Mobile Web Junkie

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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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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After our last blog post on the future of the mobile web, Wapple has been busy thinking up new ways to get you involved and give you a voice. We’ve put together a survey which will help us to get a better picture of the mobile web through your eyes.

If you’ve ever been browsing on your mobile device and felt that most sites just weren’t good enough or that advertising was too intrusive, now is the time to let people know! On the other hand, if you can’t get enough of the mobile web and think it’s the best thing since sliced bread, here’s your opportunity to shout it from the rooftops…

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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

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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