Obligitory Introduction.

[dreamatdrew]

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

Comments

[jens]

Have you thought about using a framework for optimized mobile pages? I have used iWebKit to develop a mobile version of a website and it is quite easy to build mobile pages and amazing user interfaces. A drawback is that only mobile browsers with WebKit are supported, but at least all Android, iPhone, Palm and newer Blackberry devices support WebKit.

[feathertail]

I think that this is a good idea! It'd make it easier for us to deploy something nice-looking quickly. We could include the existing mobile site as a separate stylesheet, just in case it is needed.

[angelikitten]

I've noticed people asking if it would be possible to be automatically directed to the mobile site when using phones (like Wikipedia does) - if you went down that route, would it also be possible for each user to permanently disable that feature (again, like Wikipedia), if that user wanted to? That way, everyone would be happy :)

[feathertail]

That's actually what happens on WordPress blogs that use WPTouch! They automatically serve you a Webkit-optimized mobile version (see jens' comment above), with a link to see the full version if you like.

I think something like that would be awesome, as well as being more discoverable by new users. ^.^

[azurelunatic]

So, how about looking through the style system and making sure that there is a mobile-optimized version of every style element, and letting people build their own mobile styles, to suit their own fancy and their own device? You could then have styles optimized for every device in a pick-your-style place, then hit up username.dreamwidth.org/m for your own pet implementation, and you could tweak to suit.

The main m.dreamwidth.org would have a likely-to-be-usable-by-all version. Unless it's practical to have many people hitting up m.dw.org and imposing their own styles on it, in which case we could do without the user.dw.org/m thing.

[azurelunatic]

And, along the same lines, make the update page more modular, and let people write styles for it, and have a designated mobile style (with a default thingy for regular and mobile that works unless you choose to override and screw around with it).

[hypatia]

as i recall it, there are specific security-related reasons why LJ moved from livejournal.com/user/username to username.livejournal.com (which was at one point a community feature. we should probably figure out what those are, and how going to m.dreamwidth.org would impact that. i wonder if it'll make more sense to do something like username.m.dreamwidth.org?

[azurelunatic]

Cookie-stealing. It's hard to steal someone's login cookies if your journal entries with the stuff doing the stealing doesn't appear on the www domain.

[jens]

If you are interested, I could build a small mock-up of mobile optimized pages for dreamwidth using iWebKit. It looks really great on iPhone and Android (maybe on others to, but I only checked on these devices).

[feathertail]

LiveJournal appears to have just launched a new mobile site: LINK

An iWebKit version would probably be prettier, although this might be better for less advanced browsers that can support it than what Dreamwidth is currently using. Assuming it's open-source ...

Opt in mobile site

[listener_sheogorath]

One of my bugbears is that even when I was on an entry level phone, I could access the desktop versions of sites by browsing with Opera Mini, and now I have an Android, the mobile versions are obsolete, yet I am still auto served with the crippled version of this site with no full site button in view. What about auto serving the full site version to every device and making an easily locatable mobile site button for those who need it?

Re: Opt in mobile site

[cesy]

What are you seeing, and what URL are you using? It may be worth sending a Support request - the site works fine for me on Android, and I only get the mobile version if I actually go to the mobile URL.