I have a business application which I am going to extend by creating mobile versions of it for the Blackberry and iPhone lines. One of the requirements is for the mobile devices to be able to display reports.
What is the easiest way to do this? Output the report as HTML or something else. Does this also require a crazy amount of scrolling on the device to view things?
in my opinion you had to think the mobile web differente from web. The operation available from mobile must be the operation the user need to do now, he cannot wait for them. Generally viewing a report can be postpone to be done from Desktop pc.
So suppling a mobile version of a web application involve also the choice of which operation supply and wich don't.
Related
i'm a little new to this topic, i've always used to work with responsive design to do this but for a new situation i have to change the content that will load on Mobile Devices than regular PCs, My Control Panel is Direct Admin on Windows server, what i should i do?
check out this answer on how to redirect mobile users to a different site - Redirect mobile devices to alternate version of my site
In addition to this I'll also chime in with the fact that people will browser most sites on both the mobile and the desktop, starting the journey on one and finishing it on another. They might also find something useful on one which they share online, only for another device type to be used when trying to read the content.
These are all reasons why we argue for content parity.... the same content for every instance. I'm sure your client believes they have a good reason for this, but I would encourage them to re-evaluate the decision before starting this process.
After making a duration/cost estimation, I'm about to start developing a desktop application using OpenLayers. I've never had experience on it before, but have the support of some coworkers who do.
Now we have to estimate the time and effort it would take the same application to be viewable in mobile devices. I know the existence of openlayers.mobile.js, but nobody in my company has ever worked with it before.
I know it has some advantages over the normal OpenLayers library, such as pinching for zooming, and so. But, does it has any blocked capabilities? I mean, if I write code to draw a line on a layer in the desktop application, change the simbology of a layer, add a buffer arround a polyline, etc.. will it still work with the mobile library?
Is there funcionality in the desktop version that is not in the mobile one?
I'd need to know before estimating what can I offer in the mobile version, and how hard will it be to get so.
See examples tagged with mobile:
http://dev.openlayers.org/examples/
The next OpenLayer versions will probably have better mobile support as this is something many users are interested in.
I already have a website with huge database which is good for Desktop browser my site is on Joomla base. Now i want to develop for Smartphone (like iphone, android, nokia) and mobile browsers. So how can i achieve this goal what is the best way of doing this.
Mobile Sites like Yahoo, Youtube i want to developed something like this because i'm new to developing mobile sites so any one can suggest me the right way for developing the mobile version for my current Desktop Site.
Thanks in advance
There are extensions for Joomla that style your site for mobile usage here: http://extensions.joomla.org/extensions/mobile.
It makes sense to test your site using the emulators for iPhone, Android and Symbian at some stage before you release. Each software development kit includes the ability to use the mobile browser.
Note that this is not the whole story. You'll want to consider:
Mobile users have much smaller displays. You'll need to rework your UI to take account of this.
Mobile users have large fingers. You'll need to rework your buttons and links to take account of this.
Mobile users tend to consume content rather than create it. Optimise accordingly.
Searching for data with e.g. traditional search boxes is tricky; you may need to rework to use scrolling through lists.
Above all: test, test, test!
Have a look at http://www.mobilejoomla.com/
I have an existing website running. I want this site to be able to be viewed on mobiles smart phones as well. I am ready to shave off some stuff, but would like to know how can I test this and are there any tools/guidelines on how to repurpose the site to be best viewed on mobile phones ? How to detect on the web site whether a mobile phone or a PC is hitting the site and accordingly serve the appropriate content.
There are few factors to consider such as:
- screen size
- touch vs non-touch
To detect whether the mobile phone hitting your site, you can simply verify the user agent.
There is a good article on this at A List Apart which will answer your implementation questions: Put Your Content in My Pocket
You can test by setting the user agent of your browser to that of mobile device. This can be done in safari under the develop settings, or firefox has various plugins.
And a tip, don't use anything that requires hover functionality. Touch screens don't hover.
You will find out it's a strange new world at http://mtld.mobi/
First decision you should make is which mobile platforms you want to support, then start coding...
As some one mentioned http://mtld.mobi/ is the best place to start for resources but for testing I would use http://ready.mobi that will test and debug your site and provide interface to viewing your website in mobile platforms.
First you need to decide what platforms/browsers you are going to support. If it is only smart phones like Android/Iphone/Blackberry it would be a pretty safe bet that as long as the website works in crome and isn't VERY javascript intensive and the site is catered for smaller screens it would be fine.
That is the theory in practise mobile is mobile and real world testing is the only way to go for 100% coverage.
Since the launch of Silverlight 2 I was expecting a lot of full blown Silverlight applications popping up but still there seem to be little evidence of this. Does anybody know of such applications out there in the wild. And also what would be the obvious applications you would develop in Silverlight. I would say mail clients are bad examples as they just as well could be written as a web/ajax app. As Silverlight is far more powerful than web+ajax possible candidates should be impossible/akward implementing as a web/ajax app.
The ones that comes to my mind is
Photo and imaging editing apps
Reporting applications
Office applications, Word/Excel...
Edit:
Added from posts
Games
The point isn't that the app need to fill the whole screen just that it isn't just a small part of a webpage, or you could call it a full blown application running inside the webbrowser, only using the webbrowser as a host.
I think the Medical app that Microsoft itself developed shows pretty well what could be achieved with silverlight http://www.mscui.net/PatientJourneyDemonstrator/
As for image editing then as I understand its a bit difficult as Silverlight lacks a Bitmap API to be able to do per pixel image editing...
Edit:
I noticed you added Word/Excel to your question and there comes the problem that Silverlight doesn't have a rich text editor built in and there hasn't been real good examples of custom implementations. There is one http://www.codeplex.com/richtextedit but I haven't seen any applications that actually use it.
I'm working on one in the medical domain.
This started as an update of a Mac classic application but due to the amount of work involved, broadened to considering other toolkits. I convinced them to go for an initial WPF desktop port to be followed by a Silverlight version.
I don't know one so far, but I could imagine that it could be used in a kind like the fullscreen video playback on youtube.
How many fullscreen desktop apps are there? Most application don't need the entire screen. If you don't want to be distracted by menus and taskbars and so you go fullscreen. Another type of applications that can use fullscreen are games.
You are limited in fullscreen to certain key presses such as arrow keys, tab, enter, and space so this rules out some of those types of apps. They have done this for security reasons so an app can't hijack the screen and record the keypresses, but I wish they could come up with a scheme to sufficiently warn the user then allow it if they consent.
An application Microsoft seem to like to show case is the AOL mail client written entirely in silverlight.
Personally I follow the rule is if you would not write it in flash you would not write it in silverlight preferring AJAX in most cases. In the past most large flash application have failed such as the flash word processor (cant remember the name) while AJAX enabled applications such as google documents have taken off.
Finally I believe until moonlight (linux and mac support) has been released and more general users have silverlight downloaded developers will be reluctant to use it widely even for smaller apps and gadgets.