On a recent trip I had a couple of minutes to kill and had no access to any quality reading material or an ipod which left me with an Internet connection and a blackberry.
Then it occurred to me that I could read some blog posts with google reader, my favorite RSS reader along with Snackr. I thought what the heck how much bandwith are blogs going to consume? That turned out to be a gross underestimation. When one is on a desktop/laptop with at least a megabit connection and everything is lightning fast, one doesn’t realize what’s really going on in terms of what the content is composed of as long as it appears instantly on the screen.
I didn’t know that most of the software/tech blogs that I tend to follow are simply not readable on mobile devices. The reason? Huge screen shots of code/technical material that get scaled down and require at least a good minute of panning on the device to see what’s going on. Its one thing to use screen shots when its needed but putting up a screen shot to post 20 lines of code? That’s plain out lazy.
There are ways of formatting this content, and when the number of mobile devices are growing exponentially with iPhones and BlackBerries taking over the cellular market we should start paying more attention to content representation on different clients.
It looks like I’m not the only one dealing with code screen shots either. Scott Hanselman has this great post on code highlighting in blog posts. It’s a must read for software bloggers.
