Mobile Web Development research
I’ve been doing some WAP development this week, which has been an opportunity to learn about a new area that I’ve not previously looked into in much detail. Luckily my client only wants WAP2.0, so I’ve not had to learn WML, just XHTML-MP, so the learning curve has been pretty shallow, but I thought it would be helpful to list some of the resources I’ve found useful.
Cameron Moll’s Mobile Web Design book was the first place I turned, and through there found both a concise summary of the issues to consider when developing for mobile, and some useful links for development and testing—the W3C’s Mobile Best Practices combined with some alternative recommendations give you a good baseline to work from. I also found this series of mobile development tutorials useful.
When it comes to testing, there are a few emulators online:
- The dotMobi emulator has two phones, but wasn’t working when I tried it
- Opera have an online version of Opera Mini that is pretty good
- Mimic also offers two different handsets, albeit one Japanese
- I installed the SmartPhone Emulator—the demo version gives you five minutes at a time, which is enough to quickly test your designs
- And I’d probably use iPhoney if I didn’t already have a real one ;)
Long-time readers of Cameron Moll will probably remember the original research he did into mobile rendering; he published some mobile tips and techniques on the back of that in 2005.
Finally, a colleague sent me links to a presentation by Heidi Pollock (ex-Yahoo!, advisor on Twitter Mobile) from Future of Web Apps last year, which is great; it really gives you a feeling for the impossibility of getting an identical experience across hundreds of mobile browsers:
If you’ve got any mobile development tips to share, comments are open.
Technorati tags: mobile mobile web cameron moll heidi pollock iphone
Bookmark this article with del.icio.us
Previously: Reading List 2007
Next: New applications a-go-go