Best designed mobile sites?
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For those of you with an iPhone, Crackberry or Droid strapped to your hip (or other body parts that we're probably best off not knowing about), what are some of the best designed mobile friendly web sites that you visit? The UPS guys pointed me to their iPhone running Yahoo and Facebook, both of which look okay. Other sites came up in tiny, unreadable text, giving them a chance to show off their phone pinching techniques. Impressive as that may be, a good, mobile friendly site shouldn't require a pinch in the butt to be easy to read and navigate. I mean, you know, unless it's one of those NSFW things. So, what's the pick of the litter when it comes to well designed mobile sites? And remember, boys and girls, play fair. We're talking the web site itself, not those fancy iPhone or Droid applications. :-D
Christopher Duncan
www.PracticalUSA.com
Author of The Career Programmer and Unite the Tribes
Copywriting ServicesGoogle. Including GMail, Reader, Voice and of course search. Wikipedia provides a great example of how to deliver large amounts of content without becoming unwieldy. Wanna impress someone? Whip out your phone and start bringing up Wikipedia pages for the chemicals on the back of some packaged food product you're both eating. Amazon is also rather decent, though it and Facebook both seem to suffer from just throwing away all the tools they'd normally cram into a sidebar on the desktop. If you want a great contrast between good and mediocre mobile web design, contrast Facebook with Google Reader: the former is technically impressive enough, going out of its way to be flashy and slick, but you're never unaware that you're seeing a sliver of what's actually available... while the latter quietly reformats itself and its content into something suitable for the smaller screen and gets out of the way. It's the difference between implementing a fancy animated "lightbox" for displaying images, and simply not surrounding the image with superfluous chrome to start with...
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Google. Including GMail, Reader, Voice and of course search. Wikipedia provides a great example of how to deliver large amounts of content without becoming unwieldy. Wanna impress someone? Whip out your phone and start bringing up Wikipedia pages for the chemicals on the back of some packaged food product you're both eating. Amazon is also rather decent, though it and Facebook both seem to suffer from just throwing away all the tools they'd normally cram into a sidebar on the desktop. If you want a great contrast between good and mediocre mobile web design, contrast Facebook with Google Reader: the former is technically impressive enough, going out of its way to be flashy and slick, but you're never unaware that you're seeing a sliver of what's actually available... while the latter quietly reformats itself and its content into something suitable for the smaller screen and gets out of the way. It's the difference between implementing a fancy animated "lightbox" for displaying images, and simply not surrounding the image with superfluous chrome to start with...
Wikipedia comes up tiny and in need of a zoom on my Blackberry, Facebook does a better job in that regard. Gmail also does a nice job of being functional.
Shog9 wrote:
Wanna impress someone? Whip out your phone and start bringing up Wikipedia pages for the chemicals on the back of some packaged food product you're both eating.
I know you. You're the guy who writes XKCD, right? :)
Christopher Duncan
www.PracticalUSA.com
Author of The Career Programmer and Unite the Tribes
Copywriting Services -
Christopher Duncan wrote:
not those fancy iPhone or Droid applications
I would never PREsume anything like that. :) I picked up a palm, what subject? Code project recently got better for me. It still has problems and some areas still require pinch. Interesting enough when I post messages I used to have to pinch, now because of the automatic edit zoom, I actually have to increase the size. Not sure when that happened. It used to be so difficult I wouldn't come here often on the phone. Now it is getting easier.
_________________________ John Andrew Holmes "It is well to remember that the entire universe, with one trifling exception, is composed of others." Shhhhh.... I am not really here. I am a figment of your imagination.... I am still in my cave so this must be an illusion....
Just brought up CP. Clearly they've put in the effort to be mobile friendly. But I can barely see Bob! :omg:
Christopher Duncan
www.PracticalUSA.com
Author of The Career Programmer and Unite the Tribes
Copywriting Services -
Google. Including GMail, Reader, Voice and of course search. Wikipedia provides a great example of how to deliver large amounts of content without becoming unwieldy. Wanna impress someone? Whip out your phone and start bringing up Wikipedia pages for the chemicals on the back of some packaged food product you're both eating. Amazon is also rather decent, though it and Facebook both seem to suffer from just throwing away all the tools they'd normally cram into a sidebar on the desktop. If you want a great contrast between good and mediocre mobile web design, contrast Facebook with Google Reader: the former is technically impressive enough, going out of its way to be flashy and slick, but you're never unaware that you're seeing a sliver of what's actually available... while the latter quietly reformats itself and its content into something suitable for the smaller screen and gets out of the way. It's the difference between implementing a fancy animated "lightbox" for displaying images, and simply not surrounding the image with superfluous chrome to start with...
Shog9 wrote:
Wanna impress someone? Whip out your phone and start bringing up Wikipedia pages for the chemicals on the back of some packaged food product you're both eating.
[Fade to scene with Chris sitting in restaurant with hot girl, using Shog's advise from above] Chris: "Hey babe, did you know that salad dressing you're eating right now contains 29 man-made chemicals that I can't even pronounce. [Girl gets up and starts to run out] Chris: "HEY! Wait! Where are you going???? I haven't even told you about the parasites that probably exist in that mushroom you just ate!" [Sounds of girl screaming in distance] Chris: Are you at least impressed?!?!?!?! Shog said you would be!!!!!
:..::. Douglas H. Troy ::..
Bad Astronomy |VCF|wxWidgets|WTL -
Wikipedia comes up tiny and in need of a zoom on my Blackberry, Facebook does a better job in that regard. Gmail also does a nice job of being functional.
Shog9 wrote:
Wanna impress someone? Whip out your phone and start bringing up Wikipedia pages for the chemicals on the back of some packaged food product you're both eating.
I know you. You're the guy who writes XKCD, right? :)
Christopher Duncan
www.PracticalUSA.com
Author of The Career Programmer and Unite the Tribes
Copywriting ServicesChristopher Duncan wrote:
Wikipedia comes up tiny and in need of a zoom on my Blackberry
Hmm... Make sure you're getting the mobile version of the site (en.m.wikipedia...)
Christopher Duncan wrote:
I know you. You're the guy who writes XKCD, right?
Ok, ok... Maybe "impress" wasn't quite the word I was looking for!
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Shog9 wrote:
Wanna impress someone? Whip out your phone and start bringing up Wikipedia pages for the chemicals on the back of some packaged food product you're both eating.
[Fade to scene with Chris sitting in restaurant with hot girl, using Shog's advise from above] Chris: "Hey babe, did you know that salad dressing you're eating right now contains 29 man-made chemicals that I can't even pronounce. [Girl gets up and starts to run out] Chris: "HEY! Wait! Where are you going???? I haven't even told you about the parasites that probably exist in that mushroom you just ate!" [Sounds of girl screaming in distance] Chris: Are you at least impressed?!?!?!?! Shog said you would be!!!!!
:..::. Douglas H. Troy ::..
Bad Astronomy |VCF|wxWidgets|WTLWell, this certainly explains the current state of my love life. :)
Christopher Duncan
www.PracticalUSA.com
Author of The Career Programmer and Unite the Tribes
Copywriting Services -
Christopher Duncan wrote:
Wikipedia comes up tiny and in need of a zoom on my Blackberry
Hmm... Make sure you're getting the mobile version of the site (en.m.wikipedia...)
Christopher Duncan wrote:
I know you. You're the guy who writes XKCD, right?
Ok, ok... Maybe "impress" wasn't quite the word I was looking for!
What, you mean they don't automatically detect that I'm on a mobile? What kind of geeks are these guys! Er, uh, yeah, it looks much better once I have the correct url...
Christopher Duncan
www.PracticalUSA.com
Author of The Career Programmer and Unite the Tribes
Copywriting Services -
Well, this certainly explains the current state of my love life. :)
Christopher Duncan
www.PracticalUSA.com
Author of The Career Programmer and Unite the Tribes
Copywriting Services -
Well, this certainly explains the current state of my love life. :)
Christopher Duncan
www.PracticalUSA.com
Author of The Career Programmer and Unite the Tribes
Copywriting ServicesYou could practice on Trollslayer, I can't imagine her stomach turning from those descriptions.... though the punishment might leave you an octave higher in pitch.... ;P
_________________________ John Andrew Holmes "It is well to remember that the entire universe, with one trifling exception, is composed of others." Shhhhh.... I am not really here. I am a figment of your imagination.... I am still in my cave so this must be an illusion....
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Google. Including GMail, Reader, Voice and of course search. Wikipedia provides a great example of how to deliver large amounts of content without becoming unwieldy. Wanna impress someone? Whip out your phone and start bringing up Wikipedia pages for the chemicals on the back of some packaged food product you're both eating. Amazon is also rather decent, though it and Facebook both seem to suffer from just throwing away all the tools they'd normally cram into a sidebar on the desktop. If you want a great contrast between good and mediocre mobile web design, contrast Facebook with Google Reader: the former is technically impressive enough, going out of its way to be flashy and slick, but you're never unaware that you're seeing a sliver of what's actually available... while the latter quietly reformats itself and its content into something suitable for the smaller screen and gets out of the way. It's the difference between implementing a fancy animated "lightbox" for displaying images, and simply not surrounding the image with superfluous chrome to start with...
Shog9 wrote:
Wanna impress someone? Whip out your phone and start bringing up Wikipedia pages for the chemicals on the back of some packaged food product you're both eating.
I used to do that when I worked in a chemistry department at the Uni; they have all the catalogs and the prices for each chemicals per weight. some of that shit cost literally an arm and a leg for a gram or so ...
Watched code never compiles.
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For those of you with an iPhone, Crackberry or Droid strapped to your hip (or other body parts that we're probably best off not knowing about), what are some of the best designed mobile friendly web sites that you visit? The UPS guys pointed me to their iPhone running Yahoo and Facebook, both of which look okay. Other sites came up in tiny, unreadable text, giving them a chance to show off their phone pinching techniques. Impressive as that may be, a good, mobile friendly site shouldn't require a pinch in the butt to be easy to read and navigate. I mean, you know, unless it's one of those NSFW things. So, what's the pick of the litter when it comes to well designed mobile sites? And remember, boys and girls, play fair. We're talking the web site itself, not those fancy iPhone or Droid applications. :-D
Christopher Duncan
www.PracticalUSA.com
Author of The Career Programmer and Unite the Tribes
Copywriting ServicesChristopher Duncan wrote:
or other body parts that we're probably best off not knowing about
:laugh:
Cheers, Vikram. (Got my troika of CCCs!)
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Shog9 wrote:
Wanna impress someone? Whip out your phone and start bringing up Wikipedia pages for the chemicals on the back of some packaged food product you're both eating.
I used to do that when I worked in a chemistry department at the Uni; they have all the catalogs and the prices for each chemicals per weight. some of that shit cost literally an arm and a leg for a gram or so ...
Watched code never compiles.
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Christopher Duncan wrote:
or other body parts that we're probably best off not knowing about
:laugh:
Cheers, Vikram. (Got my troika of CCCs!)
One more for that joke! Calorie Count works perfect on Mobiles! ccm.about.com :laugh: