So I got home from work on Monday, and as per my usual routine flipped open my laptop and prepared to have a butchers of twitter and google reader. Not before making myself a little (read: large) pre-dinner snack. I knew Apple was unveiling the details of their latest enhancement to the iPhone (the boringly named 3G S) but I wasn’t one of the many fanboys sitting drooling uncontrolably at the live feed.
I figured if there is something ground breaking, I’ll hear about it (from the 3 fanboys in my office)… Boy did I hear about it. Not from my co-workers and not because it was ground breaking, because really… it totally wasn’t. But rather because said drooling fanboys/girls couldn’t hold back their vomitus bile and felt it necessary to pollute my twitter feed and rss reader.
I mean sure - while a little underwhelming - the specs are still worthy of a once over. D-compass, memory, processor, openGL, yada yada yada. But did I really need to get a running comentary in twitter? “OMG Apple about to unveil Tom Tom turn by turn”, “OMG tethering!”. On top of that, when I opened google reader a bit later, every second post in my mobile category was iPhone 3G S ramblings.
I think I should review my mobile feeds.
That is all.
I’ve been wanting to rage about this for a fair while now. In fact, to be perfectly honest this single post was a significant driving force behind the idea of creating this site so I guess it is fitting that it’s my first post. You see in my day job I build mobile sites for some well established brand names. Unfortunately the higher-ups at these brands - corporate slaves that they are - pretty much all use CrapBerrys and hence only look at their mobile site on said CrapBerry. Setting aside the fact that CrackBerrys constitute a fairly low volume percentage of the traffic hitting these sites, it is therefore deemed an important device since those that pay the bills use them - a logical progression I can certainly follow.
Unfortunately it seems that some SmackBerrys ship with CSS, tables, background colour and some other features (like js) disabled by default. Why? To increase browsing speeds? Is a 10kb CSS file such a hinderance to faster browsing speeds, and what if the styles are inline? The average CrackBerry user generally doesn’t even know how to (or even why to) enable these features which is usually the first problem we hit in these scenarios. If we do by some miracle get Mr Suit to enable these settings we then have to start dealing with the unfortunate state of RIM’s CSS implementation.
I assume a fair amount of thought went into the implementation of CSS on these devices so I really would love to hear what the logic behind the decision to leave out support for the CSS display property was. To hide an element you should be safe using visibility:hidden and display:none, but on devices that don’t support the display property you will get a nice area of “white” space. Another annoying one I seem to have run into is that I seem unable to adjust padding or margin values on p tags but that’s not accross the board and not really a show stopper.
Lastly, the HackBerry has two rather cryptic viewing modes Page View and Column View which radically change the way the page is rendered. I believe one is meant for viewing the web as you would expect it to be rendered on a PC, and the other, for the browser to re-render it into a column format - don’t quote me on that though I haven’t really bothered investigating fully.
The good news, is that LameBerry developer forums are generally quite helpful, and with a bit of digging you should be able to find some info on the problem you are having - or at least someone else who has also experienced it. Also, the newer models - the Storm and Bold specifically - are starting to have better CSS/HTML support and generally far better browsers than the older models.
That said, I actually find the browser on the Storm to be my next favourite after the Android and iPhone browsers. Aside from some zooming lameness - like zooming in when I am trying to scroll and not having an option to programatically disable zooming - it is actually a pretty decent browser to use.
Lets face it, the mobile beast can be a retarded one. Whether you are an app developer, mobile internet site developer or even a non technical cog in the big mobile wheel you will have undoubtedly have had your fair share of WTF! moments.
We have been working in various mobile fields for a number of years now, and between us we have certainly had many WTF! moments… so we figured, why not blog about them.
Whenever we come accross something in mobile which really makes us think “that’s retarded” we will try to comment on it here. Most posts will probably be of a technical slant, though there may be the odd commercial/non-technical post every now and then.
Watch this space.