We’re pleased to announce the addition of a new advertising option into WPtouch 1.9.x – Appstores.

Unlike many advertising options that typically advertise websites, products or services, Appstores allows publishers to advertise mobile-specific applications which can be downloaded onto an end-user’s phone. Here’s a description of how it works from Appstore’s site:

Is your website optimized for mobile? Yes? Great, you can make more money by recommending apps. Here’s how it works: we look at the content of your mobile site, and we surface the most relevant apps. Users love it because they get highly relevant apps. You’ll love it, because the engagement will be higher than vanilla mobile banners. Developers will love it because for once, they are getting relevant app downloads. Everyone wins.

This is an exciting new area for mobile advertising, and BraveNewCode is proud to be a launching partner with the Appstores team.

The changes have already been incorporated into the WPtouch 1.9.x codebase, so you can update to it immediately and try out the new Appstores advertising option. We’ll also be incorporating this new advertising option in WPtouch Pro soon, so look for that in the near future.

Soon we’ll pass 3 million downloads of WPtouch, the most popular and easy-to-use mobile plugin for WordPress. We expect to cross the mark sometime in the next few weeks!

To celebrate we’re giving away a 32GB iPhone 4S in your choice of white or black!

We’ll draw a winner and make an announcement on Twitter and our blog. If you’re the selected winner, we’ll contact you on Twitter.

Good luck to all entrants!

The contest is now closed. We’ll draw the winner soon.

*Prize is available to North American and EU residents only.

Recently Google began the GoMo initiative, an online campaign to increase awareness of the importance of having a mobile-specific version of your website for your visitors.

WHAT IS A MOBILE SITE AND WHY DO YOU NEED ONE?
Just because you can see your desktop site on a mobile phone doesn’t mean it’s mobile-friendly. Mobile sites are designed for the small screen, with the needs of mobile users in mind. A mobile-friendly site can help your business connect with customers and drive conversions.

The GoMo website includes useful information and powerful statistics to show you why going mobile should be an important part of your online business plan & future.

It will also allow you to test your website, and will give you a ranking of 1-4 in terms of the quality of the mobile experience you’re offering visitors.

Lastly it provides a small, non-WordPress list of vendors that assist in building mobile sites. We’re not yet listed, but that will likely change, and folks like us will be included.

Adwords Quality Score Now Affected by Mobile Sites

Google also recently announced that mobile site optimization now affects your AdWords Quality Score. This means that serving ads to mobile visitors with a mobile-optimized website will earn you a higher rank.

The AdWords system will automatically visit your landing page, and evaluate your site as viewed by smartphones. However, if you already have a mobile site, we recommend confirming with your webmaster that you’ve configured your server to show the mobile-optimized site when the AdWords mobile User-Agent is detected.

So in both cases, WPtouch & WPtouch Pro powered WordPress websites score perfect and will help you both with your business presence online in an increasingly mobile ‘webscape’, while also improving your Adwords quality & revenue.

We just wanted to post quickly and let everyone know that recently a supposed SQL injection vulnerability was found in WPtouch (the free version). This report is false.

The vulnerability declared at packetstormsecurity.org and other security alert-type sites is impossible.

There is no ajax.php file in the root of WPtouch, therefore this vulnerability is flat-out impossible.

We take WordPress security seriously at BraveNewCode, and have on numerous occasions issued updates for security exploits in our plugins that we’ve found before they’re in the wild. We know WPtouch is a popular plugin and one that can be targeted because of it’s popularity and wide install base. We work hard to ensure the safety of our plugins on your WordPress installations.

It’s been a couple months since the last release of WPtouch Pro, but that’s not because we weren’t hard at work on it! We decided to focus our efforts with fixes, additions and changes into a major point release, so 2.4 bakes in a huge list of updates.

Retina Startup + Landscape Startup on iPad

We’ve long wanted to support retina startup screens for Web-App Mode on iOS for the iPhone 4 (and now iPhone 4S). We’ve been waiting on Apple to implement this feature, and with iOS 5 they finally have. So 2.4 supports adding a retina version of your startup screen image if you’d like to use one.

Additionally, it’s now possible with iOS 5 to add a Landscape version of the startup image for iPad. effectively now you can offer startup screens in your WPtouch Pro Web-App in exactly the same way that native apps can.

FitVid.js

In WPtouch Pro 2.4 we’ve added the fitvids.js jQuery plugin, which takes your object, embed, iframe and html5 videos in posts and pages and automatically scales them based on orientation, and screen size. In WPtouch Pro 2.4 your videos will always look great.

Aloha! iOS 5 Native Scrolling

As if the above wasn’t enough, we’ve also added iOS 5 native scrolling for Web-App Mode on mobile, and replaced the javascript scrolling we used on iPad with iOS 5 native scrolling.

iOS 5 on iPhone & iPod touch

Now in Web-App mode the header remains fixed like native apps, while the body content scrolls in native speed and momentum.

iOS 5 on iPad

The result is a smooth scrolling experience, coupled with access to features in mobileSafari which were previously impossible on iPad like text selection. For previous iOS versions on iPad, the scrolling method will gracefully degrade.

♥ Android

Along with several styling and appearance improvements for Android devices, we’ve also added support for ontouchstart and ontouchend to Android. This speeds up interacting with the UI and makes for a more native experience.

The Whole Story

For a complete list of changes for 2.4 you can visit the support posting about the new release (you need to be logged in with a pro account), or view the change log in the read me accompanying the update.