Update from the mobile mines.... sorta

[dreamatdrew]

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.

Comments

[hatman]

Wow. That's quite a list. And it sounds really cool. A fuller posting page would be awesome. Especially crossposting options. Not so excited about the skin, personally, since my mobile device (a Kindle) has a monochrome screen. But I can see how it would be really handy for other devices. All in all, though, it looks great. Expanded feature set while maintaining the option to keep trim. Perfect!

[foxfirefey]

Actually, the skin might help you out with your Kindle--you could select colors (in grayscale) that maximize monochrome contrasts.

[miang]

Yay, I finally get to play! \o/

You've covered just about everything I was going to ask for; perhaps the single most important thing to me would be the skin option (the black/blue on white is just painful; I'd love to see the mobile version match the regular site scheme!)

I'd probably be using the Full View option for reading and entry pages, as the icons are really important to me (even scaled down). I'm picturing something like Facebook Mobile here -- regardless of how I feel about FB as an entity, I have to give them credit for designing an incredibly sleek mobile version.

Perhaps the only additional suggestion I'd have -- with the caveat that I have no idea how hard it would be to code -- is to have an auto-cut feature where posts (on the reading page) more than X paragraph-breaks or Y characters long are automatically cut. This would make mobile browsing a lot easier for those of us with, er, rather verbose friends. :)

In conclusion, you guys are amazing. What's the proposed timeline for all this development? (Whatever it is, keep up the fantastic work!)

[azurelunatic]

One of the devs has character count limit in her style, and there's a suggestion for rolling this into S2 proper. dreamatdrew (who I was on the phone with just now) is, in general, against the concept of implementing things for Mobile that are not also available in some form or other on the main site. So that suggestion would have to be accepted for him to feel comfortable about coding an auto-cut for length for mobile.

I don't have word on the timeline.

[akk]

Hi, denise sent me over from my commenting on DW's mobile options (app & site) at the last update post.

Your list is highly impressive & covers most of what I was going to point out. I wish you all well for getting that into code! :)

For starters: I'm using a Samsung S8500 Wave smartphone (Bada OS) with the inbuilt browser (not Opera mini) and I'm still getting used to having a smartphone at all. So some of it may be due to my not being used to things. :)

These are all short-time things, which may be obsolete once your plans come to bear. I just thought to add them, in case some of it can be implemented without too much work:

What I noticed from playing with the current mobile site (and LJ's newer version of theirs) is that

1. the mobile site as it is, is functional but spartanic, as in it would greatly help to have a brief note, saying that it uses the accounts standard settings including crossposting (etc.) just so people know without trying what they're about to do.

2. at some point after posting, the link "view the entry" (or add tags...? I have to play again, sorry) took me to the normal site without notice (and without an option to go back to mobile), while that may be intended for a reason, I highly suggest to tell people beforehand in case data traffic is critical for them.

3. This may be phone browser specific, I don't know. The Samsung browser has it's controls in a popup menu at the bottom of the screen. When viewing the reading page as it is now, it is basically filled with links from top to bottom and activating the popup menu (for example to move back or forth in the history and/or create a bookmark) is virtually impossible without accidentally clicking a link underneath. For that reason, I found LJ's new site with text displayed to each link easier to use, even though it was a bit much text. Maybe it would be possible to add two or three lines of text to each link. Probably the first sentence or so. It would give an idea what's the post about, provide "non active screen area" if needed, and still not gobble up that much bandwidth as LJ's long text excerpts.

[dreamatdrew]

Lack of update aside (thank you A:being poor, B: having a broken screen on the phone, and C: not having reliable access otherwise) Things are Happening-ish...

Point 1, Yes, very much so, thats in the plan, including actual "crosspost to established accound" type buttons....
Point 2, any link from a post (as in type, not function) page is currently redirected to a standard dw page.... Again, in the hopper.

Point 3: do you mean non-active real-estate around each entry, or at page headers/footers? Just to be clear?

[akk]

Regarding point 3: the latter. non-active space at the header and footer of the page would solve the problem with the overlaid phone browser controls. It would give a spot on the page, where the controls can be called up without clicking a link at the same time.

And I wish you all the best good luck for resolving A through C. :)

[februaryfour]

Just dropping in (VERY LATE! T_T) on this post to say that I like all this so far. Bonus points if a DW app for iPhone appears that does exactly this, but I won't push.