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 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 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 do lots of great stuff with mobile forms in Canvas. You’ve got advanced validation rules, you can add all sorts of different form items and get extensive reports on what has been submitted.

But one thing we were missing was the ability to have a file upload form item so if you wanted your mobile web application to have the ability to upload photos from their phone, you were a bit stuck.

Now however, you have the option of doing exactly this, by adding a form item and setting the item type as “file”.

Of course, the functionality for this feature is available if you’re building your form with WAPL, just use a <formItem> element, and set the “item_type” to “file”.

Most modern handsets support it, with the exception of the iPhone, which doesn’t allow access to the file system from the browser. We’re hoping this will change in the future, but for now Safari will disable the option.

For more info about how to build form items in WAPL, check out http://wapl.info/coding-for-the-mobile-web-with-WAPL/chapter/Form-Items/

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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It’s movie time here at Wapple HQ! We’ve been busy conjuring up some neat, little bite-sized chunks of Wapple goodness on our new YouTube channel. We thought this would be a useful and illustrative way of demonstrating how easy it is to develop mobile websites using Wapple Architect & Canvas™.

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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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Mobile Internet is a tricky platform to develop for unless you use the right tools and have the lowdown on what works and what doesn’t.

As there are so many different devices out there in the worldwide marketplace any developer will meet a number of challenges. This mainly concern varying screen sizes, a number of markup languages and device inconsistencies and capabilities.

Obviously, developing mobile internet applications that work across the widest range of devices should be paramount to any serious developer or designer. If your site cannot be viewed on any percentage of mobile browsers then it is unlikely to meet its full potential or any at all.

Often, brand integrity is as important as user experience. This is especially true where mobile marketing meets customer engagement but it is also important to ensure that users have a good experience on even the simplest of sites.

Some older phones have incredibly small screens, while newer smartphones are being released with increasing 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

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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