For many years, Richard Cheshire has been
lecturing
about Flash®, or rather, about how Flash "sucks" (a
technical term meaning "user dissatisfaction"). "After all,"
Cheshire would say, "when a fast food restaurant puts a URL
(Uniform Resource Locator, commonly known as a web address) on
my drink cup and asks me to enter a contest, I'm not going to
be happy when I pull up the page on my mobile phone's web
browser while I'm still in the restaurant, and the page says
'Get Flash, or get lost'. Most phones don't have Flash".
Rather than fight a losing battle against Flash, Cheshire
partnered with his web host, Robert Osband, and formed
"Phone Phriendly", to help companies deploy web pages that
are easily viewable on mobile phone web browsers.
Known in Phone Phreak and Hacker circles as "The Cheshire
Catalyst", Cheshire (and he preferes to be called 'Cheshire')
writes for
2600 Magazine, and is Volunteer
Coordinator at the magazine's biennial confereence
HOPE (Hackers On Planet Earth).
Ozzie operates
ViaOz.Com, a web hosting site with clients such as
SpaceLaunchInfo.Com,
MuseumsOfBrevard.Org,
SpaceWalkOfFame.Com, and
DaddysRacers.Com among others. He
agrees with Cheshire that Flash is mostly used as high-bandwidth
"eye candy" that wastes the time of web users with little information
content - especially for those that may still be on dial-up Internet
access where down-load time stretches to minutes instead of seconds.
While PHone PHriendly advocates purchasing the
".Mobi" Domain Name for your
particular website, we feel it should immediately redirect to
M.yourdomain.com,
giving users the "Clue" that in the future, they can type
the "M." version of the Domain Name, "m...com" into their
phone, rather than a "www...mobi" version, which is many
characters shorter to enter. When entering characters on a
mobile phone's numeric pad, the shorter, the better. That's
what makes a web site PHone PHriendly.
Flash is a Registered Trademark. Trademarks are
used here for identification purposes only, and remain
the property of their respective trademark owners.
Ownership of registered trademarks can be
found using the Search function at
The US Patent & Trademark Office Web Site.
