Friday, May 6, 2011

Feature of the week: BibSonomy mobile

If the BibSonomy development team can be seen as a reasonably representative sample of the technologically interested population, then smartphones are truly finding more and more their way into nowaday's everyday life (despite we still do have some "I-need-my-phone-only-to-make-phonecalls" bastions, but we're working on it :) ). If you share our enthusiasm about the possibilities offered by e.g. the iPhone or Android-powered devices, then we've got something for you: Since our last release, we're featuring a mobile-optimized version of BibSonomy. Check it out:


You don't need any special app - just point the browser of your mobile phone to the "usual" BibSonomy URLs (e.g. http://www.bibsonomy.org), and we'll detect automatically where you're coming from (technical sidenote: we use WURFL for that) and provide you with a BibSonomy website optimized for smartphones. It was built focussed on the following design principles:
  • Minimal amount of data transfer in order to speed up loading times and save bandwidth
  • Reduction of interface elements to ensure usability on small (touch-)screens
  • Similar navigation paradigm to mobile versions of other major websites
  • Restriction to required information when posting new entries (e.g. via ISBN) - completion of the entries then be done e.g. later on a desktop machine
Here's an explanation of the basic interface elements:
When navigating through these pages, it may happen from time to time that you end up seing a "normal" page - this can happen because so far, we've only migrated our most popular pages to the mobile version. We're still working on that, and are happy to receive feedback and suggestions which pages should be available next!

In any case enjoy BibSonomy from anywhere using our new mobile pages!
Dominik

PS: Thanks Folke for a great fotoshooting session ;-)