We ♥ web applications!
At mobalean we love to build innovative web services for Japan and the world. Our experience will help transform your ideas into successful online services.
At mobalean we love to build innovative web services for Japan and the world. Our experience will help transform your ideas into successful online services.
Mobalean is lead by Henri Servomaa, the original founder and mobile developer. At Mobalean we strive to develop services which are loved by our clients and users. By working in an agile manner, quickly adapting to changing requirements, we can deliver quickly and often.
Hailing from Finland, Henri has a long history with computers and the internet. With a background in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, he has worked in Japan as Software Developer and System Admin since 2001. In 2005, he joined a company to develop mobile sites for the Japanese market and has been involved in mobile ever since.
Cleve Lendon is a Canadian engineer who has been contracting for Mobalean. He came to Tokyo in 1994, and has lived here ever since. He has broad experience as a software developer, which includes development of mainframe software, Internet applications and mobile apps (Android and iOS). He is especially skilled at writing Java applications (vd. Simredo 4, Grafikilo 15). When not programming, Cleve enjoys improv acting and studying languages, such as Latin and Esperanto.
Our strength is crafting web services for both Japanese and international markets. We bring our technical and cultural experience to help you adapt your ideas into successful products.
We develop with Ruby on Rails and use the best agile practices and tools, such as test driven development and continuous integration to achieve quality.
We are the leading provider of technical expertise about the Japanese mobile web. Mobalean started when the smartphones were just appearing on the market. Our Keitai Web Technology Guide is a quick starting point for learning about the initial challenges of Japanese mobile development. Although the technology stacks have changed since the proliferation of iOS and Android, some of the idiosyncrasies remain. Most notably, the Japanese market is still very much dominated by the big three carriers: DoCoMo, au and Softbank. Developers can find more technical details in our Keitai-Dev Wiki.
Email address: info@mobalean.com
If you prefer to call us, feel free to do so under +81 (0)70-6251-7245
For users of Skype, please call mobalean
Often you have text that you want to fit in a certain amount of space. For instance, with Doorkeeper, we want to truncate the title of the next event to fit nicely like the following.
One way to do this would be to truncate the title on the server side to a certain length, by using something like Ruby on Rails’ truncate method.
truncate(“Mobile Monday Tokyo - Oct. 22nd - At The Canadian Embassy”, length: 43)
# => "Mobile Monday Tokyo - Oct. 22nd - At The..."
This method can work if you are using a language in which all characters are the same width, but breaks down as soon as you have a language with characters of different width, such as Japanese.
truncate("『もう少し写真を上手に撮りたいWeb界隈の人のためのフォトワークショップ』- 第8回", length: 43)
# => "『もう少し写真を上手に撮りたいWeb界隈の人のためのフォトワークショップ』- 第8回"
The text wasn't even truncated despite looking almost twice the length! This is because the truncate method uses the number of characters, and some characters in Japanese take up twice the space as others.
Another problem with server side truncating is that it doesn’t allow for responsive design, where you want to dynamically adjust the width of the text based on the browser side.
Luckily, there is a better way to do this by adding the following CSS to the element we want to truncate:
white-space: nowrap;
overflow: hidden;
text-overflow: ellipsis;
This works like the following:
white-space: nowrap
overflow: hidden
text-overflow: ellipsis
Using this method, the truncation is based on the space the text takes up, instead of the number of characters in the string, so it is always perfectly truncated to fill up the space.
But can I use this with Internet Explorer? Yes! The text overflow property has worked since IE6!