Proudly Serving Alaska

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Alaska Mobile Websites Since 2011

Stay passionate about delivering innovative enterprise mobile solutions.

By linking your mobile workforce to a central database server critical information is at your finger tips.  But mobile apps also present unique challenges, including radically smaller screen and input sizes, slower processors, and the lack of guaranteed connectivity.

Alaska Customers

Some information I know about Alaska is I believe the state was admitted or ratified to the United States around or about 'January 3, 1859'.  Alaska is located around latitude '66.160507' and longitude of '-153.369141' and has a population of roughly '733,391 million'.  If I remember correctly the capital is 'Juneau' and the largest city is 'Anchorage'. 

I utilize different approaches based on mobile device need as to page layout design.  Feel free to jump into the design examples below and see first hand how we can get the job done.

Elastic Mobile Interfaces (jQuery Mobile, CSS)

Web sites typically do not respond well to mobile devices.  Understanding jQuery and the use of CSS help one design effective user interfaces that fit nicely on mobile devices, are aesthetically pleasing and easy to use on mobile screen real estate.

Responsive Design (Single Page Design)

The web is buzzing with responsive web designs right now.  To have a single site that will change its styling accordingly to fit to the device it's being viewed on.  In this tutorial, I'm going to make a (very simple looking) web template that is responsive from desktop size down to mobile version.  Your site's layout will generally be cut down to a single column on a smartphone for example. 

The use of meta ViewPort, specific styled mobile fonts and specifically styled CSS ensure my single page layout works on any device.

If at any point you decide to reach to me just know the area code I work within for Alaska is '907'.  For Mobile Web assistance you will find my rates very reasonable for Alaska.  Now just keep in mind my time zone is 'Eastern Standard Time (EST)' and I know the time zones in Alaska are 'Alaska Standard Time (AKST)' in case you wish to call me.  Anyway let me continue.

Responsive Design (Mobile User Agent Redirection Design)

Another form of Responsive Design serves different devices layouts tailored specifically for the type of screen.  This non-single page responsive design requires the detection of the mobile phone.

I detect the type of device viewing the page by the user agent which ties specifically to the browser viewing the page (ie.  iPhone Mobile Layout, iPad Mini Layout, PC Fixed or Fluid layout).

Fluid Design (Element Proportional Space Designs)

The main difference is that Fluid Layouts (also called Liquid Layouts) are based on proportionally laying out your website so elements take up the same percent of space on different screen sizes, while Responsive Design uses Media Queries to present different layouts based on screen sizes/type of screen.  For some examples of both kinds of design, see Inspiration: Fluid & Responsive Design.

Fluid's intent is to keep the same spatial weighting to all elements, and works okay on different sizes of screens of the same sort.  They tend to look okay on a 32", high resolution monitor and a 12" lower resolution laptop.  This layout also works well on Microsoft's Shuffle device.  Fluid layouts are pretty easy to implement.

For a deeper look, check out Fixed vs.  Fluid vs.  Elastic Layout: What's The Right One For You?  by Smashing Magazine, which goes in depth on the primary changes in Fluid design.  They also have Responsive Web Design Guidelines and Tutorials for an overview of responsive (with plenty of links should you want to dig deeper into Responsive Design).

Responsive Design is very much "in" at the moment thanks to Mobile, Smashing actually has a whole tag for responsive design.

Mobile App Unique Challenges

When building smart phone mobile applications for a BlackBerry (or other) device, the dimension of the screen plays a huge factor in the overall feature set proposed.  Unlike a traditional desktop solution, where space is readily available, with smart phones screen real estate comes at a premium.   This presents some interesting challenges.  For example, it's not practical to place more than a few fields on the screen, so the application is going to have to be split up over multiple screens, or pages. 

Entering data on a smart phone can also be a challenge.  Because the processor speed isn't nearly as fast as your average desktop PC, you can't do as much processing on the device.  This is a generalization, but the point is you are going to have to do more with less on a mobile device.

Connectivity can present other challenges.  Let's say you are saving data to the remote server, and then you hit a dead spot in your coverage.  The application is going to have to sync up with the backend server when connectivity has been restored, and that functionality is critical to the operation of the system.

jQuery Mobile

jQuery Mobile has broad support for the vast majority of all modern desktop, smartphone, tablet, and e-reader platforms.  In addition, feature phones and older browsers are supported because of my progressive enhancement approach. We're very proud of my commitment to universal accessibility through my broad support for all popular platforms.

I use a 3-level graded platform support system: A (full), B (full minus Ajax), C (basic HTML).  The visual fidelity of the experience and smoothness of page transitions are highly dependent on the CSS rendering capabilities of the device and platform so not all A grade experience will be pixel-perfect but that's the nature of the web.

* Note: If jQuery core 1.8+ is used with jQuery Mobile, iOS 3.x and BB5 are re-graded to C level support because core dropped support for methods these platforms need for full functionality.

XHTML MP (Mobile Platform)

XHTML Mobile Profile (XHTML MP) is the standard language for mobile web development.  XHTML MP is an XHTML variant.  It offers richer presentation and is very similar to HTML.  XHTML MP is built on top of XHTML Basic.  In this article by Nirav Mehta, I will have a look at the fundamentals of XHTML MP and the grammar which must be followed for development in it.

Since XHTML MP is based on XHTML, certain syntactical rules must be followed.  Making syntactical errors is a good way to learn a programming language, but so that you don't get frustrated with them, here are some rules you must follow with XHTML MP!  Remember, HTML is very forgiving in terms of syntax, but make a small syntax error in XHTML MP and the browser may refuse to show your page!

You know, I don't make it out to Alaska much but I would like to see the 'Willow Ptarmigan' state bird.  I am a little familiar with the Alaska 'Forget-me-not' state flower as well.  However, I do not know much about Alaska's state tree the 'Sitka Spruce'.  Fishing is fun to me perhaps I would like reeling in the Alaska 'Largemouth Bass' state fish.  Anyway, sorry I went off topic.  Let me continue.

If you have developed WAP applications, you would be interested in finding the differences between WML (Wireless Markup Language - the predecessor of XHTML MP) and XHTML MP; apart from the obvious syntactical differences.  You need to understand this also while porting an existing WML-based application to XHTML MP.  Most of WML is easily portable to XHTML MP, but some features require workarounds.  Some features are not supported at all, so if you need them, you should use WML instead of XHTML MP.  WML 1.x will be supported in any mobile device that conforms to XHTML MP standards.

WML

Wireless Markup Language (WML) is a markup language based on Extensible Markup Language (XML) and was developed specifically for content and user interface for mobile device.

The Requirements

To be competitive the trading application I were building needed several key features, including:

1. Real-Time Level II Quotes
2. Up-To-Date Account Balances
3. Current Portfolio Holdings
4. Real-Time Charts
5. Stocks, Options and Mutual Fund Trading
6. Ability to Cancel Pending Transactions

My Approach

My approach was to prototype the entire mobile application using the appropriate SDK, and test the final product.  I can build cutting-edge mobile apps for a wide variety of purposes.