For many years, Richard Cheshire has been
lecturing
about Flash®, or rather, about how Flash "sucks" (a
technical term meaning "user dissatisfaction"). "After all,"
Cheshire would say, "when a fast food restaurant puts a URL
(Uniform Resource Locator, commonly known as a web address) on
my drink cup and asks me to enter a contest, I'm not going to
be happy when I pull up the page on my mobile phone's web
browser while I'm still in the restaurant, and the page says
'Get Flash, or get lost'. Most phones don't have Flash".
Rather than fight a losing battle against Flash, Cheshire
partnered with his web host, Robert Osband, and formed
"Phone Phriendly", to help companies deploy web pages that
are easily viewable on mobile phone web browsers.
Known in Phone Phreak and Hacker circles as "The Cheshire
Catalyst", Cheshire (and he preferes to be called 'Cheshire')
writes for
2600 Magazine, and is Volunteer
Coordinator at the magazine's biennial confereence
HOPE (Hackers On Planet Earth).
Ozzie operates
ViaOz.Com, a web hosting site with clients such as
SpaceLaunchInfo.Com,
MuseumsOfBrevard.Org,
SpaceWalkOfFame.Com, and
DaddysRacers.Com among others. He
agrees with Cheshire that Flash is mostly used as high-bandwidth
"eye candy" that wastes the time of web users with little information
content - especially for those that may still be on dial-up Internet
access where down-load time stretches to minutes instead of seconds.
Follow the links to learn how we were instramental in establishing Area Code 321
for the Cape Canaveral area - arguably the Countdown Capitol of the World.
When setting up an HTML "tag" to make some information "clickable", we were surprised to find out that mobile phone browsers can place telephone calls using the TEL tag, while desktop browsers could not. Cheshire took it upon himself to deal with this.
Chesh has an article pubished in the Autumn 2011 issue of 2600 magazine on the topic. A TEL tag looks like:
<a href="tel:+13215438633">321-Liftoff</a>
PHone PHriendly advocates purchasing a short
".Mobi" Domain Name for your
particular website (and we can help you come up with one, as we have for others). We have
PH2.Mobi for
M.PHonePHriendly.Com. The "M." web address tells the visitor we're about to Refresh them to the ".Mobi" site, and 5 seconds later accomplishes the task. Now, if bookmarked, the user has the shorter address to give to their frends. We also use the .Mobi domains for our e-mail addresses, so people have shorter addresses to type in.
Shorter URL's to type into small keyboards helps make your site PHonePHrendly.
Flash is a Registered Trademark. Trademarks are
used here for identification purposes only, and remain
the property of their respective trademark owners.
Ownership of registered trademarks can be
found using the Search function at
The US Patent & Trademark Office Web Site.
