Macronimous Web Design

Our popular E-Book Practical Search Engine optimization techniques is launched for the iPod Touch/iPhones. You can carry this simple iBook  in your iPhones and use it as quick reference. Its available at iTunes to download now.

There  1.4 million free and paid applications already exists in the iTunes app store. Though this count is very high, there is still plenty of scope for more applications to be developed and it will only stop when we humans quench our thirst for creativity.

More than a mobile phone, iPhone is looked upon as a lifestyle accessory, which is fun and exciting to use. The main strength of iPhone would be its retaining capability. Similar to most MAC users who would find it difficult to work in other platforms like Windows, most iPhone users will find it difficult to use other mobile phones. This will make the device and its applications to grow for a long time.

iPhone application development is unique in a way that it is not mandatory to have a group of people working under an organization to create iPhone applications. It is also well suited for individuals to unleash their creativity and earn a handful of money and fame too. There are applications like tossing a coin, which has attracted a lot of downloads- Kudos to the thought.

Why not you be a part of this revolution? All you need to do is a MAC machine, an iPod or iPhone preferably, Internet connection and Click here to view our first part of the article – “Getting Started with iPhone Development”

In late 1990s, and into the initial few years in the last decade, developers (and users as well) were confused. If they needed a solution, say an invoice management system, how do they get it? Two choices – (1) An installable PC based software or (2) a Web application. (By the way, why don’t we ever call it Web software??? – that’s what it is!). Web applications (AKA Web software) was the unpopular choice for a few reasons – among them Bandwidth limitations and a general insecurity about how safe using web applications was.

But as the years passed by, the requirements too changed. When we started working collaboratively, (which was made much easier with the internet and with bandwidth growth) people slowly started moving into web based applications. Web based Emails are possibly the first web applications people used. People started developing cross-browser compatible web applications. We stopped application development with VB and started focusing only on ASP and then ASP.NET. Now Web 2.0 has changed the perspective of ’software’ totally. And Hybrid applications became possible with APIs etc.

Likewise, in Mobile development, there are two ways to create  applications. (1) Mobile browser based applications – which are websites optimized for Mobile browsers and (2) Installable (or Native) Mobile applications. They both have advantages and disadvantages

Why Mobile Browser based applications and why not?

Mobile Brower based applications are slow due to the bandwidth limitations and will eat up your data usage in your phone plan. Also, the user needs to remember the URLs and type it, which every cell phone user knows is just plain  hard. One advantage is that the development cost is low since the developer only needs to consider how to make it compatible with most mobile browsers, and not each type of cell phone. Also, now that many Mobile browsers support HTML and smart phones come with bigger screens to see full sized websites, and users can zoom in and out. We have keyboards too to manage this. But, if you want to browse websites, you can do that in your tiny Netbook, which you always carry with you, right?

So, in short: The advantage of a mobile browser based application is the low development cost, and the disadvantage is the bandwidth limitations and the limitations of Mobile websites, which does not access your Phone’s components like your Address book, Camera, etc.

Why Native mobile applications and why not?

Native (installable) applications resides in your cell phone, and you  launch it directly from there, with whatever search parameters  are stored within your mobile (Eg. The names of the 50 states in the USA, your favorite locations, daily weather, etc). Except for free text search, all of  the search parameters can be stored in the mobile – OR they can be updated just one time.  The communication between the Data/Web server and the mobile phone could be drastically reduced. An application like a stock portfolio can be created within your Phone and stored. Every day you just need to update the stock prices. You need not download the entire portfolio each day. Also, the application resides within the phone, and can access your phone’s features such as your camera, phone book /contacts, etc .

It has also quickly become clear that another  hidden advantage of native applications is brand loyalty. If a customer installs a mobile application which you supply, he or she will rely on your application and trust it. For Example, I use Viigo for regular information updates (News, weather, etc) but a site called Justdial.com or Google local for local address research. If Justdial comes with a Blackberry solution, they captured me as their user.

The disadvantage is obviously the development cost. No two mobile platforms can share the same mobile application, and there are too many Mobile operating systems (or platforms) existing in the market. If you develop a mobile application to market it widely, you need to develop that in J2ME (for phones that support only Java with no loaded OS), Symbian, Mac iPhone, Android, RIM, WebOS( for Palm pre), LinMo and Windows mobile. Though J2ME (or Java ME) is widely used, it has  severe graphic limitations, and I am sure it won’t be pretty  in my Blackberry Bold! If a developer does not have expertise in more than one technology, then you need to use various mobile developers, and finding them all under one roof would be difficult.

So, in short: The advantage of native mobile applications is quick access and less data transaction, and the disadvantage is the cost of development.

No, “Hybrid” applications are not ways of ‘going Green’ or developing applications to be‘environment friendly!’

They are Applications that use BOTH browser interfaces and native mobile components. With HTML5 and JavaScripts, now the browsers are becoming capable of accessing a phone’s built in features like contacts, camera etc. We started developing applications using PhoneGap and I believe solutions like this should, hence the name, fill-in this gap.  Platform free mobile solutions are what we need now and the gap between the browser based applications and native mobile applications is getting narrower.

Finally, what would be the disadvantages of  hybrid mobile applications? Two things comes to my mind…(1) Application security, and (2) the learning curve for the developers. Mobile developers need to know HTML and Web developers need to know mobile phone APIs. Right? Let us see how these obstacles are overcome.

Here is a nice presentation which talks about the standards for Mobile web development.

Accessing this blog from your Mobile browser is now enabled. Thanks to Alex King of alexking.org. Its a simple WordPress plugin, Its called WordPress Mobile edition. Just follow the instructions, activate the plugin, The blog is up for the mobile now, just call blog.macronimous.com from your Mobile browser..and Yes.. you got it!

Alex has written it the Mobile site as a separate theme, with XHTML/CSS with less or no graphics (Logo is not coming up, you need to tweak the code a bit if you need). Otherwise the job is done. We are planning to write some Themes based on Alex, with bit more graphics – optimized for the mobile!

Do you want your phone looks like your wristwatch?, Pen? or even like your arm band? Do you like a phone which never need to charge its batteries? Nokia is working on making this into reality with the support of Nanotechnology. Recently at Design and The Elastic Mind” exhibition in the Museum of Modern Art, Nokia Research Center (NRC) in collaboration with the Cambridge Nanoscience Centre (United Kingdom) released its Morph concept technology.

Nanotechnology enables materials and components that are flexible, stretchable, transparent and remarkably strong, and Nokia believes this can be applied to making Flexible, Changing, Self-Cleaning communication devices with Advanced Power Sources (such as solar power utilization). Your device will also will be capable of – Environment sensing. It can measure analyzing air pollution, to gaining insight into bio-chemical traces and processes.

Tarmo Virki of CNET Says “The market for Internet services is approaching 100 billion Euros, and Nokia is the first big mobile phone manufacturer to embrace the Internet media business. Close rivals Samsung and Sony Ericsson could follow, but are a couple of years behind”. While Forrester Research says mobile Internet users to triple over next five years to 125 million just in the Western Europe, Nokia confirms their wild ideas like Apple and Google succeeded with many such ideas. Nokia now has its global device market share was about 40% in Q4 of 2007, so reaching their customers with innovative products is something they are working hardly now.

Changing new directions is not new to Nokia. They started as wood-pulp manufacturer in 1865 (Nokia wood Mills), after acquired by Finnish Rubber Works, they entered in to telephone and telegraph cables manufacturing. They were also involved in producing telephone and telegraph cables, and finally they entered in 1967 into commercial and military mobile radio communications technology.

Click here to see the official web page to read more on Nokia Marph.

Apple released the long awaited iPhones Software Development Kit (SDK) and the associated iTunes “App Store” and iPhone Developer Program. If you are a developer you can download it for a price of $99 and start developing applications for iPhones.
Unlike other Phones, Apple was keeping their phone isolated from third party applications, means you cannot develop or buy a third party application developed by programmers like us.
Things changed now – You may expect good, useful, buggy, unusable applications for your phone, which you can buy, install, enjoy or crash your phone.
Now developers need to start learning this tool for development, application optimization, porting with memory management etc. Unlike other phone manufacturers, Apple has only one phone, one screen resolution and one style – so at least for now we do not have to worry about the screen sizes and some other constraints in mobile phone development.
Apple wants to compete with rivals like RIM’s BlackBerry and Microsoft’s Windows Mobile on enterprise features, so, we, developers got another environment to develop and market our applications and to make money.

If you have a website for your business to reach millions of internet users, you should also consider a simplified version of your website for the Mobile phone browsers. Designing a mobile site is not a big deal. If you are not a web designer, You can easily do it with dev.mobi’s Mobi site builder. This will help you to reach millions of GPRS users who search for sites and information across the globe.
If you have knowledge in HTML you a learn XHTML and CSS a bit and build custom mobile sites and check them with ready.mobi. Ready.mobi testing will help you to make sure that your site will appear fine with all kind of Mobile browsers, well, at least in the recent popular handsets.
If you are a web design company or a designer, You may also want to consider becoming a dotMobi Mobile Web Developer Certification.
The following are few guides and learning resources to gear up yourself Mobile ready!
• dotMobi Web Developer Guide
• W3C Mobile Web Best Practices 1.0
• Switch On! Web Developer Guide
• XHTML Mobile Profile 1.0
• MobileOK Basic 1.0
• Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) Level 1
You may also want to build your own product catalog or even want to sell your products through a Mobile site. This is absolutely possible with XHTML, CSS and with your favorite programming language (PHP, ASP.Net etc). You need knowledge in XHTML MP (Mobile Profile) is a subset of XHTML, and XHTML is nothing but the stricter version of HTML. You can get the XHTML mobile reference guide here from Openwave.
The challenge with the Mobile websites is making them ready to fit with maximum number of mobile browsers and handsets, since handset manufacturers are promoting different browsers.
You can also develop a CMS to manage your Mobile website, and the content management admin panel as web browser based, But it could also be a mobile browser based to feed in your content and if you are really want to dry your mobile battery quickly.
If you are a Joomla expert, you may want to learn to how to use Joomla as your Mobile site CMS. Read further at dev.mobi article
We developed our mobile site and launched at go.macronimous.com which is mobile browser friendly, and also ready.mobi test passed.

There are plenty of tools are available in the Market for Mobile application and game development. Which one is your choice?
I found few articles, which gives a list of tools for Windows mobile as well as Java (enabled) phones – I mean Windows CE.NET and Java ME (J2ME).
Michael Juntao Yuan of JavaWorld.com has written an extensive article on Java Mobile development tools..
For Windows mobile development, Microsoft offers many tools and kits. Click here to see them.
I personally recommed the follwoing few:
For J2ME:
Netbeans

For Windows Mobile:
Visual Studio 2005
Windows Mobile Developer Resource Kit

Here is a page of resource, which gives you details for all the technologies including Appforge and Codewarrier.