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

[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.