Mobile Web Junkie

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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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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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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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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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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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

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

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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Mobile Internet is a tricky platform to develop for unless you use the right tools and have the lowdown on what works and what doesn’t.

As there are so many different devices out there in the worldwide marketplace any developer will meet a number of challenges. This mainly concern varying screen sizes, a number of markup languages and device inconsistencies and capabilities.

Obviously, developing mobile internet applications that work across the widest range of devices should be paramount to any serious developer or designer. If your site cannot be viewed on any percentage of mobile browsers then it is unlikely to meet its full potential or any at all.

Often, brand integrity is as important as user experience. This is especially true where mobile marketing meets customer engagement but it is also important to ensure that users have a good experience on even the simplest of sites.

Some older phones have incredibly small screens, while newer smartphones are being released with increasing Read more

We received the following comment from Jeff Miller on the ‘removing scrollbars‘ article.

“Your site doesnt even show up on any mobile phone, other than maybe an iphone. But doing a test on your site it show up very bad on other phones which most of the world use. it only scores a 3/5 on ready.mobi and its very hard to navigate on phones. Obviously you are not the mobile web junkie but the wapple (wurfl rip off hosting solution) for iphone junkie.”

Ouch. Oh well, there’s always one… The reply got kinda long but turned out to be quite a good read. So I thought it would be nice to post it as an article. Here it is: Read more

Scrollbars are a pain on web and they are even more of a pain on mobile.

If you’ve ever had to develop a website that does anything imaginative with it’s width then you will have encountered the inclusive / exclusive discrepancy amongst browsers. For example, should your page length exceed the vertical size of a browser window, a vertical scrollbar appears – trouble is some browsers feel the need to subtract the width of the scrollbar from the width of the page – causing horizontal scroll on the page. Read more

The mobile web is a great place for advertising, content, information, social experiences and fulfillment on the go. In fact, what better than the opportunity to connect with users through the device they carry around with them at all times?

Trouble is, developing for mobile browsers is hard if you don’t choose the right tools and technology to help you on the way.

If you’ve ever tried to code for the mobile web in the past (or have been lucky enough to have someone do it for you), you’ll know how hard it’s been to create a mobile site that looks great and provides a great user experience on all mobile devices.

Mobile web development is traditionally very difficult. You are not alone. In this article, I hope to explore some of the troubles encountered and then a really cool mobile publishing solution that will help you develop mobile web sites – your mobile web sites, the way you want them. I’ll also explain how you can do it quickly.

The results will optimize for EVERY mobile browser, perfectly.

Instead of having to worry about a couple of browsers as you would with a desktop browser, you’ve got different screen sizes, firmware, operators, carriers and multiple markup languages to look after – all of which meaning there’s a potential 50,000 devices to support.

That’s a staggering number. If you ever had the problem of making something work in IE6 then multiply that headache by the figure above. It’s brain-splitting to say the least.

There have been tools emerge in the past that have gone some way to helping, but now there is a new service available that has removed all of the problems and barriers to development. It’s called Wapple Architect and by the end of this article you’ll know all about it and how it’s revolutionized the entire web world.

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Fact: People are accessing your website URL on their mobile phone!

The latest stats suggest that 5% of traffic to websites now get hit by mobile browsers, even if you promote a separate URL for mobile web.

What do you want them to see? The actual website that takes 20 minutes to load and scrolls to about 10 times the width and height of the mobile? Not likely. They’ll want to see a mobile specific version, running off that single domain, perfectly optimized to whichever handset they’re using, yes, even if they have an iPhone. Read more

For as long as I can remember, developing for mobile has been an absolute nightmare. To start with, there are thousands of unique handsets on thousands of operators with different browsers, firmware and capabilities. There are hundreds of different screensizes and resolutions to take care of, flash and java issues, CSS support (or lack of it) and markup languages galore. You’re not going to be able to deliver a great user experience if you can’t optimize to each and every one of these 50,000+ combinations across all the billions of handsets in the world.

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