General discussions : General : IBM project lets users make their own mobile versions of websites
>
New Topic
>
Reply<
Esato Forum Index
>
General discussions >
General
> IBM project lets users make their own mobile versions of websites
Bookmark topic
Researchers at IBM have developed software that lets mobile users create slimmed-down Web pages that can be viewed more easily on a small device such as a mobile phone.
Called
Highlight, the software is an extension to the Firefox browser and was built by researchers at IBM's Almaden Research Center.
Highlight lets users record the steps required to perform a simple task on the Web, say looking up flight arrival information on a Web site. Users can "clip" sections from a Web site and then save them on another Web server, which then serves the slimmed-down pages to the mobile device.
The software lets Web surfers create their own versions of Web sites, free of the clutter that makes them hard to navigate on a small screen.
In addition to acting as a Web server for the mobile user, this second Web server actually runs a copy of the Firefox browser that fetches the data from the Web site being copied and then serves it up to the Highlight user.
Highlight works well for what developer Jeffrey Nichols calls "task-driven things" -- shopping on Amazon.com, for example, or getting local restaurant recommendations from Google Maps.
The fact that Highlight works with a proxy server presents a problem for Highlight's developers, however. Not all Web sites are happy to have their content copied onto other servers.
Nichols isn't sure whether this problem will be solved, but he's hopeful. "IBM or some other company could host a service that hosts these things," he said.
The IBM researcher hasn't publicly released Highlight, but he said that he'd consider doing so if there was enough interest in the project.
Source
1 and
2
--
Posted: 2008-07-17 08:03:06
Edit :
Quote
New Topic
Reply
