Hi Elizabeth, I have done loads of work for mobiles, application design, development and websites, for Vodafone. You can see some of my work here: http://blakeys.com . It can be a bit daunting at first but can be very rewarding. Mobile marketing is said to be one of the biggest tools for the future, see http://www.trendsinbranding.com/trends.php#7 . You might want to read about Blue-Casting because lots of the best marketing agencies are offering the technology to their clients now. Here is a list of stuff that was very useful for me:
1. If you are targeting BlackBerry then get in touch with their developer arm, research in motion, http://www.rim.com/ . I use a mac so I had to install a virtual machine and XP to get the emulators working but once up and running they are what you need i.e. work just like a blackberry. Rim are just the best for developing for the BlackBerry and have a big community. The emulators I installed were for the Pearl (8110) and Curve (8310) which are: BlackBerry Device Simulators 4.2.0 and 4.2.2. However to get them to work for email and use ur PC's internet you need to install; BlackBerry Email and MDS services emulator and BlackBerry JDE 4.2.1 (the backbone for them all). 2. Adobe Creative Suite comes with a useful little application called Device Central. You'll need to download the latest specs for handsets but it's great for getting info about screen res, supported media, and all that jazz. You can also view your wapsites from Dreamweaver (if you use that pooh) in device central with just a click. 3. Handset recognition is not the easiest to setup, and we found that it still didn't work 100% so had to make changes to the database, but it might be of interest: http://wurfl.sourceforge.net/ . 4. look for mobile developers blogs, they can be really interesting. It is a bit tricky to get things working for mobile. Key things to understand are that 3G is still quite slow so use very compressed images when you can, screen real estate is at a minimum so use a nice navigation (the phone's kepypad can work as navigation), data charges scare people away from browsing through 3G. Here is a link to a website where i found a nice template to help me get up and running http://www.internetmademobile.com/ (i hope it's still on there somewhere). Here is that template on my testing site: http://pendulum8.com/COMPASSMOBILE/v1/wapsite/ index.xhtml - all standards compliant and uses CSS so this email is not completely O/T!! lol Drupal and Joomla will have plugins that make a mobile friendly website easy. It might be worth making a basic website using that technology and then adding the mobile plugin. Good luck! Chris On 08/08/2009, at 12:02 AM, Davies, Elizabeth wrote: > My google-fu is weak and I'm turning to the community for ideas. I > know this is off topic, except as a call for help on finding a tool. > > I'm tasked with making some very large and very active websites > mobile friendly with CSS (not for an app, but a CSS mobile style > sheet on the regular website). Except I don't have a mobile device, > and even if I did it can't connect to our DEV environment, nor can I > expose the site to the world in any way to use the online emulators > until it's fully tested and ready for prime time. > > So ... does anyone know of an emulator, plugin or other for any > common browser or Visual Studio 2008? Our two most common mobile > visitors come in on Blackberry and IPhone, but the idea is to build > out a test case for the least effort and lowest common denominator > of CSS. While I find TONS of great resources on styling for this and > have what I think should work ready for a look-see. What I can't > find is a way to actually SEE what I'm styling. > > Elizabeth > > > IMPORTANT NOTICE: This e-mail message and all attachments, if any, > may contain confidential and privileged material and are intended > only for the person or entity to which the message is addressed. If > you are not an intended recipient, you are hereby notified that any > use, dissemination, distribution, disclosure, or copying of this > information is unauthorized and strictly prohibited. If you have > received this communication in error, please contact the sender > immediately by reply e-mail, and destroy all copies of the original > message. > ______________________________________________________________________ > css-discuss [cs...@lists.css-discuss.org] > http://www.css-discuss.org/mailman/listinfo/css-d > List wiki/FAQ -- http://css-discuss.incutio.com/ > List policies -- http://css-discuss.org/policies.html > Supported by evolt.org -- http://www.evolt.org/help_support_evolt/ > ______________________________________________________________________ css-discuss [cs...@lists.css-discuss.org] http://www.css-discuss.org/mailman/listinfo/css-d List wiki/FAQ -- http://css-discuss.incutio.com/ List policies -- http://css-discuss.org/policies.html Supported by evolt.org -- http://www.evolt.org/help_support_evolt/
