dotMobimobiThinkingmobiForgemobiReadyDeviceAtlasgoMobi

Mobile Tips

On this page we provide an archive of our mobile tips. Tips are short & simple pieces of advice designed to help you improve your development effectiveness, one bite-sized chunk at a time.

If you have a tip to share, please submit it here and it will be added to the list.

  • - Posted by ruadhan on 17 Dec 2009
  • Use Google Analytics for Mobile Tracking
  • Google Analytics can track traffic to your mobile website from all web-enabled devices, whether or not the device runs JavaScript. This is made possible by adding a server side code snippet to your mobile website. To install the code snippet, select "Advanced" from the "Add new profile" setup wizard within Google Analytics, and select the radio button, "A site built for a mobile phone". PHP, Perl, JSP and ASPX sites all supported. Simply copy the code displayed into every page you want tracked and you will have harnessed the awesome power of Google Analytics to track your mobile visits!
  • - Posted by ruadhan on 14 Oct 2009
  • Can't touch this!
  • Network operators often install transcoding technologies on their WAP Gateways. Transcoding proxies attempt to automatically transform content to make it more suitable for mobile access. However, since this is an automatic process the result to your site can often be sub-optimal. If you have developed a mobile-optimized site, then your content is already be fit for mobile consumption; transcoding it may well ruin the mobile user-experience that you worked hard to create.
  • - Posted by daniel.hunt on 08 Oct 2009
  • Think mobile
  • When you're working on a site or app for a mobile device, always remember to think mobile! Overuse of stylesheets, images, ads or even content can be detrimental to your cause, so follow these quick guidelines to make sure your mobile masterpiece is fully accessible to your users on the move: Don't overdo it with images - your users will be much more likely to return if they don't have to download 2MB of images on every page
  • - Posted by ronan on 06 Oct 2009
  • Opera Mini on desktop
  • Opera Mini can be run on the desktop also. This is very useful for testing how your sites will work on this browser, something that is becoming increasingly important as Opera Mini gains popularity. This is not a simulator or emulator -- it's the full Opera Mini running in a J2EE container: run Opera Mini in your desktop browser.
  • - Posted by ruadhan on 28 Sep 2009
  • WML on desktop browsers
  • If you really MUST write WML pages, and you want to test on desktop browsers during development, unless you are using Opera, you will quickly learn that your desktop browser can't display WML, and that it will offer to download the page instead. But since you want to see if it renders okay, this is not so useful... A couple of remedies: Use Opera - it has no problem displaying WML Get the WMLBrowser add-on for Firefox - it will kick in for WML pages
  • - Posted by ronan on 23 Sep 2009
  • Moderation
  • If you find that you are up all night coding mobile web apps, and you barely know your spouse any more, hold back a bit on the mobile development and go outside and look at the sky and the trees. They're nice. It's possible that the world will wait for your app.
  • - Posted by ronan on 23 Sep 2009
  • Screen ruler
  • JR Screen Ruler (Windows) is a very handy tool for checking the exact pixel size of stuff on your screen, and for setting up your browser window to be a particular pixel size for rough-and-ready testing (see tip #3).
  • - Posted by ronan on 23 Sep 2009
  • Firefox profiles are a mobile web developer's friend
  • You can save a lot of time on mobile testing if you create a Firefox profile that mimics a phone. Change the default font to something that looks like a phone font (try Tahoma) Change the default font size to something that gives approximately the same number of words per line as a mid-range phone Change the browser window width to (say) 240px Change the default home page to your list of mobile links (see tip #1) If you do all of this you get a really crude but effective approximation of what an average phone user will see.
  • - Posted by ronan on 23 Sep 2009
  • Safari developer menu
  • Apple's Safari browser has a Developer menu that is very useful for mobile developers. Enable it from the "Advanced" tab in Preferences. Once you've done this you get access to some very useful things: Change UA string to iPhone or iPod touch Web inspector – a really useful way to debug page loading issues and check resource sizes
Previous
12