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
LBS in Opera Mini?
February 22, 2008, by ronan
Random thought: if Google can manage to make cell ID-based location information work in its J2ME map applications, couldn't Opera do the same with Opera Mini?... Read More
New features in find.mobi
February 21, 2008, by ronan
Now that MWC has passed and we're temporarily freed of the metabolism it imposes on us (and the entire industry), it's time to report on what we've been up to. We've been adding some new features to find.mobi. The biggest new feaure is one that is not immediately apparent to the eye: a much bigger index of mobile web content. We did this with a delicate blend of brute force and subtlety:... Read More
iPhone web design patterns
February 8, 2008, by ronan
We've been putting some more features into find.mobi recently. One of these features is a new skin designed specially for the iPhone. It may seem strange to have an interface that has a version tailored to one particular device but when you think about it makes sense. Our find.mobi interface already had 3 different versions, for high, medium and low resolution phones... Read More
Making your .mobi domain compliant
February 7, 2008, by ronan
The .mobi domain is unlike all other domains in that it has a set of rules that web site owners must follow -- most other domains such as .com, .net, and .org do not have any technical requirements about the content hosted in the domain. The .mobi rules often cause confusion amongst site developers and domain holders so we thought we'd try to help people get their domains to pass muster... Read More
User Agent Switcher config file
December 19, 2007, by ronan
Chris Pederick's User Agent Switcher is an essential Firefox add-on for anybody in the business of creating mobile web sites. We've talked about this before but it is worth mentioning again. This little add-on lets your Firebox (or Flock / Mozilla / Seamonkey) emulate a mobile device in its requests by sending a configurable User-Agent string. I've attached a config file to this post that contains the correct UA strings for a few common phones and the W3C Default Delivery Context. This will save you the trouble of finding the correct strings yourself... Read More
SVG and the Mobile Web
December 5, 2007, by ronan
It has always surprised me that the mobile industry has not made better use of SVG. SVG is very well suited to publishing rich content on mobile devices for a number of reasons: compact, lightweight, open standard, reasonably good device support. We've just published an article on mobiForge that summarises the capabilities of SVG and how best to take advantage of it for mobile web applications.Link... Read More
SVG & Mobile
November 30, 2007, by ronan
It has always surprised me that the mobile industry has not made better use of SVG. On the face of it, SVG is perfectly suited to publishing rich content on mobile devices for a number of reasons:It is a compact way of representing vector graphicsSVG graphics (in keeping with the name) can be scaled to arbitrary sizes, removing some of issues with screen dimension proliferation on mobile devices... Read More
Price barrier to a good mobile web experience is falling
November 20, 2007, by ronan
This weekend while idly browsing around some phone stores in Dublin, I noticed that you can now get a Nokia 6120 for about €170 from a couple of different Irish operators with a prepaid contract. This is the lowest price I've seen for a new S60 phone without a contract. It's not short on features either: HSDPA, 2 cameras (1 of which is 2 mega pixel), video calling, nice screen etc... Read More
Should government web sites be required to have mobile-friendly versions?
November 2, 2007, by ronan
Last week we put together a site that advised on the current status of the fires burning in California (calfire.mobi, read more about it here). We did this partially because we thought it might be useful to people, but also because we think it can serve as an example for other public advisory sites in general. This got me thinking about the broader issue of making information available to the public: should all government / semi-state bodies be required to create mobile-friendly versions of their web sites?... Read More
Find.mobi goes beta
September 28, 2007, by ronan
Those of you who keep a close eye on your web server access logs may have been wondering what the botmobi crawler was doing sniffing about your site. Well now you know: we're pleased to announce that find.mobi is now in public beta... Read More
