Mobile Themes

I set up a very quick mobile theme for this site using the iDrupal module/theme. I did this after a great discussion with Marquis Cote about his work with the Public Health Agency of Canada. I think that the work done here is by far the best use of Web 2.0 technologies I've seen in the Government of Canada. Well considered thought out approaches to government use of Youtube, Twitter, Facebook & good old RSS feeds.

There are great communities around incorporating mobile technologies with Drupal. I've been watching this passively, but only got an iPhone recently so haven't had much of a need to test/evaluate these tools. I've been impressed enough with Safari's ability to reasonably display 3 columns on this tiny device (although with scrolling and squinting). Marquis' goal's in developing his mobile version of the PHAC site was to present more targeted information to the visitor. It's a well thought out approach, and do hope it is helping to spread the good work of this agency.

Now this fits in nicely with the CLF 2.0 as there is no standard for how to present government web information on a mobile browser. I wanted to try to involve a bit more of the GoC branding in the mobile version of this site. The iDrupal version switches automatically for the iPhone. I'm not sure though what it does for the blackberry or other mobile browsers.  I'm experimenting with ways to present custom themes for different browsers (including IE 6 & earlier) using the Switch Themes module that allows you to jump to a wide screen version of this theme.

This theme and this implementation still requires quite a lot of work and evaluation. It is also clear how much work should be done to think through how a site's content should be presented to a mobile user. Why would someone be browsing a government site from their blackberry?

There was a podcast that I was listening to earlier that was suggesting that it might be better to present the information to Safari in either JSON or XML, but at least for this hack we'll run with XHTML.  That being said it would be good to strip it down more to get it to run faster.