The big Friday announcement at LGF is the launch of our new mobile version for smartphone browsers. This has been on the drawing board for waaay too long, and it gives me great pleasure to finally throw it out there into the jungle of the Internets and see if it survives. (At left is a screenshot from my iPhone.)

The mobile LGF design uses “responsive” techniques to automatically adapt the layout to small screen sizes. It works in either portrait or landscape mode and adjusts to fill the screen either way, and you can zoom in on the page with the pinching gesture or by double-tapping objects. Images and videos are automatically resized to fit as well.

One big change in the mobile version: the left column is no longer there. It has joined the Choir Invisible. The right column, however, with the Featured and Recent lists of LGF Pages, is now at the bottom underneath the main article(s). If you want to go straight there, there’s a button at the top of the page that will jump immediately to the Featured list.

You can even read and post comments, and all the features of our commenting system work just fine. The only disadvantage with mobile devices is that on pages that have hundreds of comments, you may find things getting too slow to be useable. In that case, a good idea is to use LGF Spy mode, which you get into by tapping the little green magnifying glass icon at the bottom right of a post.

This is still a work in progress; the most important areas of the LGF site are now adaptive to small screen sizes, but there are still other pages that need to be updated with the new design techniques. But it’s such a major improvement for mobile devices as-is, I couldn’t see any reason to wait any longer to launch.

This first version is targeted at smartphones in particular; a tablet version is next on the to-do list (but less important, since many tablets can display the regular-sized version of LGF just fine). Have fun with it, and let me know if you run into any problems.