OK, so as you guys know, I'm on this crazy trip across the US and we've been logging our stuff on our little website which is based on SMF + Aeva and a custom theme.
There are some interesting things we've found from doing this that I want to share, and since the Wedge version of Aeva is still basically Aeva from a user standpoint, I think a lot of that stuff stands. Note that this is SMF without a mobile theme and not using WAP because there are other things tied into the site's posting page that aren't in WAP and I didn't have time (or energy) to code them up multiple times. (Namely, the site has a topic tagging system and also a facility to geotag individual posts with a location. This requires various splices into the posting setup.)
1) Posting, generally, sucks from a mobile phone. It actually really sucks on an iPhone 4S, I'm actually surprised more people don't complain about how bad the experience is. Even with the phone in landscape, getting the subject and then the text in is painful. We don't really need formatting much in mobile, even the bold etc. is probably too exotic for the most part but perhaps a collapsed menu of some kind to bring up the tags would be OK. Ideally though I'd consider doing what Tapatalk does: the post interface for a new topic is little more than two text boxes. (Of course I need other stuff but that's another matter entirely and the specific requirements we have for Crossing Overland will actually necessitate a custom app to support background data being gathered and batch uploaded to the site later on.)
2) Does Wedge's version of Aeva support spitting out the non Flash version of embed code where we have it? I'm thinking YouTube in particular. (I can't exactly do a hotpatch on the road to splice the youtu.be code in, but there's at least one video on CO that uses the standard embed code.)
3) Media uploading can typically be much, much simpler than what we currently have. Sure, most of those options will be useful for some people but for the most part, especially when uploading from mobile, it's just not necessary. Perhaps a collapsible menu for the stuff like album covers and the extended information.
4) We really need a mass upload option of some kind (even just AJAX uploading a la Dragooon's plugin for regular posting) that works without Flash so that uploading from mobile is not a hideous chore. It's gotten to the point where we've broken out the one laptop we did actually bring to handle mass uploading, but that's a 2006 MacBook and doesn't exactly handle it *well*. (In unrelated news, the camera connector kit for iPad works really well)... actually, AJAX uploading for media would truly rule just to have it anyway, mobile or not.
5) The selector bit for media items where you can copy the bbcode is not really copyable on a mobile device and for reasons I can't entirely figure out, the item doesn't usually come up with anything useful in there other than the id number.
For example, we uploaded a picture, and the item in question just had:
Code: [Select]
as the text. Which would normally be fine but we wanted:
Code: [Select]
or similar and this is a real pain to add on mobile if you want kind of nice formatting on blog posts. We find ourselves copy/pasting all the time to make this work... I don't know about on desktop yet but on mobile at least it would probably be neat to have the media button not just go straight to an upload button but instead to a media browser from which you can upload if you want, and then have the media browser cover the gallery contents. This would mean we could just upload everything, then filch it from the gallery easily, or upload one at a time without any real fuss either (since the popup could handle the upload AJAXively which would be slick even on an iPad). Fairly sure I've mentioned this before but IPB actually does it this way, and thinking about it, it would also make mass upload much nicer for posting images to the site and then pulling that into the post and that would greatly smooth off our workflow - and I'm fairly sure it would for others too.
Aeva works truly magnificently as a storage ground for media items but I gotta say, the workflow of getting items into posts isn't ideal and it gets worse with the more items you add and until recently I'd pretty much used it as a storage ground, rather than making it part of a cohesive blog structure.
6) Can we actually do something with the textbox sizing and positioning? What we've found with an iPhone (it's largely a non issue with iPad) is that there is some crazy resizing crap going on that means you tap to select the textbox and then it zooms in to the point where the textbox is larger than the screen. Now, I'm sure this is at least partly no longer an issue because it's using SMF 2 code rather than our code and I can't really test it on Wedge right now to be sure, but the way it does zooming on the fixed-width container is really frustrating since it means to type in a post you have to swipe left and right to actually see everything, and even composing the line-blank-line-blank-line posts I've been doing for the blog for the live video updates (yes that's me doing it on Louis' iPhone while he's driving) is frustrating. Again I'm thinking like Tapatalk here, where the box is sized for the screen and it all fits without any scrolling horizontally or any such nonsense. I would kind of presume @Dragooon's mobile theme for SMF works nicely in this regard but again right now I can't really test it. I should note this is the first time I've *really* tried to use an SMF setup for posting and even though I know we have a slightly weird theme, I can't be the only person who finds the experience of posting even 3 lines of text with 2 blank lines tiresome.
I really don't know how much of this stuff can be fixed by way of a mobile skin. Seems to me there is far more at stake than simple CSS resizing (e.g. pulling a different editor component for mobile that doesn't just push all the buttons as normal but has a totally different presentation and code to support it) and some of it will need much greater change if it is to be facilitated, especially the uploading workflow stuff. (Btw, I'd like to see the AJAX uploading of attachments as a core feature just in general. Would be easier to support it in Aeva too if the support files are already present.)
There are some interesting things we've found from doing this that I want to share, and since the Wedge version of Aeva is still basically Aeva from a user standpoint, I think a lot of that stuff stands. Note that this is SMF without a mobile theme and not using WAP because there are other things tied into the site's posting page that aren't in WAP and I didn't have time (or energy) to code them up multiple times. (Namely, the site has a topic tagging system and also a facility to geotag individual posts with a location. This requires various splices into the posting setup.)
1) Posting, generally, sucks from a mobile phone. It actually really sucks on an iPhone 4S, I'm actually surprised more people don't complain about how bad the experience is. Even with the phone in landscape, getting the subject and then the text in is painful. We don't really need formatting much in mobile, even the bold etc. is probably too exotic for the most part but perhaps a collapsed menu of some kind to bring up the tags would be OK. Ideally though I'd consider doing what Tapatalk does: the post interface for a new topic is little more than two text boxes. (Of course I need other stuff but that's another matter entirely and the specific requirements we have for Crossing Overland will actually necessitate a custom app to support background data being gathered and batch uploaded to the site later on.)
2) Does Wedge's version of Aeva support spitting out the non Flash version of embed code where we have it? I'm thinking YouTube in particular. (I can't exactly do a hotpatch on the road to splice the youtu.be code in, but there's at least one video on CO that uses the standard embed code.)
3) Media uploading can typically be much, much simpler than what we currently have. Sure, most of those options will be useful for some people but for the most part, especially when uploading from mobile, it's just not necessary. Perhaps a collapsible menu for the stuff like album covers and the extended information.
4) We really need a mass upload option of some kind (even just AJAX uploading a la Dragooon's plugin for regular posting) that works without Flash so that uploading from mobile is not a hideous chore. It's gotten to the point where we've broken out the one laptop we did actually bring to handle mass uploading, but that's a 2006 MacBook and doesn't exactly handle it *well*. (In unrelated news, the camera connector kit for iPad works really well)... actually, AJAX uploading for media would truly rule just to have it anyway, mobile or not.
5) The selector bit for media items where you can copy the bbcode is not really copyable on a mobile device and for reasons I can't entirely figure out, the item doesn't usually come up with anything useful in there other than the id number.
For example, we uploaded a picture, and the item in question just had:
[smg id=216]
as the text. Which would normally be fine but we wanted:
[smg id=216 type=preview align=center caption="First sight of the Pacific"]
or similar and this is a real pain to add on mobile if you want kind of nice formatting on blog posts. We find ourselves copy/pasting all the time to make this work... I don't know about on desktop yet but on mobile at least it would probably be neat to have the media button not just go straight to an upload button but instead to a media browser from which you can upload if you want, and then have the media browser cover the gallery contents. This would mean we could just upload everything, then filch it from the gallery easily, or upload one at a time without any real fuss either (since the popup could handle the upload AJAXively which would be slick even on an iPad). Fairly sure I've mentioned this before but IPB actually does it this way, and thinking about it, it would also make mass upload much nicer for posting images to the site and then pulling that into the post and that would greatly smooth off our workflow - and I'm fairly sure it would for others too.
Aeva works truly magnificently as a storage ground for media items but I gotta say, the workflow of getting items into posts isn't ideal and it gets worse with the more items you add and until recently I'd pretty much used it as a storage ground, rather than making it part of a cohesive blog structure.
6) Can we actually do something with the textbox sizing and positioning? What we've found with an iPhone (it's largely a non issue with iPad) is that there is some crazy resizing crap going on that means you tap to select the textbox and then it zooms in to the point where the textbox is larger than the screen. Now, I'm sure this is at least partly no longer an issue because it's using SMF 2 code rather than our code and I can't really test it on Wedge right now to be sure, but the way it does zooming on the fixed-width container is really frustrating since it means to type in a post you have to swipe left and right to actually see everything, and even composing the line-blank-line-blank-line posts I've been doing for the blog for the live video updates (yes that's me doing it on Louis' iPhone while he's driving) is frustrating. Again I'm thinking like Tapatalk here, where the box is sized for the screen and it all fits without any scrolling horizontally or any such nonsense. I would kind of presume @Dragooon's mobile theme for SMF works nicely in this regard but again right now I can't really test it. I should note this is the first time I've *really* tried to use an SMF setup for posting and even though I know we have a slightly weird theme, I can't be the only person who finds the experience of posting even 3 lines of text with 2 blank lines tiresome.
I really don't know how much of this stuff can be fixed by way of a mobile skin. Seems to me there is far more at stake than simple CSS resizing (e.g. pulling a different editor component for mobile that doesn't just push all the buttons as normal but has a totally different presentation and code to support it) and some of it will need much greater change if it is to be facilitated, especially the uploading workflow stuff. (Btw, I'd like to see the AJAX uploading of attachments as a core feature just in general. Would be easier to support it in Aeva too if the support files are already present.)