs also allow you to process delivery receipts for the messages you send. This allows you to determine the status of the message, i.e. delivered, failed, expired etc. Let's take a look at how this all works.

Sending SMS Messages - A Quick Recap

DeviceAtlas API 1.4

daniel.hunt — Tue, 31 Aug 2010 09:36:45 +0000

This week was an important one for DeviceAtlas - we finally launched the new 1.4 version of our API!

Why 1.4?

The mobile web is constantly evolving, and with it, device detection needs to evolve too. With significant evolution in device capabilities, and large structural developments in certain device headers, the new DeviceAtlas API provides a highly flexible platform to cater for this growth, both now and well into the future.

Sending SMS from Apps and Webapps

mokil — Tue, 10 Aug 2010 14:27:29 +0000

It’s easy to send SMS messages from any Web site or application, but it’s surprising how few sites/applications actually do this. Integrating SMS into your system gives it something extra, and allows your system to enhance the mobile experience for the user. In this article, we’ll look at how an SMS message can be sent from any system, and at a few providers who offer this functionality.

Choosing an SMS Provider

There are essentially three types of SMS provider:

Mobile Network (e.g. Vodafone, Three)
Aggregator
SMS Messaging Company

The dot conf 2010

daniel.hunt — Thu, 29 Jul 2010 13:36:51 +0000

Last week (22nd July 2010) I was lucky enough to attend the first ever dot conf in the NCI in Dublin, Ireland.

What is the dot conf?
The dot conf is a new web technology conference for anyone who works, rests or plays with the internet. It’s a one day event and it's free. Essentially it's a teddy bears picnic but with internet folk instead of bears.

Testing on Physical Devices Made Easy

mokil — Mon, 19 Jul 2010 14:08:04 +0000

In past articles, we've discussed testing mobile Web sites using browsers, and testing using emulators. Using this combination, along with a solid test plan, should bring you to a point where your mobile site is stable and appears to be working correctly on a number of devices. Ah, but wait; what do I mean by appears to be?

Measuring the Effects of Operator Transcoders

ronan — Wed, 23 Jun 2010 16:59:05 +0000

The issue of mobile-operator transcoders on the mobile web has been hugely controversial. For many iPhone and Android phone owners the negative effects of the transcoders are no longer visible and the issue has dropped off the radar, but they remain a serious problem for those using lower-end devices.

Meet goMobi - A New Content Mobilization Platform

ruadhan — Wed, 23 Jun 2010 15:33:25 +0000

Here in dotMobi we've just launched our latest product. The culmination of months and months of hard work by the dotMobi team has resulted in the release of our spanking new content mobilization platform: goMobi.

You can find all the official blurb over at http://gomobi.info along with some videos of our CEO and CTO talking about the product. What I aim to do here is to give an overview, from a developer's viewpoint, so that you can find out what there is in goMobi to appeal to the developer in you.

A quick introduction

Device Detection in the Cloud: DeviceAtlas Personal

ruadhan — Sat, 19 Jun 2010 14:49:20 +0000

In this article we offer full tutorial on how to use the preview release of the service. So what is DA Personal?

The purpose of DeviceAtlas Personal is to make device detection even easier. The main difference between DA Personal and DeviceAtlas, is that Personal is a Web service. It works as follows: a user visits your Web site on his mobile device. You then forward the User-Agent HTTP request header to the DA Personal service, and the response you receive will contain information about the user's device. That's it!

SMS Bubble UI in iPhone Apps

weimenglee — Mon, 14 Jun 2010 16:50:36 +0000

Users of iPhone are no stranger to the built-in SMS application that displays your messages using cute little bubbles (see Figure 1).

However, this innovative UI feature is not exposed to the iPhone developers - you have to create it yourself if you want to have the same look-and-feel of the SMS application. Creating this UI - which I will call the Bubble UI, allow you to represent information in a conversational style. A good application of this is when you are creating a chat application. Messages exchanged between two persons can be shown in message bubbles.

DeviceAtlas & HTML5

daniel.hunt — Wed, 19 May 2010 12:50:37 +0000

HTML5 is the brand new version of HTML, which contains a number of differences to it's predecessor.

Using the PopoverView in iPad App Development

weimenglee — Thu, 13 May 2010 08:51:12 +0000

In the previous article, we saw how to develop a new type of application known as the Split View-based application on the iPad. And one of the new views introduced for the iPad is the PopoverView, which you had a quick glimpse of it in action in the previous article. In this article, I will show you how you can use the PopoverView in your iPad application, not just in a Split View-based application.

Getting Started with the PopoverView

Developing Split View Based Apps for the iPad

weimenglee — Mon, 19 Apr 2010 11:31:06 +0000

The iPad runs on the same OS used by the iPhone and the iPod touch, which means that developers who are already familiar with iPhone programming are able to quickly write applications for the iPad. In fact, most (if not all) iPhone applications should run without any problem on the iPad, albeit in a smaller frame size, with an option to pixel-double. However, to really make full use of the large size screen afforded by the iPad, you would need to redesign your UI to take into account the extra screen space.

Offline iPhone Web Apps

weimenglee — Thu, 25 Mar 2010 10:56:34 +0000

One of the several features outlined in the HTML 5 specification is the support for Web applications that continue to work while they are offline. This feature is very useful for Web applications because a Web application can be loaded just once and then run offline without needing a persistent Internet connection, making it behave just like a locally installed native application.

Dashcode supports the manifest attribute available in the HTML 5 specifications for offline web applications. And so in this article, you will learn how to write offline iPhone Web applications using Dashcode.

dotMobi company acquired by Afilias

VanceMan — Thu, 11 Feb 2010 16:02:10 +0000

You may have heard – or seen the press release http://www.afilias.info/mobi+acquisition – that dotMobi has been acquired by Afilias.

Location in iPhone Web Apps

weimenglee — Tue, 26 Jan 2010 10:40:49 +0000

One of the key limitations of developing Web applications for iPhone is that you are not allowed to access the hardware on the device via the Web browser. For example, you cannot access the camera on the iPhone; neither can you access the accelerometer. This seriously limits the kinds of applications you can develop on the iPhone. One notable exception, however, is the support for tracking the location of devices, through a combination of GPS, Wi-Fi, and cellular triangulation.

Programming Apple Push Notification Services

weimenglee — Tue, 12 Jan 2010 11:56:55 +0000

One of the key limitations of the iPhone is its constraint on running applications in the background. Because of this, applications cannot keep running in the background when the user switches to another application. So, applications that require a constant state of connectivity (such as social networking applications) will not be able to receive timely updates.

Nexus One: Where is Android at?

ruadhan — Tue, 05 Jan 2010 17:02:30 +0000

With the announcement of the new GooglePhone, which promises to be the best Android device yet and by all early reports at least comparable with the iPhone 3GS, it seems appropriate to stop to take a look around to see where Android is at.

We start with the breakdown of Android Platform distribution, based on access to the Android Market.

Android versions (Source: http://developer.android.com)

Sending SMS with SMPP, Kannel and Java

senthadev@gmail.com — Tue, 08 Dec 2009 11:30:28 +0000

There are many technologies and protocols that can be used to send and receive SMS from an application. This article focuses on sending SMS via a Short Message Service Center (SMSC), with the help of the Kannel SMS gateway.

In order for an application to send a SMS, it generally has to communicate with a Mobile Network Operator (MNO) over the Internet. To understand in more detail consider the following example.

A Media service provider wants to send a program timetable as an SMS to its end customers. The application is running on a Linux based java application server.

Newsletter October 2009

admin — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 15:35:18 +0000

Welcome to the mobiForge newsletter October 2009.

This time:

1. Announcing mobiForge Antenna
2. A Guide to Mobile Emulators
3. Understanding UI in Android
4. The Mobile Web is Dead...
5. mobiForge Shortlisted for Golden Spiders Awards

Understanding User Interface in Android - Part 4: Even More Views

weimenglee — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 12:13:12 +0000

In this final installation of the Android Views series of articles, we shall continue our exploration of another category of views - Menu views, and some additional cool views. The views discussed include:

Context Menu
Options Menu
AnalogClock
DigitalClock
WebView