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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Following hot on the heels of our efforts with URLs for Wapple Canvas powered mobile sites, we’ve created another chunk that should help you SEO your sites to the max.

We’ve created a Sitemap chunk, which displays links to all pages on your site, alphabetically, with nice URLs (if you have it turned on).
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Previously on Wapple Canvas powered mobile sites, URLs weren’t the prettiest or most SEO friendly they could be.

Sure, you could insert text at the start of the URL and create a shortcode to identify your site, but essentially, everything was managed and displayed with pretty ugly looking variables.

But that has all changed.

We’ve introduced a new feature into Wapple Canvas called Tidy URLs that allow you to configure, at a page level, the URL that page will have.
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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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If you have data that you need to display in tabular form – be it the premier league table, or your local darts league, the table chunk inside of Wapple Canvas is for you.

We’ve built a chunk for you that allows you to define your data in a device independent language, and let us do the rest of the job for you.
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We have integrated Amobee into Wapple Canvas so you can deliver Amobee adverts on your mobile site!
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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