Hello, and thanks for stopping by. I’m very pleased to be here on the mobiForge blog after taking a short break from having a platform from which to speak about mobile web issues, concerns and answers for developers. After having spent over 8 years behind the helm of the developer program at Openwave (a.k.a Phone.com a.k.a. Unwired Planet), I find my self engaging in new challenges.
I am excited to now be involved with the Mobile and Devices team at Adobe Systems Inc. Adobe enters into the mobile space from a unique perspective. A market leader in web development tools, technology, services, and solutions, Adobe has been working for many years to address the needs of mobile developers. Mobile initiatives and products reach across the breadth of Adobe, from image and graphic editing to video production, to web development and content authoring to interactive application development.
Despite the fact that my new role takes me out of the direct line of fire of the developer community, I have a scope of responsibilities that ultimately will impact the community as Adobe technology continues to proliferate on handsets globally. I plan on sharing with you my thoughts and insights about what developers can accomplish today when developing for mobile, not limited by or specifically related to technology or solutions available from Adobe.
That said, let's get on with it…
[On my soap box here]
One of the perpetual challenges for the mobile web developer is determining what device features can be relied upon and when can one expect new features to reach enough penetration to be viable enough to implement for. This is a question that each developer has to independently determine based how any given feature or technology might apply to his or her site, and there are no universal truths. If you feel comfortable tightly constraining the number of devices that can use your site/application then you’ve got a tremendous amount of flexibility in what to implement when. On the flip side if you’re trying to reach as large an audience as possible across a variety of devices, you have to think about progressive feature deployment and graceful degradation. Another way to slice the problem is to determine the importance of any given feature to your application, and limit the handsets you serve based on that.
The sad or painful reality is that many folks still do not understand the ground truth, but dear reader, that is clearly not you! By simply taking the time to join us here at mobiForge you already know that developing for the mobile web has it’s own specific set of challenges well beyond what it means to develop sites for the desktop.
Many of us in the technology world have a tendency to skew towards early adopter status, which also has a tendency to put us outside the mainstream of the consumer market when it comes to not only our expectations for device features, but our tolerance for faults, failures, incompatibilities and latency. We want to trust that things will or should work, and are willing to put up with some degree of pain to get at what we want. ‘Real’ end users are not so likely to be as forgiving. So that said, what can you do today?
Here’s what I think:
- Develop a slimmed down, light weight version of your site to make available as a mobile experience (following the mobiForge developer guidelines and stlye guides are a great way to start)
- Make the ‘complete web’ version of your site available for users who want it (or think they want it). Even if you’re doing device detection, provide the ability for the end user to override or do an end run around the detection.
- Serve your mobile experience off of your regular, published domain by doing device detection. That is serve the content you create for item 1 above off of www.yoursite.com so that the default mobile experience is quick to load and simple to navigate
- Explore emerging technologies but don’t anticipate their wide spread adoption until 12-18 months after their first deployment. Another way to think about this is that the functionality of the average user’s phone is going to be 12-18 months behind what you’re reading about in the media today
Remember, while according to the media hype the iPhone changed the purchasing behavior for consumers (e.g. they buy an iPhone because of it’s data features), those iPhones represent less that 0.1% of those over 1 Billion phones in peoples hands today. That’s not to say that it’s not a valid and important market for you (again, you have to make that call for your own purposes), but please don’t expect that everyone is walking around with that power in their pocket. While there is much hubub about 'full web browsing' I posit that delivering a tailored for mobile experience based on the points above will satisfy your end users and provide the type of experience that brings them back.
I’m looking forward to an ongoing discussion with you and hopefully can provide meaningful and valuable insights to assist with your mobile web development. In the coming weeks and months I'll be sharing with you my take on industry developments, thoughts about how (and when) to leverage emerging technologies, and sprinkling in some code along the way. Drop me a line and let me know what you think, or if there is anything specific you’d like me to talk about.
Enjoy!
Ron
