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By saturation - Thu 20 Oct 2011
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I was wondering if there are any plans to create a simplified version of Kartris that can be accessed by mobile phones? I do a bit of Android and iPhone development and was hoping you may have some simplified pages so I can access the same data without re-writing all of the code.
Just curious.
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By Neil - Thu 20 Oct 2011
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http://www.freeaspnetcart.com/Topic1228.aspx
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By Paul - Fri 21 Oct 2011
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Yes, just to add further to this...
Firstly we wanted to avoid producing an iphone app, or app for any other specific device, and instead have mobile support via a modified HTML based interface.
We did work on this, approaching it by using a separate skin with modified CSS. This would reformat pages and hide some elements to fit a smaller screen. The plan was to use the same aspx files for the interface, with various exceptions and alternative code within these for mobile devices to hide or modify some sections.
The problem was that this started to get quite messy. It may be therefore that we eventually work on a much more simplified set of interface files specifically for mobile or lower spec devices, that would for example avoid ajax and popups. It would still have a skin, but with much reduced code and far less CSS. The product layout and navigation would by simpler (rather than having various configurable layouts for products, we'd just have one standard one - image and product name with 'from' price perhaps, and so on). This solution would provide pages which were smaller, with fewer embedded files, and so which should load faster on slower connections too.
But this is obviously a larger job than simply changing the skin, hence it was bumped from 1.4. But it is something we definitely want to pursue.
Any feedback and suggestions of course appreciated as we haven't really settled anything concrete yet, so it's very much still an open discussion 
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By saturation - Fri 21 Oct 2011
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Makes sense. Plus, if you made an actual app, I'm sure moving customizations for each Kartris site would be almost impossible, if not completely impossible.
I was thinking along the modified HTML as well--somewhere in the backend allow the admin to manage a separate home page for mobile, then use simplified category, product, account, and checkout pages, no sidebars--just vertical scrolling for only the critically necessary.
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By Paul - Sat 22 Oct 2011
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It's possible to reformat the HTML using a skin, so that sidebars etc. don't feature. Within certain user controls, elements can be hidden with CSS too. But hiding elements with CSS doesn't of course remove that code from the page, it only tells the browser not to show it, hence we worked instead on hiding or reformatting some HTML within the user controls and pages themselves, rather than with CSS through the skin. This way, elements can be removed from the HTML source of a page, not just hidden, thereby reducing page size which is more critical on mobile devices.
If we can go the route of a separate mobile interface, it would likely not include all the features of the full version (such as adding reviews, large image views, etc.), and would try to avoid javascript and AJAX as much as possible, to work on the widest variety of simple browsers.
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