Mobile Web Junkie

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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I mentioned in a previous post that I’d written an article on the cake bakery about how to mobilize an existing website or application by just downloading the code, signing up for a dev key and following the instructions.

But whilst my plugin works perfectly, it’s missing a helper to actually build the WAPL for you. So I was really impressed when I saw that Gordon Pettey had written his own article on the bakery using mine for a bit of inspiration that not only did everything my plugin did but included a helper!

I’ve tested the code and it works just as expected, so if you’re using CakePHP and want to mobilize your website or app, you should check out his Universal Mobilization with WAPL article.

Last week something exciting happened inside the colourful walls of Wapple – the latest version of the mobile site was launched. Below are the obligatory before and after screenshots and at first glance you’ll probably notice that they look pretty similar. However, all is not as it seems because underneath the bonnet – everything has changed.

Built with Canvas

Built with Architect

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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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