Recently a large portion of my time has revolved around development for Mobile and Devices. This has predominantly been focused on FlashLite version 1.1 and also some FlashLite 2 or FlashLite 2.1 . This new area of development, and also the purchase of a Nokia N95 has bought a new appreciation of the requirements for more content that is accessible from mobile phones and also other mobile devices, for example the PSP. As part of the re-design of this blog I have begun to experiment with mobile and device specific web and application development.

The first step was pretty easy. Taking this blog mobile. Because Blog.bittube.com is published using the WordPress the first thing I did was to look for a plug in. I only found one. which rather surprised me. You can get it here.

WordPress Mobile Edition

I am no PHP master (neophyte even), but what this seems to do is to re-theme the site in a more Mobile Friendly manner. Removing all the gloss and leaving a rather inelegant simple text list version. As a result of this I began to hack around at some thing that might be a little kinder on the eyes, while still working on more limited devices. This is still very much a work in progress but I hope to find time to continue these experiments to a more complete result.

mobile.bittube.com/blog

Is the first attempt at providing a mobile and device specific theme and presentation for my blog. The theme is very closely based on the PlainText theme, All I have done so far is to any 'extra' blog decorations in an attempt to learn more about CSS and XHTML,my how HTML has changed since I trotted off in my new fangled FutureWave Splash spurs all those year ago .

To finish this post Here are a set of links that I have dug up and Found useful as I have begun investigating development for mobile and devices further.

• Instructions on how to find the MAC address of your N95
• W3C.org Mobile CSS Profile
• Nokia Mobile Internet Tool Kit
• JavaScript Screen Resolution Detection, and redirection
• Fire Fox User Agent Switcher*
• General Mobile Device User Agent Information

* I have been using fire fox to test some content in lieu of my N95, its just quicker and easier than testing on device ALL the time. In order to do this, I have simply used the User Agent Name of Nokia, this seems to be sufficient for testing. However if you need the full user agent string for the Nokia N95 then the consensus seems to be:

Mozilla/5.0 (SymbianOS/9.2; U; Series60/3.1 NokiaN95/10.0.010; Profile/MIDP-2.0 Configuration/CLDC-1.1 )
AppleWebKit/413 (KHTML, like Gecko) Safari/413

A break down of an example of this user agent string can be found over at allaboutsymbian.com the breat down is at the bottom of the page in the 'Flash and User agents' section.