ronan
Ronan Cremin leads engineering efforts at DeviceAtlas. He focuses on building device intelligence applications, such as the award-winning DeviceAtlas and DeviceAssure products. Mr. Cremin also represents DeviceAtlas at the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and International Telecommunication Union (ITU).
Latest Articles by ronan
Don’t forget the supine surfer
December 10, 2008, by ronan
It's easy to be waylaid by the word "mobile" in "mobile web", to assume that the defining characteristic of mobile web surfer is the fact that they are out and about. Not always so! Sometimes, mobile = not at PC. Remember that "mobile web" often means the "consumed-on-mobile-device web" rather than the "out-and-about web". ... Read More
Transcoding: what are the Viagra, Cialis and “Dear Winner” of HTML tag soup?
December 8, 2008, by ronan
Over the last 6 months or so part of the tech team in dotMobi has been working on Instant Mobilizer, a site mobilizer service to help small businesses dip their toes in the waters of the mobile web. One of the big problems with content transcoding is deciding when it should be applied: if there is little hope of it working well another alternative should be offered. ... Read More
Mowser Publisher Information
June 16, 2008, by ronan
This document is designed to take the place of the Mowser Publisher Wiki that resided at http://pub.mowser.com/. This information has now been moved to a series of pages on mobiForge.The following content in mobiForge is relevant to publishers using mowser to mobilise their content... Read More
Creating mobile web sites using Google App Engine
May 29, 2008, by ronan
Just a quick note to say that we've just published an article on building mobile web applications with Google App Engine, complete with advanced device detection. Check it out on mobiForge. Advanced device detection, meet infinite scalability!... Read More
Creating Mobile Web Sites with Google App Engine
May 29, 2008, by ronan
By now most people have heard of Google's App Engine (GAE). In case you haven't, GAE lets you run your own web applications on Google's extensive network of servers meaning that you can scale your application as traffic demands, with no hardware headaches, no machine provisioning, no LAMP stacks, no Apache configurations... Read More
Server-side predictive text
May 13, 2008, by ronan
We've decided to try an experiment on find.mobi: server-side T9: if you type in a purely numeric query we will try to see if it maps to any common words in the English language, and offer you a link to the search. Thus searching for 46835 will ask you if you meant "hotel" and "7464 8663 " will suggest "ring tone"... Read More
Mobile search: what are people looking for?
April 28, 2008, by ronan
One of the great things about running a mobile search engine (find.mobi ) is that it gives you a direct line of sight into the behaviour of normal users, and their expectations of what is available on the mobile web. One interesting insight we've gained from find.mobi is that the majority of search phrases are navigational in nature... Read More
MMS is a usability disaster
April 25, 2008, by ronan
I can't remember the last time I got an MMS message. Ewan of SMS Text News reminds me why: MMS: Still a piece of shit ... Read More
Viewports on mobile browsers
April 16, 2008, by ronan
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... Read More
A snapshot of the mobile web
March 19, 2008, by ronan
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... Read More
