Mobile Web Junkie

Ever since we first created Wapple Architect, you could use it to integrate with Wapple Canvas features. In fact, loading a menu built with Canvas onto an Architect site was one of the first operations we ever performed with our fledging new mobile markup language.

But as we’ve improved the Architect schema, one area of documentation we’ve sadly neglected was telling you how to use these advanced Canvas features in your WAPL.
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If you’ve been keeping an eye on the list of chunks available in Wapple Canvas, you’ll have noticed a new one pop up today – the Bing Map Chunk.

What we’ve done is integrate Bing Maps into Wapple Canvas and Wapple Architect, so you can easily create great looking maps, with plenty of options that always works on mobile.
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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.

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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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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Since its launch in June, the Wapple Architect Mobile Plugin for WordPress has seen a huge amount of usage. So much so that it now deserves a showcase article discussing success stories so far about blogs that have installed the plugin.

Hopefully your site is one of those featured, but if not, don’t despair because I’m going to include a few tips and tricks at the end of this article that will mean that in the next showcase, I can’t fail to include yours!
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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

Today marks another significant milestone in the evolution of the Wapple Architect mobile plugin for WordPress – version 1.2 has been released into the wild!

There’s been some great feedback from version 1.1 as well as a whole load of suggestions and feature requests and I’ve tried to implement as many of them as I can.

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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

You’ve installed my Wapple Architect Mobile Plugin for WordPress and entered your Dev Key only to find that although your mobile blog looks great, it doesn’t look as awesome as some of the other blogs that are using the plugin.

So what can you do about it? Luckily for you I’ve compiled a list of some of the top tips to make your blog look awesome on mobile, just follow it and by the end of it you’ll have a great looking mobile site.
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