Some Random Moblog

I’m getting increasingly irritated with these messages. (Note the signal level in the pictures at the end of this post.) I live and work in central London, where you would expect a good mobile signal. Yet there are holes in the service all over the place. We’ve got the devices that can make the mobile [...]

Reading through a report from mobiThinking.com, a point caught my eye; the paper suggested that “browser sniffing” is an essential feature to deploy for mobile-orientated websites with two odd but, to me, seemingly contradictory pieces of advice; Don’t build your site for a minority audience- remember most people don’t have an iPhone. Don’t build a [...]

I’m a big fan of wireless internet. It always reminds me of the Arthur C. Clarke quote, “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic”, and when a pocket sized device can not just access pretty much any website, but instantly play Internet radio, stream YouTube videos and basically “contain” everything on the Internet… Well, [...]

Since September 2006, a new top-level domain dedicated to mobile websites has been available; “.mobi”. The idea is that this replaces the “.com” for mobile sites, and indicates that a website has been designed specifically for mobile devices. Several domain names with this “.mobi” suffix have apparently been sold for hundreds of thousands of dollars. [...]

This is a simple list of the iPhone applications that I would call essential; the ones I would install if I had to restore my iPhone tomorrow; a mixture of the useful, the strange and the entertaining; NetNewsWire I’ve already talked about this is some detail; it uses the Newsgator RSS reader to deliver news [...]

The Flickr developers blog has a great post up, sharing some of their lessons on building an iPhone website. Definitely worth a read for anyone interested in building websites for “next gen” mobile devices- not just the iPhone (in fact, one of their tips is not to build just for the iPhone.) Code: Flickr Developer [...]

One of the interesting aspects of Android that I’ve yet to see implemented is the fact that it isn’t soley a mobile phone operating system. It can be used for any mobile device. I think it’s going to be some time before we start to see this being tried and tested, but the potential for [...]

I’ve been playing around with RSS feeds for a while now, but never really felt like I ‘got them’, or that I was really using them properly. Either I tried to track too many sites, meaning there was too much information coming in (and a constantly growing mountain of unread news- making me feel like [...]

One of the drawbacks with the iPhone is that there’s no way to copy and paste. Two reasons; firstly, there’s no way to select a chunk of text in the first place (because the “touch and drag” movement either moves the page, or moves the cursor, depending on the context), but also there’s no clipboard, [...]

Today, Google released Chrome, it’s new web browser aimed at making web applications work better. It’s an open-source project, built on the Webkit rendering engine (which displays the page) and the new V8 javascript library (which deals with ‘behaviour’- eg. animated elements on the page, AJAX etc.) So what does this have to do with [...]