Improve the /mobile site for modern smartphones

[swaldman]

Title:
Improve the /mobile site for modern smartphones

Area:
www.dreamwidth.org/mobile

Summary:
The capabilities of the current www.dreamwidth.org/mobile site are very limited, and should be expanded.

Description:
The site at www.dreamwidth.org/mobile is currently very basic, and allows reading and simple posting.

This is good, and is vital for the older generation of mobile browsers which can only handle simple web pages. Please do not remove this.

However,
There are now many smartphone browsers around (e.g. webkit-based ones, fennec, etc) which can render more fully-featured web pages, but which suffer on the standard DW site because of things like fixed-width text boxes (e.g. on my phone, fitting the edit box for a new post onto the screen makes the text illegible).

It would be useful to have a version of the site which offers most of the functionality of the normal DW site in a layout geared to small screens.

I realise that building a different version of every page would be a huge task. I hope there can be discussion on whether it can work automatically, and/or which bits of the site are needed.

Poll #2523 Improve the /mobile site for modern smartphones

Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 40

View Respondents

This suggestion:

View Answers

Should be implemented as-is.
25 (62.5%)

Should be implemented with changes. (please comment)
1 (2.5%)

Shouldn't be implemented.
0 (0.0%)

(I have no opinion)
13 (32.5%)

(Other: please comment)
1 (2.5%)

Comments

+1

[alisx]

I read a lot of DW on my iPhone.

[kyrielle]

I use my iPhone a lot for DW and in many cases I don't think it needs much modification, but some things do - and the text boxes / comment boxes are at the top of the list. They're tricky on that little screen.

[liv]

Yeah, I'm ok with this as long as it definitely, without any doubt includes the not removing the old version part. I'm pretty much unable to read LJ from my mobile now that they've made a new snazzy version of the mobile page, and I would really hate that to happen to DW.

[ignaz]

I use my droid for DW all the time and there are several changes to /mobile that I would love to see implemented.

[zvi]

Please to be more specific.

[ignaz]

What, here? Or in (a) new post(s)?

... actually, I think katieastrophe below covered my main requests.

[zvi]

I meant here, actually. It's not uncommon for a bug from suggestions to direct the developer to the discussion for ideas about implementation.

[katieastrophe]

Things I would like to see changed in the mobile site:

* When posting, ability to select icon, mood, music, location and custom security groups (i.e. not limited to public/access/private)
* Mobile friendly comment pages after posting; reading page directs to ?format=light, but only before you comment; if you respond, then you get sent to a non-mobile version of the page.

[melina]

I would be happy to test a different mobile site on my Palm Pre.

[sky]

I would be all over this. I love reading DW from my iPod Touch, but posting anything is a pain, so even just something with mobile-sized text boxes would be amazing.

[denise]

Hi there!

I just want to let you know that while I'm marking this suggestion as 'rejected', it's only because there aren't really any specific improvements mentioned in it. We have somebody working on improving the mobile site, and a project team forming - check dw_mobile if you want to get involved!

[swaldman]

Fair enough :-)