Developer meeting – mobile development

In our developer meeting, we discussed mobile development. We’re not primarily mobile developers, but modern web applications need to work effectively on mobile devices, and we have done some mobile-specific projects.

We talked about who cared about mobile browsers and responsive design – and came to the conclusion that everyone did. It’s not just people actively using a mobile device, but it’s also things like displaying on projectors at client meetings, docking browsers, and Chromebooks and other very small laptops.

We mostly use a responsive design CSS framework like Bootstrap, which does a lot for us but not everything. There is a “bootlint” tool that checks whether we are using Bootstrap classes effectively. We can also use Chrome and Firefox to simulate mobile devices. Actually accessing with real mobile devices is useful – but a bit of a pain for C# projects, because you have to configure the embedded IIS to allow access from outside the computer it’s running on, which isn’t the default.

We’ve had to do work in the past to fix display of items via “hover” – e.g. making them work on-click instead – but this may conflict with existing behaviour. Right-click is effectively unavailable too. Gestures are available – but not widely used.