Viewing Your Web Site on Kindle Fire Tablet

[bmpress]

Hi Bob,
I just got a Fire tablet computer with high res screen. It is great for viewing my pictures and it can surf the web too. Your web site looks very good, but I can not view any of your forums. Do you know if there is a way to do this?
Barry

[Bob Atkins]

The honest answer is that I have no idea!

The site is designed to look right in all the major web browsers (IE, FireFox, Chrome, Opera, Safari) but I have never attempted to optimize it for mobile use. I don't know much about the browser that Kindle uses either. I assume it's somewhat different from PC based browsers, but I don't know of any details. I believe it's based on webkit, which I think is the same engine on which Chrome and Safari are based.

There should be nothing special about the forums. Although the software is written in PHP, it generates standard HTML pages which I thought should have rendered properly on any standards compliant browser. The pages don't use any tricks and don't contain any Flash files, Java Applets or other files which might require browser plug-ins to be present.

Searching via Google I don't see any reports of complaints that SMF forums (which is what this is) have issues with Kindle browsers, so at this point I can't really help. I don't have a Kindle, so I can't really do any testing here. Maybe some other forum reader who has a Kindle could check it out and let us know if they have the same issue.

I'll keep an eye on this since it's likely that more and more people will to using tablets and e-book reader devices to browse the web and I'd like to support them if I can. Not sure I'm up to making the site optimized for smart phones though. That could be a lot of work!

[bmpress]

Thanks, Bob. When I tried it again I noticed an alert box that said there was no "JAVA Scripts." So I looked for an app, but there were none. Hope that helps.
Barry

[Bob Atkins]

I'll take a look. Though it's very confusing, a JAVA script isn't the same as Javascript! JAVA is a language that requires JAVA be installed on the computer, while Javascript is built into all current web browsers. Apart from the name the two are pretty much totally different. I'd guess that every site on the web uses Javascript somewhere. but few use JAVA (in the form of JAVA applets).

I'm 99% sure there is no JAVA on my website. but there is Javascript on just about every page. It serves up the menus for example.

So I'm still not sure what's going on. I'll have to find someone with a Kindle and take a look at my website on it.

[Bob Atkins]

If it is a Javascript issue, I found the following on the web about the Kindle Fire:

In the Web browser click on the Menu icon (the ladder at the bottom center of the screen), then click Settings. You have to scroll the settings screen up a bit to see the "Enable JavaScript" checkbox, but it is there.

You might try that. I don't see why you'd need Javascript to see the page, but if for some reason you do, then perhaps you don't have it enabled.

[bmpress]

Voila...I turned on Javascripts and it worked. The forums are now present. I have been using the 9 inch fire for a few weeks now, and find it quite good. It automatically found all my pictures which had been put up on Picasa as jpgs, and they are displayed in very accurate high res color.

Barry