From desktop to mobile : a framework for function and content transformation

The use of mobile phones and other mobile devices are becoming widespread and almost all of these mobile devices have some sort of mobile Internet access. Due to the increase in mobile Internet usage, many websites need altering in order to become mobile compatible. Creating a mobile compatible version of a website is challenging due to formatting and capability restrictions imposed by the mobile device. Currently, one of the popular methods of creating a mobile compatible website involves the creation of a new, dedicated mobile version of the website. However, this approach can prove to be expensive, and repetitive, since a fully functional desktop version of the website often already exists. A second method involves the use of a transformation proxy to transform the traditional website into a mobile compatible version. This research develops a transformation framework that enables a web developer to create a single set of source files that can be used to render output compatible with both traditional and mobile devices. In developing this framework, capabilities and restrictions of the mobile device were examined. Furthermore, current mobile web development guidelines and best practices were discussed. This resulted in the development of a method to identify and outline areas of a traditional website for transformation into a mobile friendly format. Furthermore, a transformation engine that allowed processing of the traditional website into a mobile compatible website was developed. This transformation engine extracted the outlined areas, and rendered the extracted content, all while maintaining the website’s original functionality. The development of a prototype verified that the transformation concepts are valid, and provided for the development of guidelines and recommendations. The development of a framework to enable the web developer to create a website once, and enable it to adapt its output for mobile devices, will have a positive impact on the development of content for the mobile web

Automatic form filling on mobile devices

Filling out forms for web based services on mobile devices is a very time consuming and frustrating task for users because of the limited text input capabilities. This is a critical bottleneck to obtaining a wide acceptance of such services, especially mobile commerce that often requires filling user data. We developed an architecture based on a local proxy on a mobile device and a lightweight algorithm for a comprehensive analysis of forms, which leads to the most probable user data to be filled in, driven by an initial rule set [Chie Noda, John Hamard, Enrico Rukzio, Alexander De Luca, Method and Apparatus for Automatic Form Filling on Mobile Devices, Patent. Publication number EP1777629, Publication date 2007-04-25]. We further discuss our implementation and the evaluation results for the algorithm as well as the usability of the prototype