We’ve created a fantastic 10 Session Webinar Training Program to aid you in becoming a master mobile web design expert and we’re including an additional 11th session focusing on mobile marketing.

This webinar-based Program starts November 1st and is absolutely FREE and we’re offering it exclusively to registered Wapple users. (not registered yet…click here quick!)

During the course you will learn how to build a mobile site yourself using our fictitous car services site ‘K-Ching’ as the focal point whilst learning some of the exciting key design, marketing & technical features of our intelligent Mobile Publishing Platform.

Once registered you’ll be able to download the Training Pack which will include the Program Schedule, the K-Ching Mobile Site content (graphics, csvs ) and all relevant training preperation.

Be quick though, places are limited and registration closes THIS Friday 28th October.

Register Now for the K-Ching Training Webinar! (or sign up with Wapple first)

For anyone wanting to display a listing of their products, be it either a one off list, or a list of categories, or a list of items inside a category – it’s all now possible.

You’ve got a load of options to play with:- display thumbnails next to product titles; upload separate thumbnails for each category; options for pagination and of course as with everything in Wapple Canvas, it’s fully multi-lingual.

Right now the shop chunk allows you to show your products, but we have plans for adding checkouts and to integrate with mobile payment providers such as PayPal mobile express checkout. When we add these, we’ll make sure we let you know.

We’ve already used the shop chunk to display product listings on a number of sites – it’s great for showing information and allowing your consumers to browse through items.

Get in touch and let us know what you think of our new feature or if you’ve tried it and have a suggestion to improve it!

Well all these problems and more have been solved with the latest chunk to be added to Wapple Canvas.

It’s called the Bing Search Near Me chunk and is an integration with a number of technologies from those clever folk at Bing. It allows you to search for locations near to you – pizzas, restaurants, golf clubs, fitness centers – they’re all there ready to be searched for.

Lots of Bing

First of all, it integrates with the Bing Maps Search Service, which allows you to enter a location and keyword – and return relevant results. Tie it in with GPS lookups on a mobile phone browser and you’ve got something that will find you stuff right where you are!

We’ve also integrated the chunk with Bing Maps, so not only can you find locations near you, but you can see where they are on a map – very useful if you’re not too familiar with an area.

And finally we’ve used the Bing Maps Direction Service, so after seeing your nearby spots on a nice looking map, you get handy directions that show you exactly how to get there and how long it’ll take!

Some practical uses

If you want any kind of search on your site to find businesses, or shops, or restaurants or whatever, this is the chunk for you. It’s massively configurable, so if you want to allow your users the ability to click the link to phone the shop direct, or change walking to driving directions, you can.

It also has a setting for overriding the mode it starts in – so if you have an event and want to show the nearest 3 Sushi restaurants to your party in downtown Manhattan, set the mode override, specify the where and the what and let the chunk do the rest!

To demonstrate just how useful this chunk is – we had a guy at Wapple HQ needing to find a tyre in a hurry. He used the Bing Search Near Me chunk to find a tyre shop nearby, used the click to call functionality to check if they had one in stock, and followed the directions and map to get there to have his tyre fitted!

It’s all available in one chunk inside of Canvas – so log on and add a Bing Search Near Me chunk to your page to get your users looking for locations near them!

If you’ve got some ideas for using the chunk and would like to talk them through with us, drop us a line.

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.

Of course, our powerful device profiler Wapple Exhibit makes sure that your huge 1000px image is displayed perfectly to scale on any handset and if a particular phone doesn’t support transparencies or PNGs in general, you’ll get the fallback of a JPG (if the phone supports it!) with your choice of background colour. It also ensures that these higher quality images are still minimal in size and load quickly over mobile phone networks.

Get started by logging into Wapple Canvas and upload some new graphics. Overlay some transparent images on top of another background image if you want, the choice is yours!

If you’re using Architect, integrate your better quality Canvas images by using a <graphicChunk> element and reference your new image. More information on how to do this can be found on our documentation site at http://wapl.info/coding-for-the-mobile-web-with-WAPL/chapter/Graphic-Chunk/.

Let us know what you think of this new feature and whether if you’d like to see any other improvements with graphics.

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.



We use them inside of Wapple Canvas to store URLs, so you’ll be taken to a mobile site after taking a picture of one, but they can be used to hold other data such as text or vCards. It also gives you another alternative to the black and white 2D or QR codes – so if you wanted to print a colour barcode on a movie poster to take you to the accompanying mobile site, you now have that option.

If you want to read more about Microsoft Tag, check out http://tag.microsoft.com/consumer/index.aspx.

We’ve put an example on this page, try scanning it with your mobile phone and let us know what happens.

Store locators, POI locators, Location Lookups – call them what you want – we’ve integrated them into Canvas so you can have location based services built into your mobile site.

The system is two fold.

Geo caching

First up, you create your locations (either manually or with a CSV file) – you don’t need to know exactly where they are either, a zip or postcode will do. We’ll then use geocaching techniques to work the rest out including an exact latitude and longitude. We use a mixture of Bing, Google, Yahoo and Multimap for that but it’s configurable, so if you find your locations in your area are more accurate with Bing, then use Bing.

Location Lookup Chunk & Maps

Once that’s done – place a Location Lookup chunk on a page, specify which location group to grab data from and you’re done!

You get a whole raft of options with the chunk, ranging from which map provider you want to use (Google Maps so far – but more to come), to the colour of the marker/pushpin you want to use to show locations.

We’ve also employed some new techniques and technology with this chunk -  if you have a handset with a browser that supports GPS capabilities, the chunk can automatically find your location. Particularly handy if you don’t know where you are and need to find a coffee shop in a hurry!

Also, if you have an iPhone, you can click on the map and it’ll automatically open up Google Maps, again very useful if you want to pan and zoom. Of course if you don’t have an iPhone, you’ll still get a great looking map with all the locations mapped on it.

Store locators are the obvious and probably the most widely used application for this functionality, but you don’t have to restrict yourself to just that – surf spots and locations of music events are two others that spring immediately to mind. You could get really creative and track vehicles/people, and then allow visitors to your mobile site the ability to find them. Who knows, you could even create some sort of city based spy game with it!

If you’ve already created a store locator or any kind of location based service – or would like more information about how to get started, get in touch, we’d be only too glad to talk to you about it.

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).

Not only will Google, Bing and other search engines be able to find your pages easily, your users will thank you for providing better access to pages across your site.

To get started, login to Canvas and edit one of your pages. Drop a Sitemap chunk anywhere on it, and we’ll take it from there. We’ll work out which pages are available, which shortcut letters should display at the top, and the URL structure of the pages.

If you want more from the sitemap chunk, or would like to talk to us about mobile SEO, drop us a line.

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.

No variables, no mess, just a nice, pretty URL that you can let the world know about. If you want your URLs to have a .html, or .htm, or even no extension you can – it’s free text so you dictate how they look.

And by creating tidy URLs that match both your page title and the content inside, you should earn a few extra brownie points with the likes of Google and Bing.

If you’ve got your own domain pointing at our servers, you could get even more SEO friendly URLs, but it’ll work just as well with a Canvas short URL. Every page on your site can have a tidy URL – so if you have a specific campaign that you need to publish, create a new page and give it a user-friendly URL. Mobile Advertising and Mobile Marketing just became a whole lot easier!

Don’t forget to turn Tidy URLs on in Canvas – login and head to Site > Properties > Defaults – it’s the last option on the page.

Finally, we’ve updated our URL generator so that if your site has tidy URLs turned on, you’ll get nice URLs by default.

If you have any thoughts about this feature or would like to talk to us about mobile SEO, mobile advertising or mobile marketing, get in touch – we’d be happy to have a chat with you.

Everything has had an update looks wise, we’ve improved some JavaScipt (new date picker, new colour picker) and we’ve even added a check on every page so if you’ve made changes, it’ll ask you if you want to navigate away.

We’ve gone a bit world cup crazy at Wapple HQ so we’ve added some footballs inside of Canvas. We’ll be replacing them with something else once the World Cup is over so make sure you keep checking back to see what we come up with.

If you have a suggestion for any new themes, let us know and we’ll pass them over to our design wizards to see what they can conjure up.

Whenever you’re on a page or chunk inside of Canvas and you look at the help associated with it (it’s in the left hand menu), you now get a help window appear with your help inside it. No more having to browse to a different page, it’s all on the same page.

We used to have hover help on any item on any page, but it involved hovering over a question mark symbol. We’ve replaced it by having the help on the page at all times.

Chunk documentation has been added and we’re in the process of going through every chunk and adding help for it. Log into Canvas and check out Chunk Documentation from the Help menu to see how we’re getting on.

Finally, you may or may not already know that we have a YouTube channel. We’re now pulling everything from that channel into Canvas and it’s available in the Video Help section in the Help menu of Canvas. Of course, if you want to see any other videos we’ve made on all things mobile, head over to YouTube and see what we’re upto.

Let us know what you think of our new Help and if you have any other suggestions for improvements.