Help for Mobile Users

Apple Devices vs. the Competition

I have had a considerable amount of time, to try out my designs, on mobile devices and simulators, as well as learned more about the various hardware and software, so I have comes to different conclusions, with regard to what web features a given brand of smartphone, or other mobile device can handle, than I had at first. Simply put, Apple devices have much better performance and more useful features, than Google devices, while Blackberry devices (older than OS 6) can barely browse a text only website.

Many sales people will tell you, that a non-Apple device does everything an Apple device does and you are getting the same thing, for less, because you are getting a generic work-alike. Many people also seem to think, that since Google Chrome and Opera are powerful web browsers, that the Google phones and Opera Mini will be similarly capable, at web browsing.

Nothing could be further from the truth. And Amazon's Fire's new browser Silk combines the problems of both Google phone browsers and the Opera Mini browser. For people browsing my website, with an iPod Touch 4 or iPhone 4 or higher, the main site should work well. For those with older Apple devices or non-Apple devices, I recommend my mobile website. I have added as much to the formatting as these devices can handle.

Opera Mini and Amazon.com Fire's Silk Browser

Opera Mini now works with this mobile version of my website.

The reason why Opera Mini and Amazon.com Fire's Silk web browser work poorly, with my main website, is that I have worked on my website, for over 13 years and read about computers, almost every day, for at least 10 years. I use all the latest best practices and my website is as efficient, as is possible, without spending ridiculous amounts of money. I also update my website almost every day.

The problem that Opera Mini and Silk were designed to deal with is big sites like CNN.com, who are very sloppy memory and bandwidth wise, and so these browsers aim, to remove all this extra useless data, automatically. The problem is, that whenever computers are set up, to make difficult decisions, they usually end up not working very well, because, although computers can process data very fast, they are very dumb at things, like analysis or synthesis. And websites are very complicated and are getting more and more complicated very rapidly.

There are many different ways to solve, the very different problems, that different websites are designed, to deal with. So, in the simplest terms, a browser, like Amazon's or Opera's compress graphics and fiddle with site formatting, assuming your website is designed the same way, as these large corporate websites are and, in the process, end up making graphics unreadable and breaking all the interactive elements of a website.

Simply put, there is very little you can do, to make my website more efficient and trying to do so will screw things up. To make sure it doesn't over compress my images, I could just send really high resolution images, which would make everybody else's access very slow, or I could make an entire site just for Amazon.com's web browser, but I am not going to do that.

But the biggest problem with these web browsers is that they assume that no one ever updates anything on their website, so you are often given an outdated version of my website, which could likely make it inaccessible, as I change many parts very often. This also makes it hard to test with, because it makes it difficult, to be certain, that I am (and you are) getting the latest version, of what I just updated.

There is supposed to be a setting in the Amazon Silk web browser preferences to turn off these features that will likely cause problems with my website. To turn off these annoying "features" you have to turn on "Basic" mode or something negative sounding like that under "Settings -- Accelerated Browsing".

2 Different Ways to Access Content on Mobile Devices

There are 2 types of mobile device specific content on my website and 2 different ways to access it. The first is by using a web browser on your mobile device, where you will find it optimal to view the main website, or my website optimized for mobile devices. The other kind of mobile access involves 2 steps: 1st step involves the use of a regular desktop, laptop, or netbook device to download the mobile device optimized files and 2nd step is to transfer those files, to your mobile device, for viewing them later, on the mobile device, in a 3rd party e-reader application.

Simplified Version of Website (Mobile Website)

For users of non-Apple smartphones or other non-Apple mobile devices my website will likely have performance that is too slow to be usable. For Google devices or any less mainstream phone I recommend my website for mobile devices.

Only the iPhone and iPod Touch will be able to see all the PDFs, unless you have the appropriate additional software.

iPhone and iPod Touch (Main Website)

The iPhone and iPod Touch 4 and higher can browse my main website fine including the PDFs and audio. Almost everything important is made available in standard web pages and everything important is available in a PDF. The design will automatically change based on whether the device is rotated to the landscape or portrait orientation.

You will be able to see everything including my interactive interfaces, because nothing on my website requires Flash Player to function.

Apple iOS Testing (Main Website)

The site has also been tested for compatibility with Safari, and in Apple's iOS Browser Simulator which is included in the iOS SDK 4.2, and was also tested with a real iPod Touch 4 so it should also work well with the iPhone 4.

Be sure to upgrade to the latest iOS 4.2, if you have any problems viewing anything.

Google Android Testing (Simplified Website)

This mobile site has also been tested for compatibility on the browser which is included in the Google (Android 2.1) SDK Emulator (excluding the PDFs) and should work well enough on Google branded (excluding the PDFs) mobile devices.

For Google phones, only Android 3 and higher will display either website without serious degradation of graphic quality as 2.3 and below don't support anti-aliasing of rounded corners or SVG. I now recommend Google Android 2.3 and below phone users use Opera Mini instead of the included browser. The latest versions of the Barnes and Noble Nooks are based on Android 2.3.

iPhone and iPod Touch (Download Files)

To hear my audio, choose the Apple/iPod version from your desktop computer and import it into iTunes to transfer over when you sync your iPhone or iPod Touch with iTunes.

E-Book Reader (Download Files for Mobile Device)

You can get all my philosophy books in their collected edition in 3 mobile e-book optimized formats I call: Apple Mobile version (which can be viewed on iPhones/iPod Touches with iBooks, Google devices, and the Sony Reader) Handheld Version (which can be viewed on almost any handheld device and is the official format of Barnes & Noble e-books and their e-reader the Nook), and Amazon.com Kindle version (which can be read on the Amazon.com Kindle, the Kindle Reader for the iPhone/iPod Touch, and with the Mobipocket Reader on most mobile devices).

You can also see DjVu versions of texts with the Xdjvu application on the iPhone or iPod Touch.

You can get all the books together at my collected works page. More information is included in the zip archive that the e-books are in.

Handhelds (Download Files for Mobile Device)

PDF/A1-As should be viewable on Palm and Windows handhelds with the appropriate version of Adobe Reader.