Mobile

Digg API Contest Finalist: A mobile interface for Digg in FlashLite 2.x. DiggMob displays the popular stories from a category, allows reading the teaser, and can direct the phone browser to the full article. Preferences are saved to the phone for easy entrance after the first run. By: Brian McMurray (bmcmurray)

Now that I'm in the Top 10 it's up to the users to vote for their favorites by digging the article until May 31!

read more | digg story

I have just submitted my application for the Digg API Contest: diggMob

diggMob is a FlashLite 2.x program which allows those of us with capable cellphones to feed our Digg.com addictions. Now you can get the most popular articles from most of the main Digg categories while on the go.

I'm not a huge fan of FlashLite 1.1. I've been playing around with it for the last few days in a mobile development class I'm taking, and I find myself really just waiting to move on to FlashLite 2.0 or something else entirely.

It isn't that FlashLite 1.1 is bad its just different. And inconsistent. I'm very glad that Adobe (Macromedia at the time) worked in what of the dot syntax they could, but I find myself wishing they had done more.

Saw this article this morning on The Register. Microsoft is unveiling a new mobile browser, Deepfish, which they plan will make viewing webpages on mobile devices more like being on a desktop. This will work by loading a "thumbnail" of the webpage and then allowing you to "zoom in" to the area you want to see. Supposedly Microsoft is saving on how much data will be downloaded by only loading the content you want to see. Perhaps I'm just too much of a standardista, but do we really need this? Microsoft claims this will alleviate the need for designers and developers to create a specific handheld stylesheet, and sure, it will, but isn't this getting away from the entire point of CSS and standards-based XHTML? Not to mention that this browser will only run on Microsoft powered PDAs and phones. The majority of cellphone users aren't using Windows Mobile devices, so what about them? They're screwed.

It's already bad enough that Pocket IE loads both the screen stylesheet and the handheld stylesheet. Then you get other devices like the Blackberry which broadcast that they are a desktop computer so they don't ever load the handheld stylesheet. Add into that the sordid state of built-in browsers on most phones with their poor CSS implementation and Opera Mini's built-in overrides and the mobile web is already a mess.

The Web is perhaps the greatest medium for content. It doesn't behave, however, like print and TV. For years, we as designers and developers have had to fight trying to force a square peg into a round hole. When big software companies do something like Deepfish, all we're doing is taking a miter to the round hole and slowly cutting it out into a square, when what we should be doing is finding a way to turn our square peg into a circle peg.

An excellent interactive artist named Paul Catanese visited Bradley University on Thursday. He was part of this year's set of Visual Voices lectures, and his visit was excellent for a large number of reasons.

Paul is much like me, in that he teaches in the field of multimedia. We swapped notes on techniques in web design classes. (He was quite impressed with Chad's idea to use a del.icio.us account to keep track of pertinent web links.) We discussed quite a few issues in teaching web design:

1. In the span of only two classes, we must take folks who are used to the drag and drop ease of Flash, and show them that to truly write standards-compliant sites, you need to have a good understanding of the HTML code of a website. (Luckily, we've begun to introduce HTML and basic web design earlier into Bradley University's curriculum.)
2. Paul said that he'd love to be able to teach PHP and MySQL in his top-level web design course, but that he just feels that there isn't enough time.
3. I was showing my class some tips on producing sitemaps and wireframes in OmniGraffle when Paul came into my web design course. If you own a Macintosh, you owe it to yourself to at least download OmniGraffle, since there it a 20-node limited version available. There are excellent free stencils available to produce wireframes, UML diagrams, network layouts, and hundreds of other types of graphical documents. Paul showed me Graffletopia, which has literally hundreds of free documents and stencils available for download.

Then Paul left for a little bit as I went to gather the stable of mobile phones for my special topics course, and I offered to let him speak for quite awhile, since Paul has done some neat things with blending gaming appliances like the Game Boy Advance into his artwork.

Google has recently unveiled their new Google Apps Premier Edition for offices and there has been a lot of buzz around it. Will web applications replace desktop applications? Is the "fat client" useless?

It's an interesting idea, and as a web application developer, it could mean huge things for me. I don't think, however, that we're going to see web applications really take over and completely replace hard-drive installed desktop applications. I think there are some applications which could exist just fine run completely as web apps, but I think there are a lot of applications which have the potential or will become hybrids which exist accessibly both "virtually" over the web and also on your desktop.

Convergence is the what I'd like to see. A seemless transition between the desktop office computer and my cellular web PDA or my microlaptop. While efforts like Google's take the pipedream of an integrated virtual office and make it a reality; their apps, outside of Gmail, really aren't available anywhere but on a conventional computer.

This is where I think platforms like Flex/Apollo and OpenLaszlo/Orbit are going to shine. Minor differences aside, Flex/Apollo and OpenLaszlo/Orbit are essentially the same and I wouldn't be surprised if eventually their formats become interchangable. Flex/Apollo will allow us to push to the desktop quickly and also straight to the web as well. There's the same sort of convergence that Google Apps is providing. OpenLaszlo has partnered with Sun's Orbit to push to J2ME, which most cellphones (especially the beefier PDAs and smartphones) can handle, not to mention that if you're careful, some Laszlo projects are running in FlashLite 2, as well.

With such platform independence, these systems are going to open up myriad possibilities for convergence applications.

So while I think Google Apps Premier Edition (or even just Google Apps) looks great and might stand a chance at challenging long-time desktop alternatives like Microsoft Office; I think that ultimately, Google hasn't gone far enough to make these processes truly convergent.

The mobile web is still pretty new. There are a lot of different browsers and not a lot of standardization across them. It's something like the browser wars of Netscape v. Internet Explorer from 10 years ago. Only on steroids.

I'm no stranger to dealing with cross-browser compatibility, but when you start talking about supporting mobile browsers, support just gets insane. Pocket IE renders completely different than Opera Mini and both render completely different than a phone's built-in browser, and then different phones have different built-in browsers. And none of them are specifically targetable, like IE for the desktop is (similar to how we cannot really target IE/Mac).

Even worse is laxidasical support for the handheld media type for CSS. Pocket IE uses *both* the Screen and Handheld types, but defaults to Screen, whereas some devices like Blackberry's just pretend to be desktop computers but their browsers hardly support anything. It's really quite aggravating.

And then we get into the actual accessibility of the browsers, or rather, lack thereof. Opera Mini doesn't support accesskey declarations. This isn't a huge problem, but when you consider how long some websites can become when forced to only be 176 pixels wide, losing the ability to just hit a key on the phone and skip past parts of the content sucks. Of course, that also assumes that named anchor links work, which some browsers (Opera Mini I'm looking at you again) don't support.

The only hope we have is for people to create logical, symantic websites that degrade well.

Hopefully the next few years will show some sort of standardization occuring across the myriad mobile phones and browsers in how they interpret and interact with the web. Mobile web is still in its infancy, but it will grow up quickly.