Design & Development
Character Encoding Issues and the Mobile Web
December 5, 2008, by casaise
Character encoding, the binary representation underlying every symbol in documents delivered to mobile devices, is often treated as an afterthought in mobile Web development. Many developers simply rely upon ISO-8859-1; not a bad choice, as this encoding efficiently supports all important Western European languages, has long been available in the mobile and fixed Internet, is widespread among low-end phones, and is the default encoding in the HTTP standard... Read More
The DeviceAtlas API in ASP.NET- Part I (The Basics)
Update - 10/02/2009 We have just released version 2.3 of our API as a Beta with a whole host of new features that make integrating it into any ASP.NET website much much easier. The download comes with extensive samples and documentation to help you get started. Find out more... DeviceAtlas is the world's most comprehensive database of mobile device information. The database comes with an API that developers can use to determine the capabilities of devices browsing their website and in so doing adapt their content to make it suitable for the user’s context.Part I of this tutorial will assist ASP.NET developers in learning the basics of the API and how to use it... Read More
Mobile Web Design: Getting to the Point – Part II
November 10, 2008, by paulca
Following on from part I, I want to put into practice the principles that I isolated by looking at GMail, Twitter and Facebook. I’ll apply the principles to one of the most common of web applications: the online store. I want to look at three typical online store pages and then go through some ideas about how best to apply mobile web design principles to the pages. I'll go through the process of building the site from the ground up... from simple sketches through wireframing and the final design... Read More
Mobile Web Design: Getting to the Point – Part I
October 29, 2008, by paulca
This is the first in a two part look at mobile web design. In part 1, I focus on three current 'big guns' of mobile web applications and look at how they solve the problems of mobile web application design by getting to the point. In part 2 I'll get practical and run through a series of steps to design a small sample mobile eCommerce site, applying what was learned in this article... Read More
Adding Location to a non-GPS Phone – Part II
October 20, 2008, by tomsoft
In the first part of this article, we introduced the concept of CellID, and OpenCellID – an open source database of CellIDs that can be used to build location based services, and we created a small program to determine location from CellID information. This time, we will go a step further and display a map on a mobile device, using the open source "OpenStreetMap", and we position the map using the device's location. This will deliver an experience similar to that offered by the Google Maps for Mobile "MyLocation" feature, and will run on top of JavaME... Read More
