As written before, I recently got more interested in the mobile world. This is why I was looking for a good book to start with. The mobile related books at Amazon seemed pretty much outdated to me, so I started digging through the mobile blog world.
Luckily I found Cameron Moll’s Blog and was happy to figure out that he published a book called “Mobile Web Design“, which is exactly what I was looking for.
I did not have time to read it (just got it Friday), but due to the incredible mass of snow (1/2 inch) that came down in NYC this morning, my neighbor was so kind to shovel in front of my building at about 7am this morning. This gave me the choice of watching “How to make my first Internet million” on TV or read Cameron’s book.
Guess what? I watched TV read the book! It’s short (100 pages), but comes to the point quickly, which I like a lot. Besides all the great web development tips, a few things that I’ve kept:
1. The mobile web runs on a few dozens of different browsers, which makes mobile web development difficult (confront limitations, exploit opportunities). Additionally you have 400+ devices, which are able to run the mobile web. So stop whining about your IE7 / Firefox or Mac/PC issues.
2. The mobile web is here: “Yahoo’s FIFA! Mobile site drew 5.3 million unique visitors and nearly 290 million pageviews at it’s highest daily peak.”
3. Location based services are the hottest thing right now.
4. You have four two options to offer your content to mobile users: 1. Do nothing 2. Create mobile-optimized content. [Your choice]
To summarize it:
If you are interested in the mobile web, get this book before you start digging through hundreds of mobile sites. Cameron explains a lot of different approaches to mobile web design / web development and gives you the pros and cons, which is something I couldn’t find anywhere else.
