Crimson Blog

As part of my cellphone programming class, I have been introduced to a few new tools for mobile design. So far the most important one is the Opera Mini Demo. Opera Mini is the most prevalent web browser on mobile devices, and this clever page displays web pages in a nice little cellphone after jamming it through Opera Mini’s rendering engine. Opera Mini takes an Apple like approach, discarding mobile only style sheets, and instead opting to fuse both mobile and screen CSS together with the grace of a walrus doing ballet with a running chainsaw on the flat end of a postage stamp. This is however a strong improvement over what the web used to be on a phone where the rendering was the chainsaw and the users sense of sight and good taste, the walrus. Whereas the current state of events can be done carefully, even gracefully if the web page is designed well, the past was just an exercise in how to make it hurt the least. (more…)

http://www.versiontracker.com get to know it and get to love it. As I body board the deep sea of the internet, there are certain sites that grab my attention: Sites that are well designed, sites that provide useful services, and sites that provide nifty free things. Version Tracker does a great job at all 3.
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My cell phone and the mobile web definitely lose, at least in the respect that my phone doesn’t have that feature turned on, and the screen is so mind numbingly dinky that the very thought of reading text let alone viewing images or video in teeny weenie eye squint-o-vision brings my retinas pain. My cell phone deliberately lacks features. I bought the thing when I lost my Nokia with its black and white liquid crystal display, which had a powerful back light feature for cell phone use at night. Actually that first cell phone had a textual web browser in it. I activated it once to see what it was like and promptly swore off of using it ever again as it was a major pain to navigate and read.

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