Dreamwidth Mobile

First things first, I would like to thank all of you who have made your thoughts on what mobile currently is and what it should be. Keep em coming. Seriously.

While I'd like to point out that I am NOT $deity here (the suit, the geek, and the minion are the closest we get to those), I do have my virtual sketchbook out, and I am working on things. Specifically mockup-style things at the moment. For the record, the plan for right now stands at: make it work with everything, then make it as pretty as we can. I'm pretty sure this is not what some of you want to hear, but as one of the guiding principles of DW is open access, building a site which caters to one specific platform or device as a starting point, then branching out, just seems a bit against the grain.

That being said, it is looking more and more like the current incarnation of DW Mobile will be gutted. In it's place, at least for the first go, will be something that doesn't look all that radically different. Here is a (non-exhaustive) list of things being considered:

• Global-site wide
  • Automagic detection of mobile (and possibly non-officially-supported[ mark ?, denise ?]) browsers, with a link to the mobile version.
    
    • Yes, there would be a configurable permanent opt-in/out out button. This is so that people who don't know that the mobile version is there are at least informed, and so that links which get redirected can still be looked at without painful amounts of typing (which sucks on T9, let me tell ya.....)
• Mobile-site-wide
  • Add, at a minimum, basic "skin" support to mobile
    
    • Or, in the words of foxfirefey , A tweakable site-scheme, which applies to all pages on mobile.
    • Said "skins" would allow you to change some of the basic aspects of the pages you see on mobile, such as colors and font sizes, overriding the default black and blue on white (which can be excrutiating on a smaller than 2 inch screen, lemmie tell ya...).
  • Add support for the DW inbox
• Post page
  
  • Add support for features not currently available, including tags, icons, crossposting, etc.
• Reading Page
  
  • Add support for Reading Filters. (I thought it was there but just hidden. Oh how wrong I was......)
  • Allow for verbosity options on the reading page
    
    • Full View: just like what you get on regular dreamwidth, scaled down a bit to keep it from overloading mobile browsers
    • Text-only View: Take your current reading page, kill off the images (most likely denoted with a small placeholder*)
    • Headline View: Very much like the current incarnation of the mobile reading page, with updates to make it more informative and functional
• Entry Pages
  
  • Allow for verbosity options for entries
  • Full View: just like what you get on regular dreamwidth, scaled down a bit to keep it from overloading mobile browsers
  • Text-only View: Just what it says on the tin. Current entry page minus images*.
    • Icons will probably be replaced by a link with the icons keywords. (Like I said, sketch time)
    • userheads (the little person, or planet, or swirly in front of usernames)  would be replaced by a bracketed label which confers the same information
    • All other images would be replaced by a bracketed link showing the alt text of the image if available, or a filename otherwise
  • Introduction of a page-splitter, so that pages above a certain size get split for mobile browsers
    
    • Yes, this would be configurable, from "off" to "I have a phone that barely has enough memory for my own phone number"

As I said, not an exhaustive list, but there it is. Comments, Criticisms, Questions, all welcome.

Welcome to dw_mobile . We're just getting this off the ground, here, so please be patient. 

Right now, we are very much in the brainstorming phase of giving Dreamwidth's mobile offering a makeover*. A few things have been discussed, however:

• First of all, a major-ish change: move the mobile interface from www.dreamwidth.org/mobile to m.dreamwidth.org . (Or something similar; as I said, still brainstorming here...)
• Adding and making more readily accessable features from the main site. Crossposting and Reading Filters are two items that come to mind immediately.
• Quite a few teeny backend tweaks have been thrown out too, mostly geared to optimizing for mobile browsers and to make the site just a bit easier to deal with.

Yes, I'm being vague. I have a very good reason for being vague right now: I don't want to poison the well by pre-emptively laying out a bunch of ideas that start you thinking about what's already planned instead of what you would like to see.

So, here's your space to put up your ideas. Big, earth-shattering ideas, teensy tiny nit-picky ideas, ideas that you don't think anyone but you would like. Everything is going to be considered. Mobile is for us users who have to use it, and we should make it do what we want it to do.

So, Lay on, Dreamwidth....

~~dreamatdrew 


* Just to clarify, we're referring to the mobile version of the website. While mobile client developers/users are more than welcome, that is not the primary focus of this discussion. Feel free to offer up ideas or harvest ideas here for your own use, though