mLearnCon News and Updates

Mobile-optimized websites aren’t a new concept by any means. As long as there have been WAP browsers on dumbphones (like that first flip phone you thought was so high-tech back in the early 2000?s), many content providers have offered a customized experience for those devices.

With the arrival of more powerful (and sexier) devices like the iPhone and iPad, however, a new option started gaining popularity: mobile apps. Apps allowed publications like the Wall Street Journal, Time, Newsweek, and even Canadian fixtures like The Globe and Mail to deliver richer, more interactive experiences to users on-the-go. Apple’s App Store helped make apps easy to find and purchase and later adding in-app subscription payments, creating a win-win-win situation for publishers.

But native apps do pose a slight problem. iPhone apps don’t run on Android or Blackberry phones, obviously. That means publishers have to launch several different versions of their mobile apps in order to reach all mobile users. There’s also the loss of profit to consider, with both Apple and Google skimming 30% off app sales [Apple has recently revisited their restrictive subscription rules - Ed].

So what’s a publisher to do? The Financial Times figured out the answer: build an HTML5-powered mobile web app instead.

Why? Because while differences in mobile operating systems make building one app for every phone financially unfeasible, just about every current smartphone or tablet offers an HTML5-compatible web browser. By building a web app that can adjust itself to a particular device’s display, a publisher can greatly simplify its mobile development process. Web developers have, after all, been able to build self-adjusting sites which respond to a user’s screen resolution for quite some time — so achieving this on a mobilized web app is a fairly simple task.

There’s also no need to sacrifice functionality.  Advances in web technologies like HTML5, JavaScript, and CSS3 let developers create web pages that look and act just like native apps. The Financial Times is a perfect example, offering a virtually identical experience to those offered by similar iOS or Android apps. And unlike previous mobile web experiences, HTML5 allows large amounts of data to be cached on a device’s internal storage thanks to a feature called localStorage. This gives publishers the ability to push good-quality images, sound bites, and even video embeds via mobile web apps the same way they can with native versions.

To read more go here to the Sync-Blog.com

The Financial Times has snubbed Apple and the App Store by launching a new mobile app that runs entirely out of a Web browser.

The timely launch comes just weeks before Apple begins retaining 30 percent of all revenue made by publishers who sell an app through Apple's App Store.

Built with HTML5 technology, the FT's new mobile Web site has been optimized for iPhone and iPad form factors, although other operating systems will get a similar experience through their own browsers.

"There isn't a single feature in the native app we haven't been able to replicate in the Web app," said Rob Grimshaw, managing director of FT.com. "The developers [UK-based Assanka] did a fantastic job without the help of a manual."

Read more from the full article here.

A week after launching the official release of Firefox 4, Mozilla is following up today with Mobile Firefox for Android and Maemo phones (for all twelve of you Maemo fans out there). For Android, the browser is now available on the Android Market,.

The Android browser fairly rocks. It almost makes me want to switch to Android. The mobile browser syncs all of your bookmarks, browsing history, passwords, and even open tabs with your Firefox browser on your desktop. So you can pick up browsing where you left off when you leave your desk. This syncing is huge. The browser won’t be availabl for the iPhoen anytime soon because of restrictions Apple places on browsing apps—for one thing, it doesn’t use Webkit. (But Mozilla does offer an iPhone app that syncs mobile Safari with your Firefox desktop browser).

Read the full article from TechCrunch here

The mobile browser war has been cranked up a notch with Mozilla’s release of Firefox 4 beta 5 for Android. This new version is available in the Android Market and brings desktop quality browsing to the small screen. Firefox Sync keeps the Android device in sync with a configured desktop Firefox environment, from bookmarks to browsing history. I have taken Firefox for Android for a test spin on my Galaxy Tab, and am happy to report the browser handles the tablet screen with ease.

Once installed Firefox is ready to browse the web, but you will probably want to set up the syncing to get bookmarks (and optionally tabs and browsing history) on the mobile device. This only takes a few minutes once Firefox Sync is set up on the desktop, and it places desktop bookmarks in an appropriately named section under the bookmarks.

Read the rest of the article, and see the screen shots here, http://www.zdnet.com/photos/firefox-4-beta-5-for-android/6197105?tag=mantle_skin;content