Mobile Web Junkie

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 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’re always looking for ways to improve our existing functionality inside of Wapple Canvas. We develop plenty of new stuff, but it’s always good to upgrade older features to keep them up to date.

Inside of Canvas, the graphic chunk functionality used to rely on the fact that you’d uploaded a graphic before telling our mobile rendering engine what size you wanted to display it.
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Just before Christmas, we mobilized HowToMakeMyBlog.com by installing and configuring the Wapple Architect Mobile Plugin for WordPress.

I’ve written a much more in-depth article over there about how we did it, but here’s a bite-sized version that you can cut out and put in your wallet:
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Overcoming the barriers of mobile web design and development – it’s the tagline of our blog and something that we strive towards each and every day.

We’ve given the development community some amazing tools that allow you to create some fantastic mobile sites and we’ve created plugins, components and classes that help you at every step.

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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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Konny Zsigo of the MDA recently posted an insightful article into the ‘to iPhone or not to iPhone debate.

It seems to have attracted a lot of flames. Blimey! Time for Mobile Web Junkie to dive in…

Read the  article. It’s great.

If you’re trying to make money, dump your iPhone strategy

Then the comments but in case you feel too much pain before you get as far as my comment, here it is, just for you:

Wow, what a lot of hate in the comments. I really think that a lot of you need to read back what you’ve written and see if it’s truly in the spirit of constructive debate.

I would suggest that every single flame has been posted by iPhone owners. A trait I’ve noticed is that as soon as someone jumps onto the Apple train they feel they have a fight on their hands. I guess it’s a complex caused by Microsoft constantly trumping Apple in the OS battle. Read more

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

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