I am in the process of reading âMobile Design and Developmentâ by Brian Fling. Itâs pretty good stuff. The first 8 chapters havenât gone into technical details of programming at all. Itâs been a lot of discussion about mobile as a platform, itâs history, its potential, its complexness, etc.
All fascinating stuff. Supporting the wide array of devices and browsers is a daunting task to say the least. For efficiencies sake I have decided to start by focusing on WebKit. From what I am reading and my perception of trends Iâd say WebKit is a platform to really keep an eye on if you are a web developer at all.
For those who donât know, Webkit is the underlying technology in the browser used in the iPhone, the numerous Google/Android phones popping up, and the Palm Pre. WebKitâs approach to rendering CSS seems to be defining or redefining the standard of how to use CSS for mobile. For example two major players, Opera and Mozilla have adopted it for their mobile browsers (Mozillaâs Fennec is still in Beta). The old media=âhandheldâ thing, which I never ever got around to experimenting with, seems to be losing traction.
Here are a couple articles talking about web design for mobile. optimizing for iphone and android a list apart article All that said I wanted to start playing around. Android is an open source platform and itâs development tools including an emulator are free. download install this is what I put in my .bashrc file
### Android ### (home will be where ever you extracted the package you got off the Android website )
ANDROID\_HOME=~/opt/android-sdk-linux\_x86-1.6\_r1 PATH=$ANDROID\_HOME/bin:$PATH export ANDROID_HOME PATH
In order to load the new path do:
> source .bashrc
use eclipse to launch emulator [caption id=âattachment_85â align=âalignnoneâ width=â480â caption=âAndroid Virtual Environment on Karmic Desktopâ]
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2020 update
I find myself plugging in an actual device in debug mode and connecting that to my browsers dev tools. much easier and more of a feel for what is really happening