Mobile Awesomeness Blog

A recent article from Six Revisions provides a nice overview of mobile web design best practices for developers that are relatively new to optimizing for mobile devices. It's definitely worth a read. 

The developers at Opera, who have always been forward-thinking about mobile in their own right, published a fantastic Mobile Web Optimization Guide last week that's worth bookmarking! It's got some really great tips and resource links.

For mobile websites that need to stream content or have particularly high and/or geographically diverse traffic, Mobile CDN is a good thing to look into.

If you have an iPhone-optimized version of your website or web app, check out Apple's brief guide to preparing your web content for the iPad. In most cases it's a better idea to show the full website to iPad browsers instead of the mobile version.

Ironically, Apple doesn't seem to follow their own advice. The guide doesn't work properly when viewing it on the iPad. Oh well, the iPad is still awesome!

This article over at InstantShift.com is a great summary for web designers getting into mobile. The article also makes mention of Mobile Awesomeness!

Mobi10 is a hosted service that simplifies the process of creating a mobile-optimized website by providing some nice testing and WYSIWYG tools for customers. Pricing ranges from $10-20/month and it looks like their focus is on Apple, Blackberry, Android and Palm devices.

Related services:

• Mobify
• MoFuse
• Wapple

Have you ever wondered what percentage of your website traffic is visiting from a mobile device? Wonder no more with Percent Mobile. 

Google recently announced much better support in Analytics for tracking mobile websites. Here is a step-by-step tutorial on how to install it.

Wapple is another premier mobile framework at the disposal of web developers these days. The great thing about frameworks is that you can be sure your mobile site works across thousands of devices, and device detection should be spot on. It's a great way to go if you are limited on time, budget or desire to do extensive mobile device/browser testing.

Wapple offers three public business packages, ranging from roughly $150 USD/month to roughly $1,400 USD/month. Free trials are available, and for developers they have a program that gives unlimited access to their API for free. So it's definitely on the high end of the price spectrum, but they have some serious technology to backup the price.

The 3 Wapple products are slightly confusing at first, because all of them are included with any package. Canvas is a GUI, which allows creation of a mobile website using simple drag-and-drop tools. Coders wanting control of their own HTML/CSS won't be disappointed either.

The other two products, Architect and Exhibit are what separates Wapple from other mobile frameworks. Architect allows developers to mobilize their current website or application using Wapple's proprietary, XML-based language, called WAPL.

The beauty of using WAPL markup is when it calls on the other product, Exhibit. Exhibit profiles the device by handset, hardware/firmware, browser, carrier and more to deliver your website content in a form that is truly optimized for the device, whether the output is WML, CHTML, XHTML or HTML. You create ONE site, and Exhibit optimizes it for every available device with the most advanced profiling available. It eliminates the need for extensive testing across various mobile handsets and browsers.

While Wapple is more expensive than it's counterparts Mobify and MoFuse, their advanced tools give developers great control over the user experience, with minimal time invested. I'd like to see SSL security available as an option for all accounts, and MANY more page impressions included with an account. Paying $150/month for only 500 page views per day won't cut it for most websites or applications. All that aside, it is a really well-done platform that is certainly worth a look.

Mobify is another fantastic platform available to website creators that does most of the heavy lifting if you want a quality mobile experience for your users. Thanks to mobile platforms like this one (others listed here), gone are the days when you have to hire a mobile expert or web developer to have a mobile site that works across various platforms.

What differentiates it from platforms like MoFuse (reviewed last week) is flexibility with regards to the design and layout. Although Mobify is hosted, it gives you complete control over the mobile stylesheets. Combine the style control with an extremely helpful interface that makes it painfully simple to select what elements you want as part of the mobile site, and you can see why major websites are taking notice and using this platform. Among them are A List Apart, McDonald's and Spin Magazine, among others.

Like most other players in this space, they have a basic free account, and I believe monthly pricing as well. I would expand on the pricing, but it was surprisingly nowhere available on the website. For an introduction to the platform, check out this video:

View more screencasts here.