New Product
51Degrees.mobi are delighted to announce the availability of version 1.0 of their commercial product which simplifies the task of creating mobile web applications that perform quickly and support all mobile devices, handsets and browsers. The product is titled “.NET Mobile Framework” and is targeted at ASP.NET developers with a basic understanding of the web and ASP.NET.
Problem
A major problem for ASP.NET developers when considering mobile is how to target all the different platforms and handset form factors. Screen sizes, input methods and web standards support all vary. Further ASP.NET performs well in a high speed and bandwidth broadband environment. In the variable world of mobile data connectivity extra page weight needs to be removed for optimum performance.
Solution
.NET Mobile Framework solves these problems. All the major standard ASP.NET controls have been enhanced to support mobile. 51Degrees.mobi detects the type of incoming device and then renders the page and control in an optimised form for the device. For example; when determining the location of a mobile device via the built in GPS location service there are many different JavaScript APIs to choose from depending on the device manufacturer. The Location control from 51Degrees.mobi will choose the right method for the handset. All the developer needs to do is worry about how the location obtained will be used in their application logic when the consistent FoundLocation event is fired. Often web page links and buttons are two small on touch screens to be easily selected by human fingers without using pinch and zoom. 51Degrees.mobi will automatically size selectable elements like text boxes, hyperlinks and drop down lists, so they can easily be selected when displayed on touch screen devices.
In addition to reducing the size of the web page and the amount of data that needs to be transmitted over multiple page requests 51Degrees.mobi also optimises the way images are transferred to the mobile. Consider an iPhone 4 with its 640 wide “retina” display. An image filling the screen width would need to be 640 pixels wide. The same image displayed on an iPhone 3 would be half the width at 320 pixels. Using the enhanced Image control only the data needed would be transferred improving the page load time and generating a better user experience.
There are hundreds of other benefits and features of the product including Mapping, DataLists, Pagers, and Calendar controls, near real time bandwidth and page load time information, and optimised data persistence for mobile applications. All these features have been designed to resolve common challenges experienced by ASP.NET developing for all mobile platforms.
Benefits
Organizations with a Microsoft web strategy and in house developers already skilled in ASP.NET development can quickly and cost effectively adapt their web site to support all mobile devices without having to retrain or engage expensive mobile application developers. Marketing Agencies and Professional Services Organisations can respond to their clients' needs quickly and with minimal risk using a Framework that already solves the major problems for them.
Freelance Web Developers can approach their portfolio of customers about adapting to mobile in the certain knowledge they can offer a low cost and risk solution. By reselling the server product license additional margin can also be made on client projects.
Importantly everyone can extend their web presence to support mobile without having to develop native mobile applications, spend a lot of time or money, and undertake a high risk bleeding edge project.
Pricing
Has has been designed to be within the reach of all types of developer and organisation. See this link for current pricing and licensing options.
Company Background
51Degrees.mobi was first launched in April 2009 to provide .NET developers a really simple method of detecting mobile devices and redirecting them to pages with content designed for mobile devices. During March 2011 an average of 239 new web servers start to use the product per day, including Visa, Ticketmaster and other big brands. This open source product has been freely available under the Mozilla Public License and is available for download via Codeplex, NuGet and Umbraco. Further it is included on Microsoft's ASP.NET mobile home page.
James Rosewell founded 51Degrees.mobi after creating the UK's leading mobile property advertising technology solution for Intelligent Mobile. He worked with Vodafone for 10 years prior to this where among many other things his development team created one of the first mobile web sites for the Nokia 7110 in 1999.