Who am I?
Thoughts on new mobile technologies and development areas.
P.S.
Use Nokia barcode reader to read the code ;-)
Calendar
Recently...
- Feel the power of USB OTG on Nokia Internet Tablets (and other mobile platforms)
- Thoughts on local connectivity, Nokia Internet Tablets and S60
- Java Runtime 2.0 for S60 in beta, improves usability and performance
- Widgets: One more step to simplicity...
- Java ME Platform SDK 3.0 (final) is out
- Java Runtime for S60 with Mobile Sensor API support, finally!
- DOS and Windows on S60... the true story!
- Location-aware browsing on mobiles
- NetBeans 6.5, Java ME inside
- S60 5th Edition: widgets and security
Categories
- Browsing [6]
- Business Opportunities/Services [6]
- CDMA [0]
- Connectivity [5]
- Enterprise [0]
- Entertainment [1]
- Event [1]
- Flash [0]
- Games [0]
- General [17]
- Java [12]
- Location Based Services [3]
- Messaging [1]
- Open C [1]
- Python [0]
- S60 [18]
- Series 40 [5]
- Series 80 [0]
- Symbian C++ [0]
- Testing [6]
- maemo [5]
- WRT widgets [3]
Jacek Wojciechowski's Forum Nokia Blog
Shorten your long URLs
jack44 | 08 May, 2007 18:28
Long URLs are difficult to remember and not easy to enter into your mobile device (especially if you don't have QWERTY keyboard like in Nokia E90/E70/E61(i) or external bluetooth keyboard). However, there are various online services that shorten long URLs (for example TinyURL or SnipURL).
Let's check an example: it's not easy to enter without a mistake quite long URL to my Forum Nokia Introduction Page which is: http://www.forum.nokia.com/main/forum_nokia_champion/forum_nokia_champions/Jacek_Wojciechowski.html (99 characters), but it's much easier to enter and remember eg. http://snurl.com/jacekw (23 characters). This way I can save 76 characters in my SMS/MMS message (it's ca. 77% of the original URL!). You can send short URLs in emails without the fear of them being wrapped and as a bonus if your underlying URL changes you can always modify your shortened URL.
Generally you can save much more time if you set a bookmark in your device's browser ;-)
Browsing, General, Messaging |
Next | 
Previous |
Comments (4) | 
Trackbacks (0)
Comments
Re: Shorten your long URLs
Aleksi | 22/05/2007, 21:25
Short and memorable URLs are not just a mobile device usability thing but actually a general web usability issue. In fact, Jakob Nielsen has posted "URL as UI" already back in 1999: http://www.useit.com/alertbox/990321.htmlThe example given in original posting isn't even that bad as it's at least readable, generally the URLs in forum.nokia.com site are even more horrible:
e,g, http://sw.nokia.com/id/4239db2a-2e0d-4592-a9c0-3936d0550d64/S60_Platform_Scalable_UI_Guideline_v1_0_en.pdf
Would you think these number monsters are persistent?
Then one issue is that there's nice Developer's library and Technical Library (why to have these separately?):
http://www.forum.nokia.com/document/Java_ME_Developers_Library/index.html
http://www.forum.nokia.com/document/Forum_Nokia_Technical_Library/contents/FNTL/fn_technical_library.htm
BUT try to link to a single topic therein. Since these use HTML frames they prevent browser showing the current topic's URL in location field. Of course you could try to copy URL from the link to the topic. The URL what you get is again not that nice, here's one example:
http://www.forum.nokia.com/document/Java_ME_Developers_Library/GUID-0D0A1092-5037-4421-B466-B958CB777414/overview-summary.html
OK you should have guessed that it's MIDP 2.0 Javadocs. Can I assume this stays as it is in future, e.g. can I used that in Forum.nokia Wiki as a reference?
So URL should be readable, short and descriptive of the resource they point to, and they should be persistent.
-Aleksi
Re: Shorten your long URLs
hartti | 23/05/2007, 01:40
reminded me of these barcode toolsNokia Mobile Codes http://83.145.232.112/
http://www.barcodemobile.com/firefox-add-on-to-generate-2d-qr-code-barcodes/
Hartti
Re: Shorten your long URLs
jack44 | 23/05/2007, 12:24
Hartti,You're right - bar codes makes life easier; that's why I use bar code (with URL hidden in it) in about section of my Nokia Forum blog page (http://blogs.forum.nokia.com/author.html?id=15055).
The plugin for Firefox called Mobile Barcoder is really useful, but it's a pity that there's no such plugin/widget for Opera browser ;-(
If there is a source code for this plugin, I'll consider porting it to Opera...
Re: Shorten your long URLs
vin2ktalks | 22/05/2007, 16:11