Another bus ride, another blog post from my phone.
With my Droid Incredible, though I love the native typing interface, I do find typing long passages with my thumbs to be problematic. Sure, the autocomplete features are great and help in a lot of ways, it’s still tough to type long messages.
I, like I’m sure everyone else, have seen the blackberry commercial with the guy setting a record for text messaging by dragging his finger around. I figured it was a gimmick. So, when I heard about the beta for droid users, I was skeptical.
Then a friend and coworker, Matt, tweeted about Swype, and how he recommended trying it, I decided to go for it. It’s been two days and I’m more than happy I made the switch.
The intelligence, for lack of a better word, is nothing short of impressive. Rarely does it get a word wrong and even then I feel like I screwed something up.
I was worried about a learning curve, and having it not be worth my time, but it took very little time to get used to it and I was quickly able to type far faster than with a traditional QWERTY touchscreen.
Every now and then, someone comes up with something so simple and so easy to use, it’s just mind-boggling. Swype is like that.
While I’ve always been a big fan of simple, CSS-based designs, that applies even more in the mobile market. While the speed and power of these devices and the networks they use is quickly increasing, the fact remains that we want to give users the best experience we can now.
With a site that relies on CSS for it’s design instead of background images and the like, that CSS can quickly be minimized. Sure, you can create and optimize a sprite away to your here’s content, but this can be an immense time-sink while still not giving you the benefits of having your design come from CSS.
Similarly, there are a variety of browsers to test against in the mobile market, and a simple design has a far higher chance to remain consistent among these different browsers without relying on hacks. Which, again, makes your site far more maintainable and less complex from a developer’s perspective, making life far easier, not to mention more efficient.
Just another reason clean, simple sites will make a developer’s life better.
Mobile devices capable of browsing the Internet are exploding. Both in numbers and what is being made for them. Between apps like Foursquare and Gowalla and the hype that has surrounded them, we’re still in the infancy of this movement.
What is extremely significant for developers is how many different rendering engines they’ll have to test against. Even if a site or app isn’t mobile-centric, in most cases it still “has to work.” If you thought testing in IE6, 7 and 8, FireFox, Safari, Chrome and Opera was too much to test against, just think of all of the mobile versions of many of these browsers.
What got me thinking about this was trying to write a blog post in Opera Mini. I thought I would try it out on my Droid Incredible, but alas, there was some screwy CSS that meant I couldn’t even type in the textarea field. Thus, I’m writing from Android’s default browser. Sorry WordPress – just giving you one more thing to do.
Always more to test apparently.
