Mobile or desktop version?
cruXible
Posts: 78
Does anyone use the mobile version of the forums? I always switch to the desktop version if I am on my mobile device.
Comments
In the current implementation, there is only one "breakpoint" where the layout actually changes. You can view how that looks on a desktop browser by resizing the window down to under (about) 365 pixels. You'll see it suddenly switch appearance. That's the breakpoint, and it's designed for portrait-view on smart phones.
As the screen resizes up, the elements shift and wrap around, to minimize the back and forth scroll. There are formatting glitches in the current forum that still requires side-to-side scrolling: someone edited the theme to add the top navigation bar, and didn't put it in a responsive DIV row. This results in that element sticking out to the right. I've reported it as a bug.
There are methods to change the user-agent of your browser to get a responsive site to display a different view of the page, but I don't think this theme uses anything more than counting pixel width (and maybe, to a point, DPI).
One thing you can't check on a desktop browser is whether you can pinch-zoom. Someone mentioned that was not working, but the tag to allow this is on the page. There might be a competing rule in the CSS that then prevents it. I always like responsive sites that let me zoom closer -- helpful for images.
There is no separate "version," just a different layout. That is, the content is exactly the same.
No it is not. On my Samsung Galaxy S it is very different, clean and nice, all the Smile is gone. Like the vote buttons. There is no side bar with categories. No avatars. A lot of stuff is gone. There is no way to start a new discussion.
Yes on my desktop FireFox I can see the layout change responsively as I squeeze the window smaller and smaller. That is nothing like what I see on the phone.
Seems we do indeed have a (now frowned upon) content-switcher site.
The old, bad days of designing for mobile had the server actually decapitate a lot of the content, mostly from a bandwidth standpoint. Limiting the content -- a news site that has much shorter articles for mobile, for example -- that's becoming more and more rare. Instead, these days pages use things like lazy load to defer loading of elements until they are scrolled into view.
When I request desktop, the presentation is very different.
I've not authored anything on desktop. Authoring on mobile is actually easy for text and the emoticons. More advanced formatting is a pita, but that is largely due to input being a pita, unless one gets a Bluetooth keyboard mouse.
If you haven't ran Android with one, you are missing out.
The Note 4 has stylus, multitouch, and will render a mouse pointer when given one.
I'll report back when I try real input.
Ah, you mean DB content as opposed to page content. OK, I can go with that.
But what about the avatars and vote counts, aren't they user generated DB content? There is no way I can retrieve my avatar, had I set one, using a phone.
Not that I care as you know.
The problem is, I don't see how I can get that mobile version.. I switched off the 'retrieve desktop version' option in the Android browser, but that did not make any difference. And I don't want to do that anyway, I must leave the setting as-is or other sites become unusable. Is there a URL option which can get the mobile version so that I can test it?
-Tor
pinch and zoom does not work.
I did send one post from that phone. Worked well enough.
-Tor
No, it doesn't make sense. I think it was a trend because early examples of responsive design limited the zoom, with the thinking it was no longer necessary. That's been proven wrong, but those examples -- and the old thinking behind it -- are still around. I think skel and bootstrap still come this way out of the box, though I haven't checked in a while. Many page coders now go back in and remove the option in the META tag that restricts zooming.
This forum uses the correct META tag to permit zooming. If zooming isn't working, the restriction is probably deeper inside one of the CSS files that contain the media queries for setting the styles.
There are many things about the design of the web and behaviour of clients that I don't get the reasoning of. This zoom thing is another one of them.
Generally in a window displaying a page I can scroll up and down, left and right, if the content is too big to fit. I can zoom in and out at will to suite the way I want to see things.
Well, it's my window on my machine, when in anybodies right mind did the browser creators give the power to some random stranger to dictate if I can do this or not?
I don't get the idea.
Fortunately, this is a common topic in the Web developer forums, where there are many examples of how to keep things up to date. It's a lot of work, though. It might be useful for those on small screen devices to start a thread and note the features found or missing.
Games, CAD, Vis, and client replacement use cases all benefit.
Of course it gets abused too.
When the theme style is re-examined for potential additions or changes, the effectiveness of our mobile-friendly view will be evaluated again as well.
I can post easily, and edit, my posts. But I cannot create a new thread.
Both bugs have been reported. I just wanted to ensure this discussion knows they still exist.
BTW both portrait and landscape work, including rotating the screen.
BTW2. I am away for the month, so virtually all my forum reading and posting will be from my iPhone 6+ as I won't be getting my laptop out often. So I will be giving the forum software a workout over this time.
If you see it, that creates a new discussion.
Pinch and zoom feature has been added as an issue.
If you click on the horizontal bars, it brings up the first post in the thread on a plain screen with two options for font size.
However, only the #1 post in the thread displays in that manner. I haven't been able to figure out if there is a way to zoom other posts in the same thread. And why does the the icon show up in some threads and not others? No substitute for pinch&zoom.
(iPhone 6). It seems like a bug.