My other half got me a great gizmo for my birthday:)- a Palm Tungsten C. It's a wi-fi enabled PDA, and it works a treat. It's about the only Palm OS based PDA with wi-fi built in, and it's got a thumb-keyboard, which is pretty easy to use after all those hours texting. I've only had it a couple of days, but it hooked up instantly to my wireless network at home so I've been straining my eyes browsing the web on it. What is it with us? Go out and get a huge screen for the desktop, and then spend hours on something about 2 inches across :rolleyes:
That got me thinking what a shame it is that Opera don't do a PDA compliant browser. OK, I know they're concentrating on mobile phones and perhaps that's the way things will go, but to have Opera on my PDA would be great. As it is, the default browser on the Tungsten C is pretty limited – for example, it won't deal with pop-ups or links that force a new window to open. It's astonishing how many links like that there are on the web. I'd never realized, even though almost all the links on my own site work that way. So I got stuck pretty quickly. There's also a fair deal of side to side scrolling. All this threw me back to the desktop to find something better, and after about an hour hunting down various options I'd loaded web-to-go, webpro and a couple of others. I'm sticking with webpro for the moment as it is reasonably robust, opens external links properly and can and a breeze to use. It re-writes pages for the small screen. One downside it it's not great with javascript links. It does let me in to secure sites though.
So my next project on my own website is to create a PDA/mobile version. Fairly straightforward to do. It's mainly a case of stripping out all the fancy coding, reducing image sizes to help download speeds (though that's not a problem over my broadband coonection), and getting rid of javascript links. And of course making sure everything opens in the same window. It'll take a while as there are around 80 pages to do and some are quite complex. I'm also revising the colour scheme to a standard black text on white to avoid any problems with low-powered screens.
So far, I've only done a couple of pages, so the links don't yet go anywhere. The home-page is at www.permuted.org.uk/mobile. The main intro page also works. I'll try and get some basic pages done over the next week or so.
What with the wi-fi set-up and the PDA, I'm happy, if slightly bug-eyed :eyes: