[review] Mobile Design and Development – Practical techniques for Creating Mobile Sites and Web Apps
Pasquale Granato
Mobile Sites and Web Apps
Brian Fling
2009, O'Reilly
309 pp, $34.99
A review by Pasquale Granato
First of all, let's clear the field from a possible misunderstanding:
this book is not about general mobile design and development but it is
about web mobile development. The author states a precise, despite
arguable, opinion that brutally said is: do not code native
applications but prefer as much as you can web applications. This
statement is largely discussed across the book and everyone can make
up his own opinion about this. Mine is that currently times are not
mature to consider to write just web applications both because mobile
browser are not powerful enough (on average) to assure a smooth
experience on all devices and because of the lack of a good way to
make money from your web app.
The first three chapters of the book are a really good introduction to
the history of mobile, to the mobile current status and to the reasons
that should drive an approach to the mobile development. These
chapters are a well written recap of the status of the art and present
a lot of data useful to understand the global situation. Unfortunately
the book is printed in black and white and several pie-charts and
graphs are pretty much impossible to read
The central part of the book, chapters from four to ten, is devoted to
design issues and, despite the lack of an in-depth examination of some
subjects, offers a pretty good survey of the topic
The final part of the book is slightly more technical covering topics
such as XHTML-MP, CSS, HTML5, device adaptation, etc. The problem here
is that there is nothing really practical and all remains at an
introductory level. To give you an example, a capital topic in device
adaptation like Media Queries is covered in half a page with just a
trivial example. Furthermore the author seems to be unaware of things
like XwapProfile or UAProf (that is probably a obsolete and unreliable
method but deserve at least a notation).
My biggest complain is anyway about the author's obsession for the
iPhone. The Apple's jewel is referenced continuously and always with
great glorification: the word iPhone recurs 99 times in the book and
out of the 115 pictures in the book as many as 37 depict an iPhone. An
entire chapter is devoted to iPhone web applications development even
though most of the concepts presented here are common to other modern
devices.
This is overall a decent introductory book, if you are completely new
to the field, and it's packed with many good advices but do not expect
much from the practical techniques promised by the title.
Pasquale Granato
--
“The Unified Geek Theory: At present, the President of the United
States, the wealthiest person in the United States, and the most
trusted newscaster in the United States are all geeks. At the same
time, movies based on comic book characters are routinely taking in
hundreds of millions of dollars. The only reasonable conclusion is:
We’ve won!”