People aren't looking for beauty in design on mobile. They usually
are looking for specific data to accomplish a set task. Setting a
page header using a background tile and an overlayed logo would be
suitable in a mobile app IMO
Also what about the people who are using the m.domain on the laptops,
pc's etc as they want optimised data. Will they see an ugly version?
Alun
On 20 Jul 2009, at 18:48, "Brian Butterworth" <[email protected]>
wrote:
Iain,
Your points are all good.
My general idea was to do something like these "single tall colum"
mobile sites. Certain search engines like to have the "m." as a
prefix to denote a mobile site.
http://m.guardian.co.uk/
or
http://www.bbc.co.uk/mobile/index.html
or
http://m.twitter.com
I just want to know the maximum image dimensions so that the very
few that I am going to use are not too big for this kind of
layout. I just find it very displeasing to get images that are
out of scale to the device.
Given the data for the first list of phones that have come in give
the X,Y (max image size) as:
224,300; 315,460; 168,180; 120,92; 120,92; 300,300; 320,480;
360,640; 120,128; 120,92; 168,180; 235,240; 120,92; 300,300;
224,280; 232,300; 120,92; 228,228; 300,240; 224,340; 300,200;
120,92; 120,92; 236,136; 228,280; 300,448; 440,700; 224,280;
360,640; 234,300; 229,210; 120,92;
IMHO there is considerable scope for improvement with a few simple
tweeks to get the image the right size and format.
Anything that scales an image on the page usually looks very poor,
and even on this small sample the "max x" goes from 120 to 440, and
the "max y" from 92 to 700.
Another issue, of course, is that some browsers (my G1 does this)
use a server to degrade the quality (and file size) of JPG images,
which is probably OK for photos, but not for a page-header logo.
2009/7/20 Iain Wallace <[email protected]>
If this is specifically designed for mobile, e.g. m.facebook.com or
x.facebook.com and you've already determined if the user is on a
mobile device or not, there's not much more on the server you can
reliably do to determine the screen size. For more recent smart phones
running something Webkit based (Android, iPhone) or Opera mobile you
should be able to get away with interrogating the window property in
JS to determine a maximum width, which you can then use to either
resize images on the fly that are already there (which is what google
reader does) or to write image tags with a size of your choice in the
actual image request, e.g.:
http://strawp.net/img/daynight/mariosnow/100x100.png
compared with:
http://strawp.net/img/daynight/mariosnow/300x100.png
which are generated on the fly using PHP (with caching on the server)
you're still then left with devices that can't handle JS at all, to
which I would say the safest bet is not to use images directly in the
layout, rather have them as background images which won't break the
page width. This also has the advantage that if a device can't handle
proper CSS you should hopefully just get reasonably plain HTML.
From mobile devices I've owned (Winmo, Sony Ericsson, Android) the
user will often have the image either resized for them or have the
ability to zoom out if it's too big.
In summary, I maintain that separation of layout into CSS from content
in HTML and letting the page deteriorate gracefully with the
capabilities of the browser is the sane path forward. Try doing clever
things to make it fit the width if you want, but you probably don't
need to if you have the CSS nailed.
Cheers,
Iain
On Mon, Jul 20, 2009 at 3:48 PM, Brian Butterworth<[email protected]
> wrote:
> Ian,
> Yes, I agree.
> The width and height is of the maximum picture size. I'm going to
use
> percentages in the CSS for the textual layout, but the images need
to be the
> right size for the device, in particular the site header.
> And then there is the question of the phone supporting CSS!
> I was just trying to figure out the phone capabilities first.
>
> 2009/7/20 Iain Wallace <[email protected]>
>>
>> Trying to match the style/layout of a site to the expected
resolution
>> of the device that you think is displaying it is going about it the
>> wrong way - this is why CSS has percentage widths for doing
layouts.
>>
>> Or is the question more about what you can send back to the
server in
>> order to choose an image size?
>>
>> If you want an example of something that does this quite well,
visit
>> the iPhone/Android optimised interface for Google Reader using a
user
>> agent switcher. This will load up images in atom feeds and then
>> instantly resize them in javascript to fit the page width.
>>
>> On Tue, Jul 14, 2009 at 3:09 PM, Brian Butterworth<[email protected]
>
>> wrote:
>> > Hi,
>> > I've been looking at adapting some sites to work better on mobile
>> > devices.
>> > I can do the stripping down everything to text and minimal
graphics and
>> > so
>> > on, that's the easy bit.
>> > Does anyone know of anything reliable that can tell me the
width in
>> > pixels
>> > of the device?
>> > I was hoping that Glow would cover this, but it does't.
>> > --
>> >
>> > Brian Butterworth
>> >
>> > follow me on twitter: http://twitter.com/briantist
>> > web: http://www.ukfree.tv - independent digital television and
>> > switchover
>> > advice, since 2002
>> >
>> -
>> Sent via the backstage.bbc.co.uk discussion group. To
unsubscribe, please
>> visit http://backstage.bbc.co.uk/archives/2005/01/
mailing_list.html.
>> Unofficial list archive:
>> http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/
>
>
>
> --
>
> Brian Butterworth
>
> follow me on twitter: http://twitter.com/briantist
> web: http://www.ukfree.tv - independent digital television and
switchover
> advice, since 2002
>
-
Sent via the backstage.bbc.co.uk discussion group. To unsubscribe,
please visit http://backstage.bbc.co.uk/archives/2005/01/mailing_list.html
. Unofficial list archive: http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/
--
Brian Butterworth
follow me on twitter: http://twitter.com/briantist
web: http://www.ukfree.tv - independent digital television and
switchover advice, since 2002
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