Hi Ken,

> Does anyone else have a favorite book or three for this kind of work?

If you're looking for web page and web app development vs. native app development, you might want to consider these books:

  Mobile Design and Development: Practical concepts and techniques for creating mobile sites and web apps
  By Brian Fling
  Publisher: O'Reilly Media
  Released: August 2009
  http://oreilly.com/catalog/9780596155452

  Programming the Mobile Web
  By Maximiliano Firtman
  Publisher: O'Reilly Media
  Released: July 2010
  http://oreilly.com/catalog/9780596807795

I just bought copies of both, but won't get to read them until I return from vacation in September, so can't provide any reviews yet...

You'll also probably want to investigate some of the freely-available mobile web development frameworks like iUI, iWebKit, and jQTouch.  Note that some of the documentation on the iPhone developers website focuses on *web* development and is excellent.

Also be aware that for cross-platform mobile testing and development, the various mobile device SDKs (e.g. for iPhone, Android, Palm OS) come with simulators.

-- Michael

# Michael Doran, Systems Librarian
# University of Texas at Arlington
# 817-272-5326 office
# 817-688-1926 mobile
# [log in to unmask]
# http://rocky.uta.edu/doran/
 

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Code for Libraries [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Ken
> Irwin
> Sent: Wednesday, August 25, 2010 11:55 AM
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Subject: [CODE4LIB] mobile web design: resources?
> 
> Hi all,
> 
> Forking off from the mobile-detection thread:
> 
> Does anyone have any favorite books, articles, websites, etc. for the real
> "how to" business of building mobile-friendly websites. I have been astonished
> at the apparent dearth of such books, and was delighted earlier this year to
> discover Jonathan Stark's Building iPhone Apps with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript
> from O'Reilly (2010); he has an Android-oriented version of the book coming
> out soon too. Although the book contains a lot about designing web pages, the
> app-building orientation of the book means that it gives short shrift to
> cross-platform compatibility. What I really want to find is a good guide to
> "building simple websites that will work on any smartphone, yea, verily, even
> BlackBerry." (I don't know about anyone else, but I have found BB to not
> support a lot of things that work well on Droids and iThings.)
> 
> For a shorter introduction, I belatedly discovered this article:
> Mobile Websites With Minimum Effort.
> Authors:    Wisniewski, Jeff
> Source:    Online; Jan/Feb2010, Vol. 34 Issue 1, p54-57, 4p
> 
> The number-one thing that I learned from Stark's book is something that I had
> struggled for the longest time with: why does my iThing make all web pages
> look tiny? The answer: iThings assume that all web pages are 980px wide, and
> you've got to disabuse them of that notion by the simple expedient of defining
> a viewport in the page header:
> <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width">
> (there are several variations of this, and knowing the key word helps to find
> the rest.)
> 
> Does anyone else have a favorite book or three for this kind of work?
> 
> Ken