One of the new goodies we developed for mobiForge was our Vertical Search feature. This search replaces the stock search functionality bundled with the CMS that mobiForge runs on. If you haven’t tried it out yet, in a nutshell, Vertical Search combines mobiForge search results with relevant results from various other mobile resource sites from around the web. (For example, see results for keywords touch screen here and check out the side panels).
Last week, with the Amazon EC2 compute cloud (and Cyril) providing the horse-power, we beefed up our search index by crawling many of the developer sites that we’ve listed in our Directory. When we launched, we were pulling results from Vodafone Betavine, and WMLProgramming. Now we include results from Forum Nokia, W3C, devCentral, Mobile Monday, and a whole bunch of other sites listed in the Directory. We also pull back device results from DeviceAtlas to provide fast access to the properties of any devices you might want to know more about. The result: a one stop shop for a mobile-tailored search, with results coming from all the sites we think are important to mobile web users and developers. We aim to add all the resource sites in our directory – let us know if you think there are others that might be useful to add.
UA-WTF
Another great tool we added last week is the UA-WTF tool (credit goes to James for the hard work on this one). If you ever have a UA string you need to identify, or that you are just plain curious about, then this is definitely worth bookmarking. Enter a UA string into the form on this page and with a bit of AJAX magic, properties of matching devices are pulled in from DeviceAtlas, as you type. It also highlights the portion of the UA string that was matched, and that which was not.
We hope you will find these tools useful – let us know what you think!
