Updated: Added link to slides from presentation by Taptu's Stefan Butlin - 13-Nov-2008.
This is the second part of my wrap up from yesterday's Mobile Web 2.0 event. The first part covered the morning business track. The business track continued in the afternoon but I chose to attend the afternoon developer or "Builder" Track.
Caroline Lewko started things off with a welcome and some tips on marketing applications. Caroline urged developers to sell through as many channels as possibe and to not discount carrier partnerships, pointing out that 75% of mobile applications are sold on deck.
The first panel on "Mobile Web vs. Applications vs. Widgets" was chaired by C. Enrique Ortiz and featured Tim Haysom (OMTP), Phong Vu (Nokia), Charles Wiles (Google), Fabrizio Capobianco (Funambol) and Jeff Sonstein (Rochester Institute of Technology)
Enrique started by saying that the number of web runtimes has exploded in the last year and asked the panel for their take on that. Google's Wiles argued for the browser as a platform and saw no need for web runtimes. Nokia's Vu disagreed and was supported by Funambol's Capobianco who felt that there will always need to be applications outside the browser and that web runtimes could provide a stable platform for them. RIT's Sonstein countered that the browser was a web runtime and that what mobile needed most were standards for low level access to device data and wondered if BONDI would supply them.
Enrigue next set the panel to work on defining the killer application in mobile. Fabrizio nominated "un-sexy" messaging. Other panelists mentioned voice, NFC and barcodes as possible "killers". Nokia's Vu feels that NFC will eventually replace Bluetooth for phone to phone sharing. In response to a question, OMTP's Haysom said that NFC and barcodes are not part of the initial BONDI specification but are on the radar for future inclusion.
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Next up, Brian Fling chaired a panel on the Mobile User Experience. Participants included Barbara Ballard (Little Springs Design), Christian Lindholm (Fjord) and Thomas Fellger (Iconmobile).
The session was a wide ranging discussion on mobile trends as much as design. One major trend that Barbara Ballard sees is the entry of web developers and designers into the mobile space bringing "web thinking" into mobile, which is both good and bad. The web folks bring innovation but also have a tendency to force web design patterns on mobile, degrading usability.
Iconmobile's Thomas sees the emergence of new tools and platforms like widget runtimes making it easier to create mobile services and applications, most of which aren't very good. These quick and dirty apps sometimes demonstrate innovative concepts which can then be built upon to to create something of real value.
Brian Fling pointed to the Amazon Kindle as the tip of the iceberg of ubiquitous computing.
Thomas sees the phone becoming a "remote control for your life" where the handset is your wallet and performs functions like opening doors. Audi is already bundling a phone that acts as a "smart key" with their cars in some markets. In Japan eWallet use has caused a significant drop in the number of coins in circulation. Most Japanese iPhone users carry a second handset because the Apple phone lacks a wallet function.
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Next up was a series of lightning fast 20 minute development "tutorials"
First was Taptu's Stefan Butlin on "Building, dynamic, compelling, ad-funded, off-deck mobile web content" or "What's hard about mobile web" Stefan identified five challenges:
Handset Diversity - Taptu sees 3000 unique UserAgents a day, all with different attributes and quirks. Sony Ericsson's tend to oversize text, some Nokia's struggle with CSS floats, Many Motorolas including the ubiquitous RAZR V3
have a very small page size limit.
What can mobile web developers do? There are three basic approaches:
Each class is handled by it's own adaptation code which further optimizes markup for each handset and resizes images to a percentage of WURFL screen width.
Transcoders - they break device detection and can really destroy a nicely designed mobile page. Defend against them every possible way: get whitelisted with every carrier, use the no-transform and link meta tags, check the x-Device-User-Agent for the real user agent.
User Identification - cookie support on mobiles is hit or miss and it's hard to detect whether cookies are really persistent or if they disappear when the user closes the browser. On Openwave browsers session cookies work on 3 part domains like m.taptu.com but not taptu.com!
You can also use Bango which has agreements with most carriers to pass a unique user id. On course this doesn't work if the phone is using WiFi.
Testing - You really need to test every phone on every network, but that's impossible. Besides having a library of popular phones you can use:
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posted by Dennis Bournique
November 4, 2008 @ 10:46 pm
7 View Comments
