Picture this:

You are sitting on the bus,  your commute is 45 minutes long so you whip out your iPhone and start browsing Twitter. Your friend posts a link to this awesome article on social marketing, you follow the link and then sit for the next 15 minutes frustrated with:

1. waiting for the page and all it's ads to load
2. not being able to read the content because you keep having to pan back and forth on the screen.

This tends to happen to me a lot. There are VERY few sites out there that seem to understand that today there is a need for a mobile version of a website. Sure, you can get an app for your favourite site on your iPhone, Android, Symbian or Palm powered phones but these apps usually don't offer the website content or experience. The modern mobile OS and browser technology allows most websites to load and operate just as they would on a laptop or desktop but the experience is poor. With limited screen real estate, I want to execute my tasks quickly and effectively. I don't want to pinch or zoom on anything other than a map!

Two sites that have provided excellent mobile versions are:

1. Amazon - who understands user behaviour better than the users themselves, provides a slick, easy to use interface which makes shopping a breeze
2. Wikipedia Mobile - utilizing a minimalistic design, Wikipedia provides quick, relevant information on the go, no matter what your screen real estate!

These are just a couple examples but there are countless businesses and website owners out there who choose to ignore the tremendous mobile market to be tapped. Wake up people, it's 2010!

We came across an error today with our drop down menu system that uses a PNG-24 semi transparent drop shadow image around the border where the transparency would appear black in IE 7 and IE 8. After searching and trying all possible fixes we found the solution to the problem and it was quite simple.

Our menu system uses jQuery (doesn't everything these days?), and had a nice fade in and fade out transition. jQuery handles the fade transitions by setting the opacity which IE does not like very much. So using the fadeTo() functions in jQuery is a no-no in IE. The solution, use hide() and show() instead. It's not as elegant but the transparency issue was fixed on all modern browsers.

Other solutions to the problem include:

1. Using a background colour instead of transparent on the style so you would do:

.my-transparent-stuff{background: #fff url('image.png') repeat-y scroll left top;}

instead of

.my-transparent-stuff{background: transparent url('image.png') repeat-y scroll left top;}

2. Using PNG-8/transparent gifs (hey, it's a solution)

3. Forcing IE8 into IE7 mode by adding the following meta tag:

<meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=7" />

I still can't understand what Microsoft is doing!

I just learned about Opera Turbo from the makers of the Opera web browser. Opera Turbo is a piece of software that you install on your computer that uses a proxy on Opera's servers as well as the actual website to speed up page loads. Read more at Opera Labs: http://labs.opera.com/news/2009/03/13/

This software is relevant if you use mobile broadband, dial up or any slow connection. There are obviously privacy issues, as there are with using any proxy service but I think it would be a good thing for those with slow connections.

I was browsing around my myspace account today and clicked on a bulletin from a friend of mine. When I tried to click on their profile I was sent to a page that said I had to log in but before I could do that Firefox displayed this huge message that alerted me of this being a suspicious page! That was so awesome! Having been a victim of identity theft years ago I am always very cautious. I know that FF had all these great features but it is really nice when it pro-actively protects you without being intrusive all the time. Hats off to FF yet again!

I am hopeful that there will come a time when Microsoft's IE team will learn that developers really need error messages that make some sense! I am working on this application that uses the Yahoo! UI library and in particular the menu widget. It works fine on Firefox and on IE on my local network but anything outside my network gives the following error:

Internet Explorer cannot open the internet site xxxxxxx. Operation Aborted

The reason for the error is that the DOM hasn't fully loaded before the Javascript on the page tried to manipulate it. It is solved by easily adding the required initilisation functions queued by the YUI library's event manager.