Today, I receive an email from Cameron Moll, reminding me about the (almost, August 28th) release of his long awaited Mobile Web Design book. Perfect, I thought. I’ve been waiting for this almost as long as I was waiting for the release of the iPhone.

One of the reasons I’ve been waiting in such anticipation is that, for the last 10 months or so, two of the biggest projects I’ve been working on, directly relate to mobile web. Not so much in the sense of mobile web design, but in the sense that both of these projects make use of mobile technology to extend the web beyond web browsers. I’m very pleased to say that one of these, KaDoink, just launched into limited public beta.

This is Delivery

This was extremely exciting news. Lauren and I have been working with KaDoink for the better part of the year and we’re continuing to work with them to better define this branch of web development and design.

On May 31, 2005 CNN reported on the “not far away” Smart Homes:

The entry “home” in your mobile phone address book will have a whole new meaning in a few years — your place of residence is likely to be clever enough to send SMS messages directly to you, and you will do the same to it.
Julie Clothier for CNN

It’s kind of funny, looking back. Computer’s that can SMS you, hardly seems novel. But the fact is, these are the baby steps that are seriously changing the landscape for web development. Today we’re talking about web browsers, but we’re already seeing the erosion of differentials between stand-alone applications and web applications. In fact, if you consider the necessity for online software updates, there really isn’t any. What does this mean for web design?

Mashable.com probably said it best, when they reviewed Kadoink.

If Twitter Were On Steriods, You’d Have Kadoink
Kristin Nicole on Mashable.com

Well, almost . . . aside from misspelling “steroids”. Come on guys, it’s the title of your article! Anyway, I digress.

Mobile web design in 5 years?

I touched upon some of the set backs for mobile web design in my post media=”handheld”, and again with iThumb, but what I didn’t talk about was what all this means for mobile web design in the years to come.

KaDoink is a good example. They’ve extended the traditional web 2.0 social networking beyond the web browser and translated it for complete mobile integration. Egad! If Second Life subjugates the real world as a virtual fantasy, KaDoink liberates the technology of the virtual web, into our daily lives. Well, that sounds a little too profound, but it is the breaching of these boundaries that will shape the world of web design in the coming years.

So, where do I see mobile web design in 5 years?

I’ll put it this way; We’ll all have jet packs, so Google Maps will be obsolete. We won’t need online project management applications like Base Camp, because dodgeball will take over and we won’t need to sleep anymore, because there will be sleeping pills. Oh wait, we already have something like that. Not sure what that has to do with mobile web design anyway. The point is, I haven’t the slightest idea. But I’ll say this, how we think about the web is always changing. Web browsers were designed for computers, to access the web. Why should we expect the same thing for a mobile device?

First and foremost, the iPhone is just really cool. Even with the extraordinary blunder Apple made by partnering with a single wireless provider (and probably the worst, at that), the iPhone is just so cool, I’m willing to make sacrifices. Not many companies put out products that can do that. This is one thing Apple has going for it.

One of the major issues with the iPhone, however, is the touch-screen interface. Don’t get me wrong, for 90% of what you can do on the iPhone, the slick, touch-screen actions of sliding and tapping work so beautifully, it’ll make you cry. The other 10% is a concern for many users. To start with, the number one set back, according to Chicago-based usability consultancy User Centric, is the difficulty users found in sending text messages (SMS).

Participants uniformly found text entry SMS and email to be difficult. They were frustrated by the forced use the vertical keyboard and the lack of visibility for editing the middle of a word or sentence.
- UN, 18 July 2007

Not to mention, the keys are just too close together and small for many people to navigate accurately, since you can’t use touch to distinguish one key from another. For this reason, I am proposing the introduction of iThumb, an iPhone accessory designed specifically to achieve touch-screen accuracy for the medium to large thumbed.

iThumb accessory kit and packaging

The iThumb works like this: Each accessory kit comes with 48 silicone pads that adhere to the insides of your thumbs (Fig. 1). The silicone pads provide a reduced surface area for each of your texting thumbs, allowing you to accurately type the correct letters and/or numbers in your correspondence. The derma-bond adhesive used for the Thumb Buds ™ is a durable, protein-based formula that holds it’s bond for up to 10 days. This non-toxic adhesive is the same adhesive used by surgeons and those who suspend large pachyderms from flying helicopters, but it’s easily removed with just a spritz of fresh water.

Figure 1

the future of mobile web

So the question arises, will the iPhone change the horizon for mobile web? My response, probably not by itself. With the iThumb? Increasingly likely. The iPhone hasn’t really revolutionized anything with mobile web. To the best of my knowledge, “adaptive zooming” has been around for some time. Sure it’s nice to be able to pull up a web site on your mobile device and have it look the same as it does on your desktop, but is it convenient? I guess that depends on the web site and your wireless plan. Data transfer costs can be a killer if you pay by kb.

None-the-less, Apple has made something, maybe not revolutionary, but a heck of a lot of fun. And that does have the potential to influence change, if you ask me. It’s not a technological change we’ll see, so much as it is a change in expectations. No, it’s not new. But Apple has managed to bring the state of the mobile web, to the mainstream headlines like no one else. This may not change the game, but it certainly ups the anti.

The buzz around town for the last year or so has been all about mobile web and for the first time, we’re really starting to see some interesting things in this area of web development. In December of 2006, Read/WriteWeb published their predictions for Web Technology growth in 2007.

Among those predictions, they listed that 27% of people surveyed thought that Online Video and Internet TV would take the lead in growth, while 22% thought Web-based Apps would continue to lead and 15%, Mobile Web. With Companies such as Google, Yelp and YouTube all optimized for Mobile use, the number of people accessing the internet via their trusty hand phone is rising rapidly.

I’ll take mine to go

I wanted to take a look back at these predictions because over the last 6 months I’ve found myself more and more inundated with web application work, that specifically takes advantage of mobile technology. Not necessarily mobile website, but applications that are bridging the gap. In fact, the top 3 areas from the Read/WriteWeb predictions pretty much fill my plate these days.

Despite past claims that Asia is years ahead of the U.S. and U.K. in mobile web use, a recent survey taken in March, by Online Publishers, claims that mobile web use in the U.S. is actually higher now.

The fact that more people are accessing the web from mobile devices, means designing for mobile web is increasingly important. The conundrum for us designers is, “how do we do that?”

I can certainly relate. Design for mobile web? A joke right? The support for CSS among mobile web browsers is abysmal at best, but there are things you can do and things you want to consider, when designing for mobile devices. If you are tasked with designing for mobile devices, the first thing you can do is jog over to Patrick Grifith’s mobile media test page and see what css media types your mobile device supports. This, of course, wont give you an accurate overview of mobile devices at large, but you can see what options are available. The key to designing for mobile devices is simplicity. Regardless of the advances in technology to come, when your workable real estate is smaller than a business card. The second thing you should do is read Cameron Moll’s series on mobile web design. He provides an excellent background and very useful tips.

However, if you need something quick and dirty, to just make your website more accessible from mobile devices, Google has a bare-bones tool that will make your website, a mobile website in a click (and it’s not that bad, at that). If you want to see it in action for this site, go to http://www.google.com/gwt/n?u=http://www.repeatpenguin.com/ on your mobile device.