Ruadhán O'Donoghue
Web & mobile developer & consultant
Editor & contributor at mobiForge
Author of "AMP: Building Accelerated Mobile Pages"
Runs westerntechnological.ie
Latest Articles by Ruadhán O'Donoghue
You’ve been throttled, but don’t stop browsing!
December 19, 2014, by Ruadhán O'Donoghue
With the roll-out of LTE networks across the world over the past few years, and all the associated excitement about super high-speed mobile connections, it can be easy to forget that slow-to-grindingly-slow is the normal connection speed across large parts of the world. In Asia Pacific, for example—the world’s fastest growing mobile market—65% of all connections were 2G only in 2013... Read More
M-commerce insights: Retailers in action
December 5, 2014, by Ruadhán O'Donoghue
For the third part of our m-commerce series (see part 1, part 2), we decided to look more closely at two websites that have chosen different approaches to mobile. One, Maplin, has chosen an adaptive approach without a unique mobile URL, while the other, Currys, went with an RWD approach. Both are electronics retailers based out of the United Kingdom... Read More
M-commerce insights: Mobile users and context
November 25, 2014, by Ruadhán O'Donoghue
Our last article on m-commerce looked at the effect of performance on conversions for e-retailers. In this second part, we take a look at how user context is used to optimise and adapt content by major e-retailers, and how this can affect conversions... Read More
M-commerce insights: Give users what they want, and make it fast
November 19, 2014, by Ruadhán O'Donoghue
With Black Friday fast approaching, and this year’s predicted to be the busiest since 2006, we thought it an opportune time to take an in-depth look at e-commerce – specifically, at mobile e-commerce (m-commerce). M-commerce is a strand of online retail that’s nudging close to taking up 20% of total annual online sales; appreciating its business significance, and coming up with a viable mobile retail strategy, is, thus, crucial... Read More
Android forks: Why Google can rest easy. For now
October 9, 2014, by Ruadhán O'Donoghue
With worldwide sales of phones based on Android forks on the up, and with big cloud competitor Amazon consolidating its move into the Android-based OS space race with the release of the Fire Phone, it’s time to look at Android forks. What is a fork? When is a fork not really a fork? And what do they mean for users and developers? What is an Android fork?... Read More
Mobile-friendliness 101: Adding click-to-call links to a website
August 12, 2014, by Ruadhán O'Donoghue
Creating a site that works well across all devices can be a daunting task. However, there are some simple things that you can do that can have a big impact on a site's usability. Click-to-call is one such feature: it's simple, effective, and very easy to implement... Read More
Geo-sorting: Using Device Geolocation to Sort by Distance
July 22, 2014, by Ruadhán O'Donoghue
In this article we take a look at how location information can be used to sort a list of items on a webpage. This might be useful for local search results; for example 'Restaurants near me' type searches, or for sorting a predefined list of locations such as a company's office locations in order of distance from the user... Read More
Ad targeting in a multi-screen world
June 20, 2014, by Ruadhán O'Donoghue
The latest whitepaper to be published by dotMobi takes an in-depth look at some of the technologies and issues involved in implementing real-time ad exchange networks in a multi-device environment. It takes us on a journey through the mobile ad service chain, highlighting where device-diversity and detection can be leveraged to get the most out of ad targeting in a multi-screen world... Read More
Faulty redirects, Google, and you
June 5, 2014, by Ruadhán O'Donoghue
Google has, for some time now, recommended various guidelines that should be observed when redirecting visitors from a desktop site to a mobile site. One such recommendation is that visitors who request a specific page on the desktop site should be redirected to the corresponding page on the mobile site, and should not be redirected to the homepage of the mobile site... Read More
Developer Economics: take the survey and win
May 1, 2014, by Ruadhán O'Donoghue
Update: This survey is now closed We've partnered with VisionMobile on its Developer Economics report survey. VisionMobile has been doing a stellar job of producing excellent research into many aspects of the mobile dev industry. Previous reports have charted things like revenue models by screen, platform prioritisation, and HTML5 vs native trends... Read More
