Windows Phone Thoughts - Daily News, Views, Rants and Raves

"There have been several good posts on how to style sites for mobile devices, including Responsive Web Design, Bulletproof CSS3 media queries, CSS Media Query for Mobile is Fool’s Gold, and Combining media queries and JavaScript, to name a few.These approaches all use CSS3 Media Queries. As many of these articles point out, not all mobile browsers support this feature. The Windows Phone 7 browser's base functionality is built on Internet Explorer, which will not support CSS3 Media Queries until Internet Explorer 9. As we announced at Mobile World Congress, Internet Explorer 9 will be coming to Windows Phone this year, so we’ll have much more to say about CSS3 Media Queries support on the phone soon. This post addresses how developers can achieve similar results on the current Windows Phone 7 browser in a way that will also be compatible with future updates."

Mike O'Malley put up a post on the Windows Phone Developer Blog detailing how web developers could take advantage of Windows Phone's Internet Explorer browser to get the best customer experience using CSS. This is meant to tide us over until Internet Explorer 9 is released and CSS3 media queries are supported. Check out the link for details.

"Starting on 6.5 though we are adding a new option for developers out there… “Windows Mobile Widgets”. A good way to think of a Windows Mobile Widget is as a “Portable chunk of the web” or just basically a rich internet application. Widgets are written using all the web technologies we know and love (HTML, CSS, AJAX, JavaScript) and, since they are powered under the covers by our new internet browser, they have full access to flash and other ActiveX controls available on the device (Like MediaPlayer)."

This is good news for a lot of developers out there that would like to contribute to the Windows Mobile ecosystem but are unfamiliar with C, C++, or .NET. I feel this is a great step in the right direction for Microsoft as well. Making the platform easier to write for will allow designers and developers alike to bring new applications with more refreshing user interfaces to market. At the same token it is not often that a mobile phone application will have functionality that would require anything more than basic HTML, CSS, and javascript to create. As nice as this new feature is there is still the 800lbs gorilla in the room that seems to go unnoticed... All of Microsoft's latest news releases to the public regarding Windows Mobile 6.5, especially the recent widget screenshots they released, are all from the Windows Mobile Professional platform. Where the heck is the Windows Mobile Standard love, guys?! Are we getting left out in the cold when it comes to all of these awesome new features? Hopefully when it comes to widget support Windows Mobile 6.5 Standard will receive the same new functionality.