Mobile Web Junkie

We’ve been busy at Wapple Towers lately – creating a new image processor that make your Canvas powered sites look even better, allowing you to retain your brand that much more impressively!

We now take advantage of mobile handsets browser capabilities – if they support transparent PNGs, and you’ve uploaded one, we deliver it. And we’ve increased the quality of images that are delivered too, so if you have a good quality PNG at around 1000px wide, you’ll get some stunning results on your mobile site.
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Ever since Wapple Canvas was created, there have been rules.

Rules to check if videos are supported, rules to check for active campaigns, rules to check for specific screen sizes.

Of course we have hundreds of others, but something missing from all of them was the ability to have customizable rules to specify your own test criteria.
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If you’ve been using Wapple’s technology for a while, you’ll know that we’ve long had support for 2D barcodes and QR codes.

But we’ve recently integrated with Microsoft to produce another, more visually rich alternative – Microsoft Tag.

Microsoft Tag’s are clusters of coloured triangles that hold encoded data and work exactly the same was as 2D barcodes. If your mobile phone has support natively for barcodes, or if you’ve installed an app to read them, just point your camera at it and it’ll read the data.


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We’ve been busy recently and have added a ton of new features into Wapple Canvas.

Some are updates to existing functionality, some are completely new. All of them are exciting and greatly improve your mobile browsing experience!
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We’ve made it even easier in Wapple Canvas to deliver your uploaded graphics as downloadable wallpapers.

Upload a source graphic, create a Graphic Wallpaper chunk on your page, and configure it how you want – your users will be able to view and download a perfectly sized wallpaper to their handset. And that’s every handset with any screensize!

Head over to Wapple Canvas, log in, and start uploading your wallpapers to check it out!

If you have a video uploaded to any of the likes of YouTube or Vimeo, we’ve written a new chunk for Wapple Canvas that will allow you to show it to the whole mobile world.

It’s called the Video Link chunk – login in Canvas and add one to a page to see it in action!

If it’s a YouTube video you want to show, a thumbnail is generated automatically, but for other video sharing websites, you can specify the location for an accompanying picture.

If you have an iPhone, videos will display with a play button on, allowing you to play the video with the native controls on the phone. Anything else and you get forwarded to the URL – of course when other handsets add functionality in for video playback, we’ll update the chunk!

If you want to know how to add a Video Link chunk with Architect and WAPL – check out http://wapl.info/coding-for-the-mobile-web-with-WAPL/chapter/Video-Link/ for more info.

We do lots of great stuff with mobile forms in Canvas. You’ve got advanced validation rules, you can add all sorts of different form items and get extensive reports on what has been submitted.

But one thing we were missing was the ability to have a file upload form item so if you wanted your mobile web application to have the ability to upload photos from their phone, you were a bit stuck.

Now however, you have the option of doing exactly this, by adding a form item and setting the item type as “file”.

Of course, the functionality for this feature is available if you’re building your form with WAPL, just use a <formItem> element, and set the “item_type” to “file”.

Most modern handsets support it, with the exception of the iPhone, which doesn’t allow access to the file system from the browser. We’re hoping this will change in the future, but for now Safari will disable the option.

For more info about how to build form items in WAPL, check out http://wapl.info/coding-for-the-mobile-web-with-WAPL/chapter/Form-Items/

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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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

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