Designing for the Droid
I’ve been trying to design the CSS and templates this site uses to be usable at the resolutions the droid uses, maximizing the available width and height to be readable, and yet still have useful navigation.
With something like 200,000 activations/day for the droid, and the iphone running a little ahead of that, you’d think more people would be targetting content for these devices.
But so far, in my design, not a lot of luck. Screen space is at a premium. I sure would like Fitt’s law to apply to navigation, a drop down css menu bar that used a single pixel at the top would suit me fine.
For a while I was just using my droid to look at the output, but I installed a droid emulator yesterday and maybe I can automate pushing out web pages to it.
I did roll a little script to make adding posts easier:
#!/bin/sh
pc - post create
BLOGDIR=~/git/NeX6/
Put in underscores
FILE=echo $* ]( tr ' ' '_'
FILE=${FILE}.mdwn
P=pwd
cd $BLOGDIR
cp templates/dave_template.mdwn posts/$FILE
git add posts/$FILE;
emacsclient $BLOGDIR/posts/$FILE
cd $P
”“”)
I’m going to branch off the repository and use that for the styling and templating issues while I work on getting the content into the site, maybe make a mockup or two.
Not that it matters for the blog. I think the best way to read blog content on a handheld is with an RSS reader. I just haven’t found one yet I liked. Both Feedsquares and Newsrob depend on google reader and the last thing I want to cope with is having google in the middle of that transaction, if I don’t have to.
Find me elsewhere.
Beating the Brand - A pathological exploration of how branding makes it hard to think straight
Inside the Internet Mind - trying to map the weather within the global supercomputer that consists of humans and google
Sex In Politics - If politicians spent more time pounding the flesh rather than pressing it, it would be a better world
Getting resources from space - An alternative to blowing money on mars using NEAs.
On the Columbia - Why I care about space