Skweezer is Great
September 22nd, 2006
One of the issuesi that mobile developers face is how to render web pages on mobile devices…. Most web publishers don’t provide a mobile friendly version of their site and this makes viewing on mobiles painful and in some cases completely unusable. Viewing issues (such as excessive scrolling) or memory pressure (when a page is laden with images) can prevent publishers from getting in front of mobile eyes. This is a problem for the developer, the publisher, and the consumer.
There are a few solutions. You can roll your own transcoding engine – if this is not your core competency it is probably too much to tackle. You can use a third party browser, Opera for Mobile is a great choice. In fact, if Opera is the default browser on your device, you can use Opera with NewasGator Go! Or you can use a service that will do this heavy lifting for you. My choice for this is Skweezer and you can also use Google’s transcoding engine!
I found Skweezer one evening while looking for solutions to my mobile rendering problems and was psyched about their offering. I sent Skweezer an email (I think it was like 1 am or so). Within 30 minutes, Kevin Perkins, the CEO, emailed me back. We started a dialog and took it from there. Kevin was coming into Denver for another meeting, and he made some time to have lunch with me. I really liked Kevin right away – very smart, honest, and hard working guy and he has a great team. He also is a very proud Dad which says a ton about one’s character.
I added the ability to use Skweezer to NewsGator Go! in a beta release shortly after meeting Kevin and have been thrilled with the results (see screen shot below).
In this example, I have Mike Arrington’s TechCrunch blog rendered w/ Skweezer. So, you will notice that ads and images have been removed and that initially may not make Mike happy. But, without using Skweezer I cannot even load this page on my Treo 700W. So, using Skweezer, I can actually view TechCrunch on my mobile, clip interesting articles using NewsGator Go! and then view TechCrunch using one of the NewsGator desktop readers (I use FeedDemon btw) or using NewsGator Online. Everyone benefits!
Skweezer rocks!
Entry Filed under: Mobile
5 Comments Add your own
1. Phil | September 22nd, 2006 at 10:54 pm
Interesting site, I wouldn’t want to use it to check my bank account since skweezer is acting as a proxy. Actually I would like to have a screen formatted for my mobile, but my bank isn’t that sophisticated yet.
2. Kevin | September 24th, 2006 at 2:35 pm
good point about the bank account scenario… i’ll run that one by kevin @ skweezer to see what he has to say about it.
3. Kevin Perkins, CEO Greenlight Wireless | September 28th, 2006 at 1:23 am
As excerped from the Greenlight Wireless FAQ page….
How secure is browsing the Web with Skweezer?
Short answer:
Browsing with Skweezer is very secure, as it supports 128-bit (strong) encryption for browsing secure Web sites.
Long answer:
Skweezer initiates an additional SSL connection to the remote content providers’ destination Web site (PayPal, for instance) in response to each secure SSL-encrypted request from the Skweezer user. Each link in the chain is encrypted. Another way you could view it is we’re “SSL’ing the SSL”.
Furthermore, information that is intended to be private, stays private. We do not store passwords or personal information other than what we ask to establish your account. Even then, we do not share that with third parties. We take privacy very seriously.
It’s worth noting that Greenlight Wireless has purchased the most comprehensive public key infrastructure certificate (PKI) available. It’s called a Verisign Class 3 Public Primary. If you go to https://www.skweezer.net/, and click the padlock in the lower corner of your browser, all the details are there. In a nutshell, this certificate is the most powerful and supports the broadest range of mobile (and desktop) browsers/devices available. According to Verisign, it would take a hacker 1 trillion x 1 trillion years to crack their certificate.
I hope this sufficiently addresses the issue… KP
4. Kevin | September 28th, 2006 at 1:37 am
Thanks for passing that info along Kevin!
-kevin
5. Standing Mobile » T&hellip | October 1st, 2006 at 11:25 pm
[...] I have previously indicated how NewsGator Go! and I love Skweezer and the web to mobile transcoding technology. This may appear to be a trivial task. It is not… it is hard, very hard. check out Skweezer CTO Barnabus Kendall’s post on this for more info. [...]
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