Senior Vice President and Managing Partner Robi Sen launched his blog series, Building Higher Performance RIAs for Smart Phones today on InsideRIA. The series will address the challenges of optimizing software for mobile platforms.
Today’s smart phones are not only used for making calls, taking pictures, and listening to music; now people are using their phones to do business, build presentations, make quick edits to important files, and even surf the web.
Yet contrary to what the commercials would have you believe, few smart phones provide a web experience equivalent even to a netbook. In large part this is because web application developers rarely consider the memory and CPU constraints of smart phones. At the same time, an increasing number of people are using their smart phones as a secondary or even primary method for accessing the web (http://www.theiphoneblog.com/2009/03/02/iphone-mobile-browser-share-67/). This becomes problematic because most websites are slow to download, hard to navigate for mobile users, and, most importantly, often take a long time to render, which is driving more and more mobile users away from the interactivity and power that Rich Internet Applications promise to deliver. The answer to this dilemma is that developers need to create RIAs, generally using AJAX, that are specifically designed and optimized for mobile phone users. In this series of blog posts, we are going to look at how to make applications that are not only rich and powerful, but respond quickly and offer users the experience they have come to expect from the web.
Leveraging its digital media and RIA expertise, Twin Technologies is creating web applications for the mobile platform. These are optimized for use on mobile devices and offer the functionality of desktop software and the agility of RIAs so users can access the material they need whenever they need it.