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Posted on by Daniel Payne

EDA Industry Talks about Smart Phones and Tablets, Yet Their Own Web Sites are Not Mobile-friendly

EDA Industry Talks about Smart Phones and Tablets, Yet Their Own Web Sites are Not Mobile-friendly
by Daniel Payne on 04-09-2012 at 12:55 pm
Categories: General

As a blogger I write weekly about the EDA industry and certainly our industry enables products like Smart Phones and Tablets to even exist, however if we really believed in these mobile devices then what should our web sites look like on a mobile device?

It’s a simple question, yet I first must define mobile-friendly before sharing what I discovered. Here’s what I consider to be a mobile-friendly web site:
[LIST=1]

  • On a Smart Phone or Tablet it means maximum content and minimum of graphics, because I don’t want my data plan to go over the limit.
  • On a Smart Phone or Tablet I only want to scroll vertically, not horizontally.
  • I don’t want to pinch, zoom, scroll, pinch, zoom, scroll, double-tap. That is too much work.
  • Navigation should be near the top of the browser page, and large enough that my fingers select the correct menu.
  • Search is essential to allow me to get the content I need quick, because on mobile I’m in a hurry.
  • The site looks and works well in either landscape or portrait orientations.

    Mobile-friendly web site design is not:

    • The identical experience as the desktop.

    Now that we know what mobile-friendly web site design is all about let’s see if any EDA company has optimized their web site so that mobile visitors have a pleasant experience. Today I visited the following sites and can report that NO major EDA company has a mobile friendly web site, what a disappointment. Kudos to ARM for leading the way on supporting mobile-friendly devices with their web site.

    [TABLE] style=”width: 500px”
    |-
    | EDA and IP Sites
    | Mobile Friendly
    |-
    | www.synopsys.com
    |
    |-
    | www.cadence.com
    |
    |-
    | www.mentor.com
    |
    |-
    | www.ansys.com
    |
    |-
    | www.atrenta.com
    |
    |-
    | www.tannereda.com
    |
    |-
    | www.agilent.com
    |
    |-
    | www.aldec.com
    |
    |-
    | www.arm.com
    |
    |-
    | www.apsimtech.com
    |
    |-
    | www.atoptech.com
    |
    |-
    | www.berkeley-da.com
    |
    |-
    | www.calypto.com
    |
    |-
    | www.chipestimate.com
    |
    |-
    | www.ciranova.com
    |
    |-
    | www.eve-team.com
    |
    |-
    | www.forteds.com
    |
    |-
    | www.gradient-da.com
    |
    |-
    | www.helic.com
    |
    |-
    | www.icmanage.com
    |
    |-
    | www.jasper-da.com
    |
    |-
    | www.lorentzsolution.com
    |
    |-
    | www.methodics-da.com
    |
    |-
    | www.nimbic.com
    |
    |-
    | www.oasys-ds.com
    |
    |-
    | www.pulsic.com
    |
    |-
    | www.realintent.com
    |
    |-
    | www.sigrity.com
    |
    |-
    | www.solidodesign.com
    |
    |-
    | www.verific.com
    |
    |-

    I could’ve researched more EDA and IP sites, but I think that you can see the clear trend here, we talk about the mobile industry but don’t apply mobile-friendly to our own web sites.

    What about the media sites that write about our industry? They didn’t fare much better on being mobile-friendly:

    [TABLE] style=”width: 500px”
    |-
    | EDA Media Site
    | Mobile Friendly
    |-
    | www.semiwiki.com
    |
    |-
    | www.eetimes.com
    |
    |-
    | www.garysmitheda.com
    |
    |-
    | www.marketingeda.com
    |
    |-
    | www.eejournal.com/design/fpga
    |
    |-
    | www.edacafe.com
    |
    |-
    | www.deepchip.com
    |
    |-
    | www.chipdesignmag.com
    |
    |-
    | www.dac.com
    |
    |-
    |
    |
    |-

    The one media site that is mobile-friendly belongs to me, and I converted it in about one hour of effort.

    High volume sites are mostly optimized with a few notable exceptions:

    [TABLE] style=”width: 500px”
    |-
    | Popular Web Sites
    | Mobile Friendly
    |-
    | www.apple.com
    |
    |-
    | www.tsmc.com
    |
    |-
    | www.intel.com
    |
    |-
    | www.samsung.com
    |
    |-
    | www.cnn.com
    |
    |-
    | www.google.com
    |
    |-
    | www.facebook.com
    |
    |-
    | www.twitter.com
    |
    |-
    | www.techcrunch.com
    |
    |-
    | www.engadget.com
    |
    |-

    Making a Web Site Mobile Friendly
    Web sites that are dynamic and template-driven can be quickly adapted using Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) to detect the size of the browser and then serve up pages that are specifically formatted. For those of you who are curious and a bit geeky the basic approach is to use a style sheet which detects orientation and size of the browser for three configurations: Smart Phones, Tablets, Desktop

    Beyond CSS, there is one more trick that you have to add in the Header of each web page to force the mobile browser to tell you it’s real dimensions:

    Hopefully I can report back one year from now and show some marked improvement from the EDA and IP industries on getting their web sites to be mobile-friendly.

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