Mobile devices outnumber desktop and laptop computers by three to one worldwide, yet little information is available for designing and developing mobile applications. Mobile Design and Development fills that void with practical guidelines, standards, techniques, and best practices for building mobile products from start to finish.

With this book, you'll learn basic design and development principles for all mobile devices and platforms. You'll also explore the more advanced capabilities of the mobile web, including markup, advanced styling techniques, and mobile Ajax. Mobile Design and Development will help you:

Understand how the mobile ecosystem works, how it differs from other mediums, and how to design products for the mobile context

Learn the pros and cons of building native applications sold through operators or app stores versus mobile websites or web apps

Work with flows, prototypes, usability practices, and screen-size-independent visual designs

Use and test cross-platform mobile web standards for older devices and devices that may be available in the future

Learn how to justify a mobile product by building it on a budget

Web 2.0 redefined how we make and use websites. With the iPhone and other devices, this revolution is coming to the mobile space, but on a far more massive scale. If you're a web designer, web developer, information architect, product manager, usability professional, content publisher, or an entrepreneur new to the mobile web, Mobile Design and Development provides you with knowledge you need to work with this rapidly developing technology.

Brian Fling owns and runs mobiledesign.org, the largest mobile design and development discussion list on the web. He's been in both the web and mobile industries for close to a decade as an entrepreneur, consultant and employee. Brian has helped big brands navigate the mobile space and he's worked with a lot of well funded mobile companies that have failed miserably. Over the years he's learned that his insight into mobile is quite unique, avoiding hype describing tried and true principles and techniques to building cost effective mobile experiences.

Brian wrote the dotMobi Mobile Web Developers Guide, the first complete guide to mobile authoring. It was a free guide and while he doesn't have exact numbers, dotMobi informed him it was downloaded "over 15,000 times in the first few weeks."

Brian's intentions in the mobile space is to advocate and build awareness, not to make money. He believes that the mobile web is primed to change everything we think we know about how people search and gather information. His goal is to foster invention and innovation of the next generation of websites in a medium that is device and context aware.