I have posted my DIBI slides (PDF; 1,8Meg). It was a fun conference, and my presentation went well. Web developers clearly want to know about mobile.

The talks also seem to have been broadcast and taped; will let you know when they appear online.

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For my DIBI presentation I need a dropdown menu (in order to compare it on desktop and mobile), so I wrote one.

Point is, it took me thirty lines of JavaScript, nine of which only contain a closing }, and three of which deal with the fact that bloody Firefox still doesn’t support contains().

Net amount of lines: 18. Can somebody please remind me why we all used to think dropdowns are so extremely complicated? I can’t for the life of me figure it out.

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Yesterday John Gruber wrote about the upped pixel density in the upcoming iPhone (960x640 instead of 480x320), and why Apple did this. He also wondered what the consequences for web developers would be.

Now I happen to be deeply engaged in cross-browser research of widths and heights on mobile phones, and can state with reasonable certainty that in 99% of the cases these changes will not impact web developers at all.

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Some updates on a few developing stories in the mobile space.

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This is just in: HTC is said to be considering taking over Palm. That would be an interesting development, since HTC is one of the few parties we can trust not messing up webOS but actually using it as it’s supposed to work.

Palm has an absolutely first-rate product in webOS, especially its user interface. As far as I’m concerned the Palm Pre is the only phone that’s (almost?) on a par with the iPhone when it comes to UI, although the system is completely different (and has supported multitasking from the start, not partially and as an “exciting” novelty).

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Right now Jason Grigsby’s excellent summary of the orientation media query is making the round of blogs and tweets, and that’s well deserved. Media queries will become extremely important in the near future, when we have to build websites that work on any device resolution from 300px to 1280px or more.

Still, there’s one tiny nitpick I’d like to make, so that you fully understand when to use orientation and when to use device-width.

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I have made a list of the fifteen mobile browsers I currently test. This will give you some insight in the current mobile browser market, which is volatile, complicated, and sometimes shrouded in mystery.

One of the commonest questions I get is “Which mobile browsers should I test?” The hidden question here is which devices you should own. It’s time to attempt an answer.

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Cameron Moll is worried about a future in which we’ll all write Objective-C for the iPhone OS instead of writing web standards for the mobile web.

At one point in time, J2ME (now Java ME) and WAP were the starting points for a discussion on mobile strategy and the web. Then, for a brief period of time, you talked about HTML/CSS. Now, for a growing majority of mobile strategies that don’t require a global presence on widely varying devices, the discussion begins with iPhone.

Emphasis mine. Strategy and presence are the clue, and they’re the reasons I think the situation will not be quite as bad as Cameron fears.

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An interesting study caught my eye. When taken at face value, it proves that in order to really make money with apps you have to switch to the BlackBerry platform.

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