I’m a busy guy. My PDA helps keep me connected around the Wi-Fi drenched campus, whether it be checking my email, keeping tabs on my website or the news. I find it rather ironic that the CEO of Newsvine, the very respectable Mike Davidson, posted an article on his blog to the tune of Make Your Site Mobile-Friendly in Two Minutes. Now where is the discontinuity in this? Well, I’ll tell you. Newsvine is horrible on mobile devices, even digg renders better. The current method of display top seeds, featured writers, most active stories, etc., does not even come up in a mobile device. What do I mean by mobile? I am talking strictly in the Palm-sense. Everything could render perfectly in a Windows Mobile device such as a Treo 700w, but my stance originates from the Blazer web browser on a Palm LifeDrive. Landscape mode makes websurfing ideal, which killed my hopes and dreams when the first visit to Newsvine was a crippled user experience.
I understand, Newsvine is currently in beta meaning somethings will change; most for the better, possibly a few for the worse. The point of this article is to get standards gurus to start looking at every possible web client, including mobile ones. I’m not exaggerating when I say 30% of my online time comes from my PDA. During the 6 or so hours I am usually on campus away from my dorm, I am currently missing out on all the great information that Newsvine has to offer, having to resort to the decently PDA-friendly digg for the “cool link of the day” or the umpteenth Jack Thompson story.
Hopefully someone on the Newsvine staff will take this into consideration. By the way guys, if you don’t have any Palm devices to debug with, hit me up and I will gladly let you borrow mine. I like to think of it as an investment for the future.
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That kinda thing will happen if you’re running PalmOS…can you even multitask on those things? :D
I love my Dell Axim (running Windows Mobile) and now that I bought Opera for mobile devices, almost all sites render perfectly in the non “Fit to Screen” mode and it even has JavaScript support.
PalmOS…pffft :D
No :-/
Mobile support is coming, Paul. My tutorial is more of a way to hack a simple site into mobile-friendliness. We’re actually developing an experience specific to Newsvine mobile users.
Excellent news Mike! I appreciate you stopping by.
wifi drenched- I like that term. A pda is a lot more portable and discreet than a laptop- with a laptop you actually have to sit down somewhere.
I agree about the mobile internet market- I can’t count the number of times I’ve been on the bus (1hr.5) and wished I could email someone or update my blog.