Guidelines on mobile devices

Several years ago the ATS created PDA versions of two of our guidelines. One was developed by a third party vendor and the other  was developed internally. ATS is interested in providing additional content for portable devices. In the intervening years, however, much has changed. At the time of our original offerings, Palm OS and Windows Mobile were the two major systems on portable devices. Both of these have been extensively updated but together they now represent only 14 percent of device operating systems. Google’s Android OS is now the most common operating system, with 29 percent of existing mobile devices using it. Apple and Research in Motion each have a 27 percent market share.

Developing content for this diverse a set of operating systems is challenging. No vendor currently offers a development tool that can handle more than one OS. Furthermore, Apple has made future development of a combined tool unlikely, as the Apple App Store will only support applications developed using their proprietary development system. The Android OS runs on several different platforms with very different hardware. Developing for the entire Android universe requires specific attention to each of the unique environments.

The availability of a web browser on virtually every device makes the approach of simply publishing a web version of guidelines formatted specifically for small screen devices a reasonable consideration. The downside of this approach is that the guideline is not available when the device is not connected to the internet which is one of the reasons for having PDA guidelines in the first place.

The other approach is to work with a vendor that provides viewers for downloadable content for multiple operating systems. Unfortunately, many of the vendors that had developed standalone viewers such as Redi-Reader have not kept up with the new OS choices. Apprisor, a reader developed by Mobile Medica seems to be the only viewer that has produced new viewer software for at least several of the currently used operating systems. At present, there is support for Apple, BlackBerry, Windows Mobile and older Palm-OS devices. Palm WebOS devices can use an emulator to run older Palm software. Unfortunately, Apprisor does not currently have a viewer for the Android platforms. I am hopeful this is only a temporary problem.

The ATS will continue to try to find a workable solution for providing mobile content to the largest number of devices possible. I am hopeful that this will be possible soon.

I am looking forward to seeing many of you at the International Meeting this month in Denver.