PavingWays

I met Cameron after his first conference talk in Europe at the @media conference in London in June 2006. He was talking about the same thing there - Mobile Web Design - and I really liked his presentation. Since then we both kept on doing research in the mobile area and Cameron just released his first book and it’s a great one!

Early chapters entitled “Mobile Web Fundamentals” give a great amount of background information on the mobile web market and usage, the concept of being “mobile” (it’s not the device, but the user that’s mobile) and on the fundamental limitations in this area (screen size, input methods, carriers etc.).

I especially liked the focus on what I really feel is important about the mobile web, even though it is in contrast to the newest developments in the browser and handset market: it’s not about bringing the desktop web to mobile devices, people, it’s about creating mobile web applications that serve people’s needs while they’re on the go!

Browser differences are also thoroughly covered in Cameron’s book and even Microformats are mentioned as a possible way to solve context-related problems in browsers, i.e. adding contextual info to things like contacts and phone numbers in the markup, so the device knows what do do with this type of content (add it to the address book/call the number).

The main section is divided into four approaches how to implement mobile web sites and applications: do nothing, reduce images and styling, use handheld stylesheet, create mobile-optimized content. It also covers topics like testing and validation as well as advanced techniques, such as SVG and Ajax (I’m mentioned in a book, yeehaa!). The final chapters contain things like promoting your mobile content, dotmobi and semacodes.

Overall the book is an excellent summary of the current status in mobile web design and a great resource for anybody who thinks of creating a mobile version of his existing website or better yet, a new, web based, mobile service (that should actually be almost everybody in the web design/development community).

The book is a must-buy and it is available as a PDF at the book’s homepage: http://www.mobilewebbook.com.

I want to recommend a book by Jeremy Keith, called “Bulletproof Ajax“. I recommend it for several reasons. First of all, the book is an excellent introduction to Ajax programming in general and everybody starting to write JavaScript code to do Ajax should read it before touching any of the libraries out there.
Secondly the book is especially suited to anybody who is interested in writing Ajax powered apps on mobile devices and constrained browsers. After all the book is all about making JavaScript code bulletproof and that’s exactly what you need to do if you are facing browser constraints, flaky implementations of JavaScript engines and a hugely fragment environment overall.

Jeremy’s book is suited for the beginner, but also for the seasoned developer, since it makes it clear what it all comes down to: writing clean code that gracefully degrades (Jeremy calls his method to do this Hijax) if the application runs in a less-than-ideal environment. There are many best practices and useful code snippets contained and topics such as JSON, web services and accessibility.

The book is not entirely new but nevertheless a must-buy, it was published New Riders Press in February 2007 and I urge everybody interested in Ajax to grab a copy, e.g. at Amazon.

A week after our visit to Mobile Monday we attended the Webmontag in Munich. Webmontag is a great platform to meet interesting people from the web business. Organized by Martin Szugat and taking place at the amiando office the event was quite the opposite from the Mobile Monday because of its very relaxed atmosphere and start-up minded people attending.

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We have been at this week’s MobileMonday in Munich, Germany. Being the first “real” MobileMonday for us, except the Mobile 2.0 Event in San Francisco last November, and being the first MobileMonday in Munich at all it has been a premiere in many ways. The overall topic of the evening was “Next Generation Mobile Internet” and it sounded like the perfect topic for PavingWays.

Here’s a quick review of the event from our perspective.

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Additional to co-moderating the Vendor PechaKucha Night at the XML Conference in Boston I also co-presented a talk on Mobile AJAX and the Mobile Web in general at the XML 2006 conference in Boston together with Michael Smith from Opera.

This was my first presentation at a conference except a lightning demo at this year’s XTech conference about CarCulatr (price finder for used cars to demo mobile AJAX using Opera Platform) and I have to say it could not have been worse…

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We went to Boston for the XML Conference 2006 from December 5-7. I got invited by Michael Smith from Opera to do a co-presentation together with him and so I prepared a talk on the Mobile Web and XML, mostly focusing on Mobile AJAX, but more on that in a separate post.

The first day of the conference featured a Vendor PechaKucha Night, which Michael had proposed to the conference committee and which he moderated together with me. I want to share some insights to this experience here.

The concept of Pecha Kucha is pretty simple - it is a special type of presentation where every speaker brings 20 slides and gets 20 seconds to present every slide. This results in 6 minutes and 40 seconds of presentation time and thus helps to keep the audience interested - add the fun the audience has when the presenter runs out of time on a slide and some free beer sponsored by JustSystems and you have an interesting and funny night.
Many of the presenters handed in their slides in the last half hour before the presentations started, there were also some last-minute changes to the order of presenters. As a result the first presentation started and ended after 10 seconds, because the presenter had handed in the wrong slides - we continued with the second presenter - it was really funny.

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We kicked off our stay in San Francisco and the Silicon Valley with the Mobile 2.0 event organized by the folks that normally organize the Mobile Monday here in the Bay Area. There were around 300 people attending, the location was great as was the lunch and the free drinks afterwards.
So what does Mobile 2.0 stand for? As Dan Appelquist described it, the concept or the idea behind this term is: “mobile web connected apps on the mobile platform”.

The whole event, apart from the keynotes, was held in panel discussions with panelists also taking some time for presenting on their own. The most interesting topics for us obviously was everything related to the mobile web and to browser based applications of which there were not many to be seen. The highlights were the presentations and demos of:

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There are many new mobile services appearing on the web almost everyday. Here on PavingWays we are trying to keep up to date and we will review selected services from time to time. We will start with tiggdo.com.

What is tiggdo?
On tiggdo.com you can create your personal phone’s homepage with services that provide information or news you require. Right now there are already a couple of services available, e.g. RSS feeds, maps, traffic reports, weather, stock quotes, job search etc. For all available services check out the about page on tiggdo.com
tiggdo.com is free to use and if you are an developer, you can ask the tiggdo team to add your service.
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