Hagrin.com

Well, I have to say that I am highly impressed with my Blackberry's ability to post new content to my new Drupal CMS. The Drupal developers should be commended for creating a highly functional, yet easy to use mobile interface.

The most impressive functionality has to be the taxonomy dropdowns. I was skeptical that they would work on my Blackberry, but after selecting the dropdown you are prompted with a "Change Option" choice. After selecting that option, you are then technically navigating only the dropdown options. In order to allow users the ability to select multiple dropdown values, checkboxes appear to the left of each value. This functionality really demonstrates how SELECT tags are actually rendered separately from the rest of the page's HTML (you may have noticed this when your dropdowns rendered on top of DHTML menus.

So, my first mobile blog post seems to be a success (although I just noticed that posting markup might prove difficult if not impossible). Once I get the redesign completely done, expect more mobile posts in order to utilize my commute time.

Google announced the initial offering of their personalized home page for mobile users. Now, the same content you could get on your personalized IG page, you can now get on your mobile device.

This announcement comes with great timing for me since my Blackberry 7290 is waiting for me at home. It's been a while since I have had a cell phone (I feel like I waste so much time just talking), but the 7290 will allow me to use it more as a data device than a cell phone. Hopefully (this is the plan), I will be able to do more updates during my travel times on the train and really become as efficient as possible.

The Google Talk blog announced the release of Google Talk for Blackberry devices. Since Blackberry users are usually very tied into their real-time communications device, releasing Google Talk for Blackberrys should open up a whole new user base previously untapped.

Although only available to US and Canada residents, the new GTalk application allows users to chat and still check email and use other Blackberry applications. This definitely is a step in the right direction; however, GTalk still needs some additional features such as file transfer to really make this applitcaion a contender in the IM market.

The Google Mobilizer utility allows you to plug any web page URL into their form and you will see exactly what your page looks like on a mobile device. This is a great way for web developers ot see if their pages look appropriate on all types of platforms and devices. All web developers should have this bookmarked.

The Open Gardens Blog (yeah, who?) has a very interesting piece on AJAX implementations on mobile devices such as cell phones. Most web developers don't even put mobile development in their mind and a lot of these newer Web 2.0 websites are not mobile device capable.

However, as the article states, Opera has made AJAX advancements possible on mobile devices by offering a SDK to developers through the Opera Platform page.

BetaNews reports that Google has teamed up with Opera to be the default search engine of choice on their Opera Mobile and Opera Mini applications. Even though Opera trails dramatically in the desktop browser race, Opera does have a strong foothold in the mobile arena and Google, recognizing that mobile computing through cell phone usage is the future, has already staked their claim. However, the partnership very wisely for Opera, only is for a single year. 2006 should hold a lot of ad

With the new wireless technologies being adopted by the masses, it's important to make sure your website displays properly on the different wireless devices. IBM has written a guide to retrofitting your web pages to display correctly and aesthetically pleasing on wireless devices.

As a side note, the Opera browser gives you the ability to view a website in "Small Screen" mode by choosing View and then Small Screen. Thsi will give a web developer some insight as to how their site will view on a wireless browser.

Google has announced that Gmail can now be accessed by your cellphone or mobile device. This is a very key service and one that could open up doors to many other opportunities for Google. Although the desktop war is in full swing between Google and Microsoft, Google doesn't have that "super giant" like Microsoft (and their 40 billion dollars in cash reserve) to contend with in mobile Internet delivery. I would look out for more mobile related releases from Google in the near future.