14 DAY TRIAL // Blogger, mostly neglected for a decade despite being Google's first ever acquisition, finally got some love and some changes last year. One of the big new features was the Dynamic Views, blog themes for the 21st century.
Dynamic Views are built on HTML5 and, as the name implies, they're dynamic, i.e. they adjust to the size of the screen and the window to present the best possible view.
You'd think that this would make them perfect for mobile devices and you'd be right. Still, it took Google a year to make it happen.
Dynamic Views are now available on mobile devices so, if you're using one, you'll be glad to know that it will work on smartphones and tablets as well.
"We’re bringing the speed and advanced reading experience of Dynamic Views to mobile. Configuring your blog to use a Dynamic View on mobile will result in a reading experience that mirrors the desktop, but is optimized for mobile," Blogger wrote.
"If you’re currently using Dynamic Views on the desktop and have the 'Default' mobile template selected, you don’t need to do anything -- your blog will automatically start using the mobile optimized view when viewed from a compatible mobile browser," Blogger explained.
"Currently, only the 'Classic' view, which is best suited for small screens, will be shown on mobile. Tablets with large screens will get the full desktop experience," it added.
Of course, the reason why it took so long for the Dynamic Views to be made available on mobile devices is quite simple, the devices were simply not powerful enough to run them.
You may have noticed that the new themes aren't exactly lightning fast on desktops either. They're not necessarily slow, but, especially on older machines, there is a sluggishness to them.
However, mobile devices continue to become ever more powerful, browsers faster and HTML5 more optimized. That said, the Dynamic Views only work with WebKit browsers, which, unfortunately or not, means pretty much all mobile browsers, i.e. the stock Android browser, Chrome for mobile and Safari for mobile. Firefox and Opera are not supported, but other WebKit-based browsers, like Dolphin should work, in theory.