Every Mobile Social App Site, Ever · Visual Idiot
This is kinda funny (because it’s kinda true).
This is kinda funny (because it’s kinda true).
A great article by Karen pointing to the real problem with the mobile strategies of so many companies: they are locked in by their CMS.
If you’re based anywhere near Frome in Somerset, get in touch with Cole—he’s putting together a communal device testing lab.
Another call for design-based (rather than device-based) breakpoints in responsive sites.
A great step-by-step tutorial from Brad on developing a responsive site with a Content First mindset.
This is my short explanation of Remy’s explanation of a BBC news article which is an explanation of an academic paper about battery performance of mobile devices when accessing websites.
Albert-László Barabási and Robin Dunbar are among the authors of this paper — it’s the scale-free network equivalent of the Avengers.
An excellent longish-zoom article by Alexis Madrigal with an eerily accurate summation of the current state of the web. Although I think that a lack of any fundamentally new paradigms could be seen as a sign of stabilisation as much as stagnation.
Josh responds to Jakob Nielsen’s audaciously ignorant advice on siloing mobile devices. Josh is right.
Nielsen says his research is based on studies of hundreds of mobile experiences, and I don’t doubt it. But because he’s finding tons of poor mobile websites doesn’t mean we should punt on creating great, full-featured mobile experiences.
I had a chat with the guys from Pingdom about performance’n’stuff. If I sound incoherent, that’s because this is a direct transcription of a Skype call, where, like, apparently I don’t, y’know, talk in complete sentences and yeah.
Taking apps out of phones and embedding them in the world around us …there’s a lot of crossover with what Scott Jenson has been writing about here. Good stuff.
It’s great to see the Future Friendly call-to-arms being expanded on. Here it’s university sites that are being looked at through a future-friendly lens.
Tim has published the results of a whole bunch of testing he did on how different browsers deal with hidden or replaced images.
An oldie but a goodie: this Bagcheck blog post contains a whole bunch of useful links to lists of mobile device testing suites.
An in-depth look at the BBC News mobile testing process. I think it’s great that people are sharing this kind of information.
BBC News are using the mobile subdomain to plant the seed of responsive design. It’s a smart move that’s been really nicely executed.
The hitherto unnoticed connection between the names of Android phones and the names of condoms.
Scott has created a one-stop-shop for documenting browser bugs in mobile devices. Feel free to add to it.
Yet another great post from Brad:
Whenever I think of the concept of “One Web” and providing universal access to information on the web, I tend to break it down into something much simpler: give people what they ask for.
A great examination of the default settings for pixel density and how it can effect reported device width values on mobile.
Andy documents the kinds of symbols being used to represent revealable navigation on mobile.
Mozilla will be supporting H.264 …but they’re not happy about it.
I won’t sugar-coat this pill. But we must swallow it if we are to succeed in our mobile initiatives. Failure on mobile is too likely to consign Mozilla to decline and irrelevance.
A sweet little meditation on the nature of the web and responsive design.
Jason reiterates Bruce’s rallying cry: Performance First!
If you could only do one thing to prepare your desktop site for mobile and had to choose between employing media queries to make it look good on a mobile device or optimizing the site for performance, you would be better served by making the desktop site blazingly fast.
Bruce hammers home the importance of speed and performance on mobile (and frankly, everywhere).
So perhaps some of the time and effort put into media queries, viewports, avoiding scrolling, line length would actually be better employed reducing HTTP requests and optimising so that websites are perceived to render faster.
Luke rounds up some of the alternatives to bitmap-based images—an increasingly important topic for “resolutionary” “retina’ displays (bleurgh!).
Adobe have launched their version of Weinre, the tool that allows you to refresh and debug iOS and Android browser views from your desktop computer.
A great post that discusses exactly what we mean when we talk about “supporting” different browsers.
Some interesting ideas on the commonalities and differences between native apps and the web.
Luke outlines three different solutions to delivering a site to multiple devices.
An acid test for mobile browsers. Point your device at rng.io and it will report on how much or little mobile shininess is available.
The slides from Chris’s presentation on the known unknowns of the web.
DirectGov is switching from a WURFL-driven separate mobile site to a responsive solution. Good move.
Some very interesting results from testing background image downloads contained within media queries or overridden with media queries: it turns out that, in iOS at least, the browser is getting smarter and smarter.
Jonathan gives a thorough overview of the various tools and frameworks out there to help build native, hybrid and mobile web apps. He also shares his decision-making process on when to build what.
That Scott is one smart cookie. He has come up with a workaround (using the accelerometer) for that annoying Mobile Safari orientation/zoom bug that I blogged about recently.
I still want Apple to fix this bug as soon as possible—the fact that such smart people are spending so much effort on ingenious hacks shows just how much of a pain-point this is.
Yes! Yes! Yes!!!
Progressive enhancement is the only sane approach to today’s massively divergent landscape of devices. It can’t be repeated often enough.
Stephanie details all the things we have to know about when designing for today’s broad range of devices: performance, capabilities, form factor, pixel density, and network latency.
These are all good points but I worry that if we just concentrate on the current device landscape, our processes won’t adapt to the future.
Joni points out a great advantage to the mobile-first approach if you choose not to polyfill for legacy versions of IE: you can go crazy with all sorts of CSS3 goodies in the stylesheet you pull in with media queries.
Stephanie focuses on Android but this is a cautionary tale about trying to impose control over what you’re sending to the multitude of mobile devices out there.
Designing to fixed screen sizes is in fact never a good idea…there is just too much variation, even amongst ‘popular’ devices.
A good round-up of what web development means today …and what web developers need to do to keep pace.
Brad is on a roll. He knocks it out of the park again, this time talking about the difference between supporting the huge range of mobile browsers out there compared to trying to optimise for them.
PPK tests the various ways that mobile browsers handle position:fixed, complete with videos.
Some future-friendly musings on mobile from Mozilla and Yahoo.
A great round-up of links and posts relating to the increasingly-important role of content strategy and structured content in our multi-device, responsively-designed online world.
Brent Simmons follows up on that Dave Winer post with some future-friendly thoughts:
If I had to choose one or the other — if I had some crazy power but I had to wipe out either native apps or web apps — I’d wipe out native apps. (While somehow excluding browsers, text editors, outliners, web servers, and all those apps we need to make web apps.)
That’s not the case, though. Nothing has to get wiped out.
I think instead that we’ll see a more tangled future. Native apps will use HTML, CSS, and JavaScript more. Web apps will appear more often on smart phones as launchable apps.
Spot. On.
The great thing about the web is linking. I don’t care how ugly it looks and how pretty your app is, if I can’t link in and out of your world, it’s not even close to a replacement for the web. It would be as silly as saying that you don’t need oceans because you have a bathtub.
A great, great reminder from Brad on the importance of progressive enhancement especially on mobile. There seems to be a real mindset amongst developers working on mobile sites that JavaScript is a requirement for building anything (and there’s a corresponding frustration with the wildly-varying levels of JavaScript support). It ain’t necessarily so!
The video of the opening keynote I delivered at the Breaking Development conference in Nashville earlier this year. It expands on the One Web presentation I gave at DIBI, focusing on the language we use to talk about our approaches to web development.
Well, this is very intriguing: it turns out that the infamous orientation/scale bug in Mobile Safari isn’t present in in-app browsers (UIWebView). Most odd.
Documentation of an ongoing project to create a mobile-first responsive MediaWiki theme.
The process behind the mobile-first responsive design of audiovroom.com.
Brad takes a detailed look at mobile browser support for fixed positioning and how it intersects with page zooming.
Luke points out that the web is everywhere: it’s accessible through the browser but also through many native applications. This is the real Web Operating System.
The Web (browser) is inside of every application instead of every application being inside the Web (browser).
Excellent points, eloquently delivered, on why sites shouldn’t be shoving their native Apps in the face of people who just arrived at their website on a mobile device.
Putting up a splash screen is like McDonalds putting a bouncer on the door, and telling customers who just parked their car and want to enter the restaurant that they should use the drive-through instead.
On the importance of using a fluid grid in responsive design.
A PDF of the slides (with copious notes) from Josh’s brilliant presentation. I love this guy!
This is article is mostly a decent round-up of development approaches to mobile but the summary lets it down by assuming that desktop users couldn’t possibly want the same functionality as mobile users — in my opinion, inferring people’s desires based purely on their device is extremely dangerous and downright patronising.
Possibly the least imaginative concept video ever made, this piece commissioned by Blackberry shows a dystopian near-future ruled by security departments run by people with very, very tired arms.
This thread on whether HTML5 Boilerplate should include Respond.js by default (and whether the CSS should take a small-screen first approach) nicely summarises the current landscape for web devs: chaotic, confusing …and very, very exciting.
A damning indictment on the lack of any upgrade path for most Android phones. It’s disgusting that most customers have contracts that are longer than the life cycle of their phone’s operating system (and crucially for me; their browser).
A wonderfully in-depth article from Zoe on all the practical aspects of using media queries for layout.
An excellent point from Jonathan: both native apps and web apps require an internet connection …and both native apps and web apps can be made to work without an internet connection.
This might sound obvious, but the myth that “only native apps can work without an internet connection” is surprisingly widespread.
A great collection of the future-friendly techniques of today: progressive enhancement, mobile first and responsive design.
A terrific presentation on progressive enhancement and mobile web development from Brad at Web Design Day. You can look at the slides, read the notes and watch the video.
Looks like Lyza’s presentation at Over The Air at Bletchley Park was really excellent.
A great little interview with Lyza, wherein she outlines her future-friendly attitude to web development.
Jason takes a high-level look at tackling mobile-first responsive images (his next post will dig into the details). This is a really good summation of current thinking. Be sure to read the comments too: Andy chimes in with his experiences.
A real-world anecdote from Jonathan illustrates some of the misconceptions around using HTML instead of going native. A lot of people don’t realise that web apps can store data offline.
Scott writes up some of the things he talked about at the Breaking Development conference: the just-in-time interactions that are inevitable in a heavily-instrumented world.
John pushes back against the idea that browser innovation is moving too slow.
Brad documents his time at Mobilewood and cast his gaze to a future-friendly horizon.
Josh sums up the Mobilewood experience wonderfully. He also makes it clear that futurefriend.ly is just the beginning:
This stuff is hard, and we need to do it together. This is a time to be generous, and it’s a time for conversation. Let’s get after it.
Luke beautifully encapsulates the forces that drove the creation of the futurefriend.ly site. I feel like I should be standing on my chair, declaring “Oh captain, my captain!”
We are preparing to launch.
I’m sitting here in Nashville with Scott, who has been answering questions from Read Write Web about the Boston Globe launch. Here’s the resulting article.
An overview of the strategy behind the fantastic Boston Globe website.
A slick little video that goes behind the scenes of the Boston Globe site.
A lovely responsive portfolio showcasing a lovely responsive site. Responsinception!
A handy set of guidelines from Brad Frost. It’s still a work in progress but it’s got some good tips for mobile design and development.
Luke’s notes from my talk at the Breaking Development conference in Nashville summarise my points nicely.
This photograph made my day: the brand new Boston Globe site running on a Newton.
Progressive enhancement. It works.
This just launched at the Breaking Development conference: another site that uses the term HTML5 to include CSS and Ajax. Still, despite its inaccurate nomenclature, it’s a useful compatibility table of device support in mobile browsers.
I’ve just seen this incredible presentation from Stephanie Rieger at the Breaking Development conference in Nashville. It’s absolutely packed full of fantastically useful ideas. You really should’ve been there, but these slides can give you a taste of the presentation.
Unfortunately this article from PPK is flawed from the start: his first point (upon which all the subsequent points are based) is fundamentally flawed:
Right now responsive design is graceful degradation: design something for desktop and tablet, and remove stuff for mobile.
That’s not the way I’m doing responsive design. Responsible responsive design marries it with a mobile first approach (or more accurately, content first).
I’m loving Amber’s detailed write-up of the Update conference, especially her description of the panel discussion as me versus everyone else.
Luke proposes a development approach that marries the best of responsive design with content negotiation. It makes a lot of sense. I like it.
An eye-opening insight into web usage on mobile devices in Asia from Paul Rouget.
Luke enumerates the reasons why Bag Check has a separate desktop website rather than one responsive URL for desktop and mobile. They’re good reasons but I think they could all be addressed with some clever conditional loading, especially seeing as the site was, of course, built mobile first.
James attempts to tackle the thorny question of what makes something a web “app” (rather than a web “site”). It reminds of the infamous definition of obscenity:
I know it when I see it.
In short, the answer to the question “what is a web app?” is “fuck knows.”
Some interesting questions (and one or two answers) about how responsive design affects publishing on the web.
A great opinion piece from Addy Osmani prompted by the panel discussion I took part in at the Update conference.
In an attempt to “optimise” performance, T-Mobile and Orange are actually breaking jQuery.
The importance of structured content for longevity and responsiveness.
An even-handed weighing up of the pros and cons of native and web app development for mobile.
Stephen and PPK are taking their two-day mobile workshop on the road, including two dates in the UK (one of which is Brighton!). There’s a welcome emphasis on testing.
The world’s first mobile photography conference will take place in San Francisco on September 24th this year, featuring Dan Rubin, Jessica Zollman and more.
It’s a provocative title but I certainly agree with this post’s premise. And the situation it describes is all too familiar.
A nice round-up of responsible responsive web design techniques, ‘though I would go a bit further and suggest that the rallying cry is not so much about Mobile First but Content First.
A handy mobile-friendly list from Mike Stenhouse of which fish are currently having their stocks depleted. It uses offline storage so once you’ve visited once, you’ll be able to pull it up anywhere.
This is the plain vanilla look.
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