Smartphone Thoughts: Smartphone Thoughts Mobile Templates Now Live

If you hit Smartphone Thoughts from your mobile device, assuming you haven't implemented some sort of desktop-faking registry hack, you'll be redirected to our new mobile template. You'll be presented with a question: "Do you have a fast/flat-rate connection?" and there are two options for you to click on. One basically says "I want to see all the pictures" the other says "I don't want to see all the pictures". If you're like me and don't have a flat-rate connection and you need to conserve bandwidth, you'll select the "no pictures" option. We've made the resulting page as fast as possible and very low-bandwidth.

How much bandwidth savings are we talking about? Well, on a typical day the mobile version of Smartphone Thoughts would usually weigh in around 200 KB to 400 KB, largely depending on how many graphics we had on the front page. We had no way to put a graphic on a post and not have it show up on the mobile page - now we do. The nice part about this solution is that you're not locked out from seeing that graphic - there's a small link that says [image] where there's an image, so if you want to see if you can just click on it. If you're lucky enough to have a fast, flat-rate connection, you'll pick the "show image" option and it will show you all the images. But we've gotten smarter there as well - our new system resizes every front page image, so you're not going to see a 500 pixel wide image that's just squished down to fit on your screen, but still 90 KB in size. What you'll see instead is an image that's maybe 200 pixels wide, so it it will fit on the screen, and it will be re-sized as well, so that 90 KB image will be a 20 KB image instead.

At any time you can change the bandwidth option by going to the SETTINGS option on the menu at the top of the mobile template. We'll be enhancing the mobile templates over time, so suggestions as welcome.