Last week the New York Times Technology section had a brief “Q&A” about mobile websites and pointed to my mobile website list as a good starting point. My neighbor who gets the Times delivered noticed it and was the first to let me know. I got a decent bump in traffic for the blog last week, so hopefully I’ll pick up a few new readers as a result!
This past week SixApart announced that the SplashBlog mobile blogging site will close down in a month. I’ve been following SplashBlog and its use as a mobile blogging client: In February 2005, SplashBlog.com launched as a free hosting service for SpashData’s SplashBlog mobile client (initial price $20). When launched, the client could post to either the TypePad or SplashBlog services. In September of that year, they released client version 2.0 which was now free, but only connected to their own SplashBlog service. The service was free for up to 100 pictures and about $30/year for an unlimited account. In March…
iPhoney: It’s not quite a simulator, but will certainly help web developers understand what their sites will look like from an iPhone. Since the iPhone uses Safari, the iPhoney app can use the same on an OS X system to provide a pretty decent testbed: Looking for a way to see how your web creations will look on iPhone? Look no further. iPhoney gives you a pixel-accurate web browsing environment—powered by Safari—that you can use when developing web sites for iPhone. It’s the perfect 320 by 480-pixel canvas for your iPhone development. And it’s free.
Russell Beattie, a mobile developer and now entrepreneur, took a break from blogging for the last year, but is back at it again. If you’re interested in mobile devices and trends, Russell’s blog is worth following: Russell Beattie’s Weblog » Filling in the gaps. Also worth checking out is Russell’s new site Mowser which transforms normal web sites to make them readable on mobile devices. Initial results look promising and I want to dive into this a bit deeper. Russell is also running mobitopia which is a mobile bookmark site (based on open-source software). I need to keep an eye on that…
With the launch of the iPhone, Apple has finally posted some documentation to help web designers understand the browsing capabilities of the mobile Safari browser: Web Development for iPhone. I was looking for this sort of information before the launch, but I guess it was under NDA. Maybe those who attended WWDC this year were privy to the info? In any case, the most interesting content is a guide titled Optimizing Web Applications and Content for iPhone. The guide gives a good explanation of the user interactions on the phone and explains how to target content, including some iPhone-specific meta tags…