Mobile Web
Mobile view… round 1
We have continued working on the overall project platform as well as the underlying mobile apps. If you haven’t been following along on the dev site, we are looking at release 1 consisting of:
- Campus Events
- Texas A&M News
- Bus Routes
- University Google Search
- Library
- Contact Phone Numbers
Other elements for possible inclusion later down the road:
- Athletics
- Directory Search
- Videos/YouTube
- Campus Maps
- Courses
- Campus Tours
- Dining Services
- University website
Again, if you have any special requests please send them our way.
The Broad Spectrum of Mobile Device Capabilities
As Erick mentioned, we are diligently working on a solution that is friendly to the entire spectrum of mobile devices. The difficulty in developing web sites and applications targeted at mobile devices is that each device has its own preferences: which markup it can render and which technologies it supports. These capabilities vary from support for JavaScript to support for bold text. JavaScript is obviously on the cutting edge for mobile browsers, whereas bold text is something developers and designers take for granted.
To help mitigate the differences, we spent time researching how others were dealing with this problem. We eventually found ourselves on the homepage of the Wireless Abstraction Library (WALL) for PHP. After some enjoyable integration work (that’s developer-speak for “difficult hacking”), we have a functional integration between the WALL4PHP library and the Zend Framework-powered back end of Texas A&M’s mobile site.
I’ll save the intricate details of how the libraries work together for another day, but I wanted to talk about how this benefits you. You are most likely intimately familiar with what your mobile device does well, and where it can improve on your experience with websites. However, because each device is designed for a particular subset of one of the popular markup languages for mobile devices—WML (WAP 1.0), cHTML, or XHTML MP (WAP 2.0)—most websites are not capable of rendering in your device’s native markup language, if you will. This is why you have a (possibly) growing list of web sites you refuse to visit from your mobile device.
It would not be prohibitively difficult to develop views for each of the three markup languages, except each device is permitted to support part of the full markup language specification, or the entire language. Giving markup to the device that it does not understand would land us right back where we started: a web site that is not properly rendered on your device.
Using markup elements defined by the WALL specification, it becomes a simple exercise to translate into the appropriate markup for a given device based on its capabilities. The WALL parsing library uses what is known as the Wireless Universal Resource File (WURFL)—a large XML database that contains information about device capabilities—to determine the proper markup for a device based on the device’s user agent. The end result is that a device that supports PNG image files will receive PNGs; a device that supports bold tags as <b> elements will receive them and <strong> elements for XHTML MP supporting devices; so on and so forth.
As webmasters, we hope that this technology will be able to help us provide a most enjoyable and useful mobile browsing experience to you. We really appreciate your feedback on what a mobile application can do for you. Keep the information coming.
Mobile view… a survey
When looking across the country and talking to folks at HighEdWeb, there is still no real concensus on how to tackle mobile web development. Most of even the leading schools have turned it over to third party developers, who then build iPhone apps… exactly what I said last time that I didn’t want to do here.
I did, though, find one bright spot. MIT has taken a similar approach and has Open Sourced their web kit, so I need to do more detailed research into their product. They do browser sniffing and then compare the results to the wurfl project, which tracks the capabilities of phones on the market. They then fork the code received by the phone based on its capabilities. Features are progressively added so that base line machines get unstyled text content while smart phones get more and iPhones/iPod Touches get the full experience.
Whatever direction we ultimately go, you should be prepared for this to not be a straight-line process. We will be rolling out the project with a few basic apps to begin with and adding a few more as we get them built and integrated. As we do so the layout and features of the base will likely change as well.
Upcoming… a mobile view
We got a new student worker a few weeks ago. When we first hired him, his primary focus of interest was building apps for the Blackberry and iPhone. This was designed to fit in with and help promote the TAMUMobile iPhone apps that were published by Terribly Clever last month. The more I thought about it, though, the more convinced I became that we were on the wrong track. We shouldn’t be building one set of apps for each phone and then another for the next phone, we should be creating one mobile web view that is accessible from all (within reason anyway) smart phones.
We experimented with a few things for about two weeks prior to leaving for the HighEdWeb conference, and the biggest thing we learned was that developing for the phone is going to be as bad as the bad-0l-days of the browser wars. There is no standard of how html, javascript, or CSS is supported. Each phone renders the same code differently, and only a few correctly.
When going to the conference I purposefully left my laptop at home and tried to get around with only my Blackberry Curve. Not an impossible situation – I have Opera Mini installed so I can see most sites — if I don’t mind one-word columns, missing blocks of content where a flash box is supposed to be, or arbitrary contend styled with CSS for the desktop which completely breaks the page when viewed from the phone. Combine this with cellular-based download speeds and I’d rarely use the Internet if this was the only way I could connect.
I’m convinced that the future of the web is mobile, but I’m equally convinced that we have a long way to go to make it usable. Follow along at http://m-test.tamu.edu/ as we try different techniques, technologies, and applications to bring the university web presence to the mobile device. Feel free to send us comments and suggestions, I think this will be an ongoing initiative for easily the next several years.
Mobile Calendar
After about a week playing with the style sheets and previewing it on every phone I could get my hands on, I think we are finally ready for a version-1 release of the mobile view of the Campus Calendar.
Kudos go out to the UNL developers who saw a need for this and made it so easy to integrate into our setup. Both this version and the standard version point to the same database, so you’ll be getting the same content, just in an easier to use small screen view.
As an aside, styling for the mobile device is very different than developing for the desktop. There is next to no browser continuity, and even different browsers on the same device will show things differently. We are going to use this as the start of a larger foray into the mobile world, so it will show to some degree what to expect. We will be taking the 320×240 screen size as our default to make sure we are compatible with older Blackberry devices, but will at the same time try to make it look good on iPhones, Storms, and other high-end devices. We are just getting our feet wet in this arena, so if you see something we could improve on feel free to give us a yell.
New Calendar Feature
For those who haven’t visited lately, we have added a new feature to the campus calendar — a weekly view. This is something that several folks have been asking about for quite a while, and we’re pleased to now be able to offer it as a resource.
Other upcoming features include a facebook ap that Donald St. Martin in the College Engineering is working on, as well as a mobile version that we indend to roll out for phone/mobile device users.
Another New Webmaster: Bob Timm
Howdy!
My name is Robert (Bob) Timm, Texas Aggie Class of 2010. I joined the Aggie Web Development Team today with the goal of providing the campus with a mobile version of the TAMU homepage. Not limited to just iPhones, but every mobile browser on every mobile phone. My experience extends from a couple years of web development and a phone app company I started this year, Roboconn Mobile Development. I look forward to providing this campus with some unique tools that have never been available to anyone before. So stay updated, changes are right around the corner!
Bob Timm
TAMUMobile now available
The icon for the TAMUMobile App
Well, as of yesterday afternoon, Texas A&M’s TAMUMobile application went live in the iTunes App Store and it looks like it will do pretty well. The folks I showed yesterday were excited about it and we’re getting good feedback.
There are still some tweaks that are ongoing. For example, when the TAMUtv sub app first opened it showed all of the content was “uploaded 39 years ago”. (I’m sorry but I don’t remember YouTube competing for my childhood attention back in the 1970s.) But we’re getting those knocked out as we see them. So if you download it, please feel free to email us at itunes@tamu.edu.
Phase 2 is also underway with the maps, courses and events sub apps going well. According to Diane (who’s working with the vendor) they are in discussions for a Blackberry version as well as others.
Once again, my thanks to all who are helping to make this possible. This really is a team effort.
TAMUmobile is near
mockup of TAMUmobile screen
This June, Texas A&M enters the mobile app fray with an iPhone suite of apps that we are calling TAMUmobile (curse you 10 character limit and ampersands…). As part of an agreement with SF-based Terriblyclever, we (led by Diane McDonald from our division) are working with them to develop a core set of mobile apps for Texas A&M. For iPod Touch/iPhone users you can see a similar set by downloading the free iStanford or DukeMobile apps.
Some of you already know this because I’ve hit you up for feeds or information or assistance. So shout outs and much gratitude to Alyssa for athletics feeds and assistance, Shawn in DSA who’s helping us out with events feeds from the allU calendar, Cheryl and Susan (CIS rock stars) with directory and feed advising, Jim and the GIS folks for maps and map info, the EIS crew (let us all groan as I say “Domo arigato Mr. Malota”) and a number of others who have updated or provided us news feeds. And we’d be in default icon mode if it weren’t for the handy stylings of Mr. Birch.
Currently, we’re about to get the prototypes in for Phase 1 and once we’ve approved, we submit the app/sub apps to the Apple App Store for processing. Phase 1 will tentatively contain campus directory, news, athletics, and TAMUtv (an Aggie youTube Channel). TAMUmobile will be a free download.
Phase 2 will (again tentatively) include Maps, Course catalog, and events/calendars which would be July-ish and in the fall we’re looking at a number of possibilities that range from classroom learning aids (such as clickers) to bus schedules.
Now up until this point, it’s been Apple this and iPhone that, and it’s true, TAMUmobile is kicking off with the iPhone versions first with Blackberry following on its heels a little later. We’re also discussing with TC other platforms/mobile browsers as well. Ultimately, this will drive what will become a mobile A&M website, but we’ll save that for a later post.
Again my thanks to all who have helped us get this off the ground and running.
iPhone App Seminar
Ben and I attended the iPhone application development seminar that Apple put on this morning. The presenter obviously already knew how to use the development software, but it didn’t look overly complicated. I suspect we’ll be seeing several folks around campus starting to build apps.
It’s probably early to start talking details, but if anybody is interested in collaboration, joint ventures, or just conversation on the topic we would be willing to help get something set up.