Mobile Awesomeness Blog

Fennec, otherwise known as "mobile Firefox", is on the way! Recently Mozilla released an early developer alpha (testing only for now) of the browser, and it's great to welcome a quality, open source mobile browser to the scene!

Currently you can install Fennec on your local Mac, PC or Linux box, and it also runs on Nokia N810 devices. I installed the Mac version on my own, and it's pretty rough. But they told me it would be, and this should evolve into a really nice, standards-compliant mobile web browser in the future. Keep an eye out for it!

There's a new mobile javascript framework on the block, which will join popular frameworks like iui. It is called jQTouch, and as you might imagine, it's a jQuery plug-in just for mobile WebKit browsers, like the one on the iPhone and iPod Touch. Visit the website and you can signup for email updates as the framework grows.

PhoneGap is an ambitious open source project that strives to help developers build platform-independent mobile applications using HTML and Javascript. For any web developer, this is music to our ears! And the beautiful thing is ... it works. This framework is a game-changer in the iPhone and mobile web development space.

Writing anything further simply would not do this project justice, so watch this video and learn about it in their words:

Recently we were sent a new mobile resource that has a really interesting business model, and could be a huge benefit to developers not wanting to spend days optimizing for all the various mobile handsets.

The site is called Mobile Elements. Basically you create a website using standard XHTML, then call their various APIs, which will optimize your code for mobile handsets based on their extensive device database of literally thousands of phones.

The service also gives you the ability to override any of the device profiles in order to make your site display perfectly. Although a little pricey for most websites right now, we think it's a wicked cool idea. 

Mobile stylesheets and mobile browser detection is all well and good. We can all agree it is easier to implement, and it's better than nothing. But in 2009 it is simply not enough if you want a high success rate with users.

What's the problem? Well, there are 2:

1. Mobile phone networks (for the most part) are not fast enough. Although you can make a site look great with a mobile stylesheet, it still takes seemingly forever to download the full page content as if it were being displayed in a computer browser.

2. Not everyone has an unlimited data plan. Don't force them to download 250kb of data when all they need to see is 25kb of it. Many mobile users still pay by the kilobyte or megabyte.

In Jacob Nielsen's recent article about mobile web usability in 2009, he makes the case for having a separate mobile website all together. He lists the reasons above, along with some other compelling information collected from their usability tests.

If you are about to take on a mobile website project, you should seriously consider the benefits of building a 100% separate version. Your audience will thank you!