Rough cut: Making of mobile.local.ch
The last time I created a mobile site was 2001 to demo customers the templating and content reuse functionality of a CMS – and yes.. it was pain (not the CMS part ;-). Two month ago we (the local.ch engineering team + friends) started to create a mobile version of the local.ch service that we release today. A few comments…
The goal was to create a basic mobile site that works on phones with a XHTML browser and allow users to super fast find phone numbers and upcoming events with the ability to initiate a call, save the contact into the address book and look-up a location map. No pictures apart from the map. Plain – no bells and whistles!
- On the WML (aka WAP) vs. XHTML topic: If you still have a phone that only can browse WML – get yourself a new phone! You should by now get a free one from your provider (with the usual commitment to stay for the next 24 months) or …. you maybe manage to install Opera Mini.
- WURFL helps! A lot of phones identify themselves nicely. Others don’t (e.g. Opera Mini, Opera Mobile or WebCore S60 browser users) but luckily some of them support basic JavaScript – that helps guessing the screen size (to display the correct map size).
- vCard support is broken – although phones way back support transferring contacts using SMS, Infrared or Bluetooth as vCard – we found that most of our test phones were unable to read a downloaded vCard file. Used the very basic WTAI commands instead (or anybody figured out how to transfer a full address via WTAI?)
- Web Standards – it helps that modern phones have enough CPU power to host browsers that make use of render engines from their big desktop brothers (Opera, Safari, IE) – that allows using homeopathic portions of CSS and JS. Too bad Gecko is too fat yet.. would be nice to have an open source browser for all of the widespread mobile phone platforms.
Conclusion: much smoother than back in 2001 – but still – the some basics are not implemented in a consistent fashion.
Feel free to send us a simple “OK” in the built-in feedback form, that we see what browser have been found working. Thanks.
2 Kommentare
27. Jul 2006, 13:05
Why didn’t you work it out in a java application?
27. Jul 2006, 13:25
Good point. From the possible amount users that uses a mobile service – today only a fraction will take the time to install a Java MIDlet – typing URL vs. installing software. That will most certainly change with the generation that knows how to install games on a mobile phone (or you get your app pre-installed by the provider..)
And well.. testing and debugging a Java MIDlet on various mobile phone is even worse than a XHTML site (but of course has the advantage that you can do more fancy stuff)
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