Q: Slide Shows on iOS Devices
I have been using iWeb to publish a variety of web sites for a number of years and continue to do so, originally publishing to MobileMe and, when that went away, via FTP to my own domain hosted by MacHighway. Using instructions from OldToad <http://oldtoadstutorials.net/No.iW14.html> I was able to successfully retain slideshow functionality after MobileMe’s servers were turned off. My sites work fine on OS 10.8.2 with Safari 6.0.2 or Firefox 17, and OS 10.6.8 with Safari 5.1.7, and probably others but these are the combinations I have ready access to.
Recently, however, I discovered that the slideshow functionality does not work properly on iOS 5 or 6. When attempting to view a slide show on an original iPad with iOS 5, only postage stamp size images appear. There are no slide show controls, there are reflections which are turned off in iWeb and do not appear on my desktop Mac and the second caption line is cut off. On an iPhone 4S with iOS 6, the images appear reasonably sized but again with no slide show controls, but with reflections and the second caption line cut off.
I can however view individual photos and browse through them without any difficulty on iOS 5 and 6. The problem exists on old sites I simply moved from MobileMe to MacHighway and on new sites created and posted initially on MacHighway. I suspect either there are some scripts generated by iWeb that are not working properly when seeing an iOS user agent or that some of the user agent functionality was performed on MobileMe servers. To investigate further, I used Safari 6.0.2’s Develop menu to vary the user agent and got the following results:
Safari 6.0.2 Mac; Safari 5.1.7 Windows OK
Safari iOS 5.1 iPhone, iPod, iPad Touch Fails (postage size images)
Internet Explorer 8.0 and 9.0 on Windows OK
Internet Explorer 7.0 on Windows Fails (no photo functionality)
Google Chrome 19.0 Mac and Windows OK
Firefox 11.0 Mac & Windows OK
Opera 11.62 Mac and Windows OK
Does anyone know whether the problem can be remedied by changes to iWeb generated code and if so what those code changes would be?
Posted on Dec 20, 2012 11:34 AM