User-1034524349 posted
Hi Mark Pringle,
I’ve spent the last 2 months getting up to speed with the mobile revolution and now have a good handle on it. I guess two months ago I was in your position!
Jquery Mobile is a great place to start it gives you a very simple way of handling the page transitions. Page transitions e.g.. having the page slide across the screen to the next is what users have come to expect from their mobile experience. So check out
http://jquerymobile.com and click Docs and Demos. If you view the site in Chrome you will see the page transitions in action.
You can of course use your own javascript but why bother. If you are going to use jquerymobile you can’t use WebForms, you will have to use MVC, it has something to do with AJAX and WebForms not liking each other, trust me I’m saving you the
frustration I went through having to build the whole site twice.
MVC4 is going with jquerymobile built in, here is a tutorial created by Rick Anderson all about mobile devices:
http://www.asp.net/mvc/tutorials/aspnet-mvc-4-mobile-features I did the tutorial about a month back and it didn’t all work, I think that is still just on the wrong side of the
bleeding edge, so I am still working with MVC3 and Razor.
One problem I found is that people don’t like to type URL’s into their phone to find your site and if they do and you a lucky enough to get them to bookmark it and add an icon to their desktop, you have little control over the way your
icon displays and usually looks ugly. You also can’t put a mobile site up on the app store or android market where the user can simply download your app to their phone and install, adding your nice little icon to their application folder.
So I’ve taken it one step further and I’m now building empty native apps with what is called a WebView in it and loading up the mobile site in that. It also has its pros and cons but I can create an icon and load the empty native app to the market
and users can then download my mobile website. You will need to do a tutorial on native apps, I have gone down the java road developing in a program called Eclipse which seems to be the API of choice with Android as I have an Android phone. Don’t let
that worry you though, compared to WebForms and MVC Native apps are very easy to build!
So with at least three empty Native apps, Windows, Android and IPhone, jQueryMobile and MVC3 I am able to create a market downloadable mobile website and the user thinks they are using a native app.
Hope all my trial and error helps you out,
Cheers,
Mike.
