chorusfm:

Well, it’s the start of the new week and if you’re visiting APnet on a mobile device right now … you’ve probably noticed that we’ve got a brand new mobile site. This is the culmination of countless hours of work and testing and dedication from all the AP.net staff and quite a few active beta testers — we’re pretty proud of how it came out. To celebrate, we’re throwing a contest … and all of those details can be found below. But first, I want to highlight a few things about the new mobile site and also open this thread (as well as this one in the general forum) to any questions or comments you may have. Our website is ever evolving, and it’s from feedback from you, the user, that helps us continue to tailor our community to give you the best experience.

So, here’s a few basic tips and tricks about the new mobile site:

1. It should automatically work if you’re using a supported mobile device (iPhone, iPad, Android 4.0 or higher, BlackBerry 10, and Windows Phone 8) … if your device isn’t on that list, it’s because we haven’t been able to test it enough to know for sure you’ll be able to use it without any issues. So, we’ve kept the “old” mobile website around for all other phones. If you’d like to try out the new mobile site on your phone, just to see if it works, you can go here — if it doesn’t work — or you just prefer the old mobile website, you can go here.

2. If you’re ever viewing the mobile website and you prefer to view the desktop site instead, you can click the menu (top left) and select “Desktop Site” at the bottom of the menu. If the menu is inaccessible, you can click here. From the desktop site you can view the mobile version at anytime by selecting it from the menu at the bottom of every page, under the “connect” header. Or click here.

3. The navigation menu is on the left top of your screen. The “action menu” on the top right of your screen contains actions you can perform on each page (in forums it has post options, in the album review section it has search and sort options, etc.).

4. When you are in a thread if you want to quickly jump to the bottom of the page, double tap with your finger. If you’d like to quickly go to the top of the screen (on iOS devices you can tap the black status bar — where the clock and battery indicator is) you can drag your finger from the left to the right of the page.

5. When you are browsing the forums (or your followed threads page, or the album reviews/interviews, or your inbox) you can always select a particular thread by clicking the title. BUT, if you’d like more options (like going to the last page of a thread, or going to the first unread post of a thread) — you can tap the gray arrow that is on the far right of the screen. This will pop-up a special menu that makes browsing around the website even easier.

6. Tapping the word “absolutepunk” at the top will always take you to the homepage.

7. The little blue dots/icons stand for “unread/new” on the site. You’ll see them on threads with new posts, or private messages you haven’t read, and one will pop-up on the top menu to let you know if you have new notifications (private messages, direct replies, etc.).

8. Artist profiles now work on mobile. So if you click a band name you can see all the news from the band right from your pocket.

9. The website works pretty awesomely as a homescreen app.

Any other questions/comments/thoughts can be posted in the replies here, or this thread in the general forum. I’ll be spending most of the next few days checking them and answering questions, or helping troubleshoot, and looking for bugs. This is just the 1.0 release of the new mobile site — and I’m already working on the next version (bringing in member profiles, fixing up some of the bugs we’ve found, and making it an even better mobile experience). Plus, once the mobile site gets all fixed up — we’ll be working on the elephant in the room: a new desktop website. So, stay tuned.

You made it this far huh? You read all my rambling??? You should be rewarded!

We’re throwing a contest to celebrate the release of the new mobile website and we’re going to give a way some giftcards. It’s a mobile site for a music website — so it makes sense to give away some giftcards that are music related. So, I’ve got a bunch of iTunes and Rdio giftcards (winners can pick which they want) that I’m going to give away to members that post about the new AP.net mobile website on some sort of social site. On twitter? You just have to follow us and make a tweet about the new mobile site with @absolutepunk at the end of the tweet, I’ll pick my favorites later this week. On Facebook? Make sure you like us, and then share this photo. Tumblr? Share this photo. I’ll be combing through all of these, as well as my favorite posts in our forums, over the week and selecting winners to get some giftcards. Music wins.

Hope you enjoy! And as always — you, the community, are what makes us special. We love you.

Mark my words, we’re taking over the world…