WPTouch
Update: I’m giving this another shot with version 1.7.4. I’m happy to see the option of showing first timer mobile users the regular page.
I’ve decided to remove the iPhone version of this blog. I was using WPTouch, which has a pretty nice interface for iPhone users with cool dropdown menus and ajaxy magic (screenshot of front page at right). The WPTouch software is solid and I have nothing against the makers of it.
That said, I am beginning to hate mobile versions of websites on my iPhone. I have a full fledged browser in this thing, I want to use it and I definitely don’t want to see a dumbed down version of your site. A perfect example of this is when I went to read the February ‘85 interview with Steve Jobs on Playboy.com. I had bookmarked the site through my reading system (which I’ll explain in an upcoming post) and went to read it on my iPhone. What did I get? Well, it wasn’t Jobs, it was dumbed down mobile Playboy with boobs all over the place. Sure, boobs are better than Jobs, but I wasn’t about to navigate through this byzantine dumbness to get to the article. Yeah, I read Playboy for the articles, heh.
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I can understand your frustration, but we feel WPtouch solves that issue by allowing for the visitor to switch between the normal view of a website and WPtouch.
That way on a per user basis the choice can be made. The choice is saved as a cookie and thus when they return to visit your site they’ll see your standard theme.
As for content, WPtouch doesn’t remove your content, aside from sidebar content. The next version of WPtouch is even more powerful, and we’ll consider the option to have visitors see your desktop theme first, and be given the chance to switch to WPtouch, instead of the other way around.
I think WPtouch is a great product. That’s why I chose it over many alternate solutions. It does 95% percent of what I want it to do. I don’t really care about losing the sidebars either.
I do a lot of reading on my iPhone and it has been increasingly frustrating to read boiled down iPhone templates and I just didn’t want to inflict that on my users. I’m not saying WPtouch is boiled down, but is a new interface forced on the user. Most of these other sites do not offer “normal” view as far as I can tell.
Also, as a frequent user of my own site (there is quite a bit of functionality behind the scenes) I was growing increasing frustrated with the process of changing to normal view to use these functions. Mobile Safari is not a paragon of stability, but 2.2.1 helped quite a bit, and is often purged of cookies due to crashes or resource overload. Once this happens, I get the default WPtouch mode.
I wanted to dive into your code to reverse the view mode, as you mentioned, but have other projects that take priority.
I have deactivated, not uninstalled your plugin, and will follow its progress. I look forward to your next version.