Over the last few years, I've had a burning conviction that's been growing and growing as I watch the current craze for 'Apps' blossom. Now, I've nothing against genuine applications or games, but it has to be said that a large number of so-called 'Apps' are simply scraping or managing exactly the same data as you can get right now, on any phone, for free. And, my way, there are no installations, no complications and no hassle. Apps? Pah - I've a new slogan to rival Apple's. "There's a Bookmark for that!"
Read on in the full article.
I'm still laughing - "There's a Bookmark for that!"
Great article.
Best .. AAS ... article ... title ... ever. LOL.
Very much agree with you Steve, a lot of the apps friends use already have decent websites and mobile versions. I don't think long term a future where the web is only available on mobile devices that the company writes an 'app' for is a good thing (regardless of if it is an iPhone/Symbian/Android app) and it rather goes against the principle of the web to have to have custom clients rather than a generic browser.
However I do disagree with you on using mobile optimised websites for speed and data compactness; it's far better to use Opera Mini to use the full size sites quickly and compactly. I have all my speed dials, bookmarks and RSS feeds synced across all 3 of my devices. I'd say ~70% of my use of my N82/Blackberry is in Opera Mini.
i get very annoyed at websites that have a specialy formated touch screen version for iphone and andriod, but they dish out the crappy mobile site to s60 5th edition.
Sometimes if you have the direct url, you can get around this. Here are some good bookmarks:
Gmail - http://mail.google.com/mail/x/gdlakb-/gp/
Facebook - touch.facebook.com
Google Buzz - https://m.google.com/app/buzz
Wikipedia - http://en.m.wikipedia.org/
Anybody got any more?
Excellent article as ever Steve. Also worth mentioning that if you use Opera Mini, then there are 9 dedicated 'shortcuts' to website on the homepage, which should be enough for anyone!! Only app I really use is Gmail, and purely because I prefer to look of the set-up via the java app.
You're absolutely right on the big point, Steve - but I must admit I find Web really cumbersome in handling bookmarks. Moving them around is awkward, as is using folders. Drag and drop would really help the experience - even replicating the "organise" function that you can do on normal menus would help. And please, can someone rid me of those useless "Download [x]" fixed bookmarks that clog up my 5800?
You can do better than this even with a little html knowledge - the s60 browser can load stored pages eg. /E:/Launcher.html which you can set as the homepage.
Launcher can contain not just links as per the bookmarks list, but also entry boxes for forms eg. for BBC weather:
<form action="http://news.bbc.co.uk/weather/mobile/forecast/4296" name="weatherForm" method="get" target="_blank">
<a href="http://mobile.wunderground.com" target="_blank">More</a>
<input id="area" maxLength="25" name="area" value="SW15" size="12" />
<input type="submit" value="BBC Weather" name="go" />
</form>
This trick works on pretty much any symbian phone, from a1000 (opera) to the latest s60v5 phones. You can think of it as a web runtime hack for non-s60v5 phones as javascript should work as well.
Fair article. I'll use it to publish my thanks and compliments for the wonderful AAS mobile site. It really is fantastic. The Guardian site isn't bad either.
I've been saying for a while now that bookmarks could do with a little bit of modernising to take advantage of the different technologies available on modern smartphones. The browser is the heart of the smartphone after all, and enhancing the bookmarks would perform such much needed surgery on it. My idea is to introduce Enhanced Bookmarks which would contain the same sort of coding as a widget, shaping the browser window in new ways depending on which site you're using (an enhanced Twitter bookmark may allow you to update your status without visiting the site for example), and the bookmarks would auto-update their code each time you visited and a new version was available. Adding a minor cache/saved pages feature to each bookmark would also allow some offline functionality for the right sort of sites.
Flickr's mobile site appears to have 2 modes: the very limited site shown in the article, and a more graphical, JavaScript-enabled, touchscreen-friendly one. To get to the 2nd site, you go to http://m.flickr.com and there will be an option to use the new site below the main menu. I forget the exact wording, because the option does not appear every time (perhaps only on browsers Flickr knows it will work on?), and once you've chosen to use the new site, it's hard to switch back to the "old" one. The "new" site has colorful, more finger-friendly links, and at least a 320px-wide screen. But it looks and works great on non-touchscreen phones, especially in landscape mode so you can see the whole interface onscreen. The new mobile site looks and feels more like a cut down version of the full Flickr site than the "old" one.
...for my current experiment to rewrite famous iPad apps in HTML5: http://whitherapps.com/
Symbian really needs to get in gear with an html5 browser.
There's a world of better web apps we're missing out on.
... on Opera Mobile running on a S60v3. "amazon.co.uk" just takes me to their full site. And if I set the "mobile view" in the preferences, it just shows a badly fragmented view of the main site. Perhaps they have some fancy heuristics if you call the regular URL in a Symbian browser. But if Opera, add the /gp/aw to the address.
I had posted this very argument in response to an article by Rafe on how to create apps for websites using Nokia's new thingy. I don't see the point of apps for websites. An app for me is only for something that adds functionality, like a task manager, or sportstracker. I don't see the point taking up space by having apps when a website already exists.
Oh, sure, you CAN use bookmarks in the S60 mobile browser to substitute for web based applications on the iPhone, but the result isn't the same.
Most mobile sites simply suck. An iPhone/iPod Touch optimized site does not.
Besides there are thousands more applications in the App Store, one of which is the Kindle app that makes the latest best sellers available, which the Symbian platform doesn't offer.
Using some websites instead of some apps is doable.
But it's a painfull thing considering Web experience on S60v5 browser. It's slow, it freezes/crashes/exits a lot. A lot of patience is required to use Web at all.
"There's a bookmark for that" would be a viable alternative to apps if Symbian offered flawless web browsing experience. And in my opinion at the current state of Symbian it is a far cry from flawless.
I like m.facebook.com better than the app. My buddy who has an iPhone thinks the same thing. The app will usually not display the most recent news posts, and instead shows Top News which usually ends up missing a lot of posts I we would want to see.
My experience is that using web bookmarks is just not as friendly as using an application that is written for a specific platform. When I was using the N97, my pet peeve was that a lot of the applications in ovi stores were simply bookmarks and not Apps at all.
Either way, I think this is based on user preference whether one likes to use Apps or Bookmarks to get web content info.
Thanks a lot for your bookmarks...
I use the Google Reader optimized for iPhone/Touch devices:
http://www.google.com/reader/i/
You have not used the facebook app on the iphone then? Because it is much better than any mobile website. And you also get notifications when something happens. And you have been raving about gravity for ages now. If there is a good symbian app for it then it is cool. But if it is not on symbian but some other platform has it then it is unnecessary?
A website will never beat a GOOD app.
Good article, I wonder why I didn't read it when it was published. Even though I read AAS I ended up finding this through Carnival on Mobilists months after it came out. Anyhow...
In most cases bookmarks do work as well as apps. One problem, probably the biggest, is that most don't know that they exist. What would be needed is an easy way to find them, the way apps are found. There should be bookmars in appstores. Shouldn't be too hard for the stores to make an Ovi or iTunes branded mobile app directory. If there isn't an eBay app in the store just show the bookmark!!!
The only one I have found is
http://www.webapplist.com/category.php?id=10
and it's just a mobile part of webapp directory.
If anyone reads these comments anymore, please tell if you have found any better lists or directories.