Writing WordPress plugins so they’re available in every language is a big ask. Which is why it’s taken us a while to release the latest version of WordPress Mobile Admin (3.0) as this was the major focus for the release.
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Tagged with:Mobile Browser Detection, Mobile Device Detection, Mobile Web Development, Wapple Mobile Internet and Mobile Web Development Tools, Wordpress Mobile, wordpress mobile admin, wordpress mobile admin theme
With Mobile World Congress kicking off today and a whole hall called ‘App Planet‘ [I guess 'Planet of the Apps' would have looked like a typo...] it’s a great day for another story with two ways of publishing to mobile going head to head.
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/28744c96-176a-11df-87f6-00144feab49a,dwp_uuid=4dce8136-4a24-11da-b8b1-0000779e2340.html?nclick_check=1
So, lets be clear once again. Installed apps are OK but they’re expensive, tied to a particular OS, distributed through crowded and controlled channels, hard to spread virally and, well, so 2009.
Web Apps for mobile are cheap to develop, OS agnostic, browser independent (if you build them using Wapple technology), free to distribute and easy to spread. Oh, and this really IS the year of the mobile web so if you want to live in the now then mobile Web Apps are the only place to be!

For the past couple of weeks I’ve been releasing updates to my wordpress plugin. A bug fix here, a new option there. You’ve got configurable menus, support for Cyrillic character sets and much, much more.
But the backlog of new features has been growing and it needed a big update to clear the decks! So yesterday signalled the release of the latest incarnation of my Wapple Architect Mobile Plugin for WordPress – version 1.5!
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Tagged with:Coding Mobile Web Pages, foreign characters on mobile, Mobile Browser Detection, Mobile Device Detection, Mobilize Websites and Blogs, Wordpress Mobile, Wordpress Mobile Plugin
Content Management Systems – it seems as though they are the in-vogue tool at the moment with every man and his dog developing one or using it to power their website.
If you do a search in a well known popular search engine for “CMS” (and assuming you aren’t searching for the Church Mission Society), you’ll find Joomla at #3. With 139 million returned results that’s not bad by anyone’s standards.
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Tagged with:Buzz Aldrin, Coding Mobile Web Pages, Joomla Developers, Joomla Mobile, Joomla Mobile Plugin, Mobile Friendly Websites, Mobilize Joomla website, Mobilize Websites and Blogs, NASA, SEF
It’s movie time here at Wapple HQ! We’ve been busy conjuring up some neat, little bite-sized chunks of Wapple goodness on our new YouTube channel. We thought this would be a useful and illustrative way of demonstrating how easy it is to develop mobile websites using Wapple Architect & Canvas™.
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Tagged with:Architect, Canvas, WAPL, Wapple Mobile Internet and Mobile Web Development Tools, YouTube
Transcoding web pages into mobile web pages does not work.
There’s an ongoing debate on the subject of mobile web transcoding, so here’s our take.
Let’s be clear on our language here though. Transcoding videos for mobiles is essential and very good, but doing it to your web output is bad. Really bad.
A reliance on an automated process that takes HTML output and reformats it to mobile markup is a deluded one. Computers are really bad at recognising diverse visual patterns (that’s why we all use CAPTCHA to protect from bots) and you don’t get much more diverse than web design. If a transcoder has been taught your web layout, you’ll find yourself tied to that web design or face losing any learning invested in the system.
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Tagged with:Architect, Coding Mobile Web Pages, Mobile Browser Detection, Mobile Development Platform, Mobile Friendly Websites, Mobile Phone Detection, Single Domain, WAPL
Right now, I feel like the blind man telling my own future.
If the BBC don’t start recognising my Android handset as a mobile browser again, I’ll go elsewhere. I’ve had enough of navigating their full website through my small screen and I want the mobile experience back.
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Tagged with:Mobile Browser Detection, Mobile Device Detection, Mobile Devices, Mobile Internet, Mobile Web
Thanks to Jakob Neilson, the world is suddenly waking up to the idea that to make the web useable on mobiles you have to make the web for mobiles.
http://www.useit.com/alertbox/mobile-usability.html
We’ve been saying this for years and I wonder what took Jakob so long to discover the mobile web anyway? Maybe he was on a really long phone contract and only just got an upgrade. Or maybe his handset was so cluttered he only just found the browser.
Either way, he’s on board now and whether you subscribe to his somewhat draconian dismissal of everything pretty over everything useable you will certainly recognise the importance of such an influential character entering the affray. Read more
Tagged with:Add new tag, Coding Mobile Web Pages, Mobile Friendly Websites, Mobile Phone Detection

HTC Magic
Stop Press: The Google Android phone doesn’t support CSS.
Or so the UAProf supplied by HTC for the G1 would have you believe. We’ve got one in the office and have recently updated its browser software. Only the new user agent profile (an XML file detailing the phone capabilities) now says that it doesn’t support CSS.
The good news for users of Wapple is that the device profiling system at its heart knows that vendors sometimes make mistakes and takes that into account. Oh, and when HTC update their Uaprof so that it says it supports CSS, it’ll know and update as appropriate! Read more
Tagged with:CSS, Exhibit, G1, Google Android, HTC, Mobile Browser Detection, Mobile Phone Detection
IE6 Must Die is a trending topic on Twitter right now. The world is demanding that IE6 support is dropped, effectively forcing the hand of anyone still using the browser and hopefully freeing the internet from the hell that is substandard browser support.
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Tagged with:Mobile Browser Detection, Mobile Device Detection, Mobile Friendly Websites, Mobile Publishing Platform, Mobile Web Development, Mobilize Websites and Blogs, Single Domain
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