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Testing for mobile devices
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Loading ...As you might know this blog is also available through an own developed mobile edition, at http://m.narnio.com. It’s based on a plugin that I developed. But how do you go about with the testing for mobile platforms, when you don’t have all of them.
I mean who has the money to buy every possible phone out there, or every tablet. Well there are some ways to do this without having all of the devices. Here is a short list:
- Run it through the validator at http://validator.w3.org/mobile/
- Use a simulator for testing like:
- Doing a simple resolution check, for IE this can be done by hitting F12 and selecting Tools -> Resize
- Checking the load times on different connection speeds, using Fiddler 2 by changing Rules -> Performance -> Simulate modem speeds
So what are resolutions to check for with mobile devices, well here is a short list.
- 480 x 800 (default Android 1.5 – 2.2)
- 540 x 960 (newer Android phones 2.3.3)
- 640 x 960 (iPhone4)
- 1280 x 800 (various Android 3 tablets)
New WordPress skin, Ajax loading vs. Google
As a major remodeling of this blog is on the way I’m going to try to build it more dynamic and more up to the Web 2.0 standards. So that includes usage of Ajax, JQuery and a more dynamically filled website. But how to build this and keep the Google Analytics working, as well as the search engine indexing. This will be one of my biggest challenges I’m afraid.
Developing a website with JQuery / Ajax and advanced JavaScript prototypes isn’t anything new to me. But having all of these features and still make the site indexable is! So far I’m stuck at the simple point that crawlers don’t support JavaScript, so no go for that part. It looks like I will have to create a module for the WordPress plugin to detect what type of user is visiting the website. Serving the search engines a version that will not use any of the advanced features that normal browsers will support.
Besides the issue with the indexing there is still the task of getting all the pages on the website to be tracked with Google Analytics. Currently that is easy, though the website is dynamic each page is a new request to the server. But using advanced features like Ajax stops that in its tracks. Currently I don’t even know if it is possible to track pages when the actual URL doesn’t change, just the content of the page. If it is possible to do this I would have to build a module to do so.
So after just ranting and brain storming for a few seconds I already found to nice features that would have to be build. Another person might call them serious issues, but I prefer good challenges. At least for the moment I do. Not even mentioning the fact that I have to build a complete new template for WordPress too.
Working on a new layout
It’s been some time since my last post here, and there are several very good reasons for that. I’m currently rather busy trying to rebuild the skin for this blog, as well as several other development projects I’ve got going on right now. One might say I’m taking on more work then I can handle, but I love to be busy I guess. So what am I working on, and what can you be expecting in the time to come here:
- Redesigning this blog, to bring it up to speed with the latest possibilities from WordPress
- Building of the UML Design tool that I started on some months ago
- Defining the specs of a neural algorithm to build a user centric database (more on this to come in the future here)
- Continued development on the Synchronizer tool, hoping to release version 3.0 soon
And that’s just the work that I do in my rare spare time next to a full-time job.
C# and custom drawing on the canvas
Part of the development of one of my pet projects, the UML Designer, requires some type of custom canvas to display the UML graphs. Sounds easy, especially since I’ve done similar things in Java. Unfortunately reality proves me wrong every time.
I started out by creating a custom component, which inherits from the Panel. This would give me pretty much a blank object that could be added to the GUI. The painting part on its own is not that difficult either. Done that hundreds of times. The problem is in adding the various objects to paint on top of the panel to the panel before drawing commences.
Ok, I’ll try to explain a little better. I keep track of what to draw in an array inside the custom panel. This because these objects contain more information then just how to draw. But they are not part of the component list of the panel. I need to add them dynamically just before drawing and remove them again after drawing. But I’ve yet to find the correct way of doing this.
Tried adding them in the onPaint method, but this doesn’t trigger them to be painted. So I’ll probably have to intercept the WM_PAINT message sent to the panel and attach the
Erasing partition stupidity
Sometimes I just have the worst luck possible. Yesterday was one of those days. I recently had some issues with my HHD in my work laptop. So I thought why not install Ubuntu on a spare partition I never use.
So far for the good idea, but when Ubuntu asked me what partition to delete I wasn’t sure which was the spare one and which one contained all the source code of all applications and websites I developed. And you probably guessed it, I erased the wrong one.
Gone is a couple of days of work. Serves me right for not checking it in every day 
