Mobile Users are going to love this!

MidnightCoder · Fri Sep 03, 2010 2:22 am

Hi All,

It's been awhile since I last posted, but I have a nice new feature to explain to you. We've added a full mobile style to the site, which should collapse very nicely to 320px, or less even. You will notice a new dropdown box labeled "Style:" in the extreme upper left of this window. By selecting the other style in it you can quickly and easily go into or out of mobile mode. The same dropdown appears on the mobile style, just below the main navigation links, so don't be afraid to try it out.

If for some reason your mobile browser has issues with the dropdown or the auto-refresh that it uses you can still access the mobile style in your profile under "Board Preferences". Simply change your Board Style setting to the one you want. This can also be accessed from either style, so you'll never get trapped in one or the other.

Currently there is about a 45% reduction of bandwidth usage on the mobile style, compared to the regular one, and based on testing the forum index. There is also a script on the mobile style which will help to scale down images for you, so that they consume much less bandwidth too. This feature may need additional tweaking on my part, we'll have to wait and see (your feedback would be valuable for this).

Regular PC and laptop users may also find the new style useful for some things. For example, it's *almost* like a "print style" in that it uses very few images, and lots of plain text. For users with small screens, poor eyesight (remember ctrl+plus sign to zoom in) this style provides a great degree of scalability without having to side scroll.

If you have any questions about it, that's what I'm here for. I'd also like to hear any feedback, improvements you would like to see, or anything else regarding this feature. Please remember though, it is still in development, so if something doesn't work quite right please *do* report it, but also please have some patience. I'll work any bugs out of it as I become aware of them.

Hope you enjoy experimenting with it.

froglipz · Fri Sep 03, 2010 11:04 am

Sweet! I will be trying that out then!

Chris OConnor · Fri Sep 03, 2010 11:49 am

This is going to be great. Thanks David!

MidnightCoder · Fri Sep 03, 2010 10:47 pm

Just a quick addendum to my post above:

I'm sure everyone is familiar with the separate homepage and index page on the forum here. I've added the equivalent to the mobile site, but for a different purpose. While the portal page of the regular style is all about showing more and varying content, the mobile homepage is now much more streamlined and faster to load. You'll only need to scroll around on the whole index *if you want to* and can instead use the mobile homepage to access individual categories. Each category link on the homepage will list the forums for that category only, making the pages a much more manageable length for mobile devices.

geo · Sat Sep 04, 2010 12:10 am

Wow, that is a cool feature. Works great on my iPhone.

Chris OConnor · Mon Sep 06, 2010 2:07 am

This is great to hear, Geo. Thanks for the feedback!

mr mistry · Thu Sep 09, 2010 7:30 pm

Ohh this is great, works well on my blackberry, but apart from the advantage of being able to use it on mobiles, its much more speech friendly.

Blind and partially sighted people like my self use a speech software to navigate there computers and the internet, the new mobile style is much quicker and easier for the speech software's to manage!

Nice one!

MidnightCoder · Thu Sep 09, 2010 7:34 pm

Nice! Thanks for the feedback. I've actually been thinking this would be useful for people who have difficulty with font sizes and such, as it can be zoomed in much more without getting side scroll in the browser.

Really glad to hear it's helping.

Chris OConnor · Thu Sep 09, 2010 9:56 pm

This is so good to hear, Mr. Mistry. I didn't even think about the obvious advantages this new feature would have to visually impaired people.

I hope this enables you to fully enjoy all that BookTalk.org has to offer. Let us know if you can think of any other features that might help you.

mr mistry · Fri Sep 10, 2010 8:28 am

yes it mite seem obvious and simple, but hardly any websites actually implement it. Yes I am now able to use all of book talk a lot more easier, effectively and enjoyably, also, I can now recommend other blind and partially sighted people to book talk!

The magnification is great, but what I was more impressed with is the ability for a screen reader to handle the page much better in mobile view, magnification is no good to someone who's totally blind, but now that you've added this feature, they can still use it with something called a screen reader, which uses a speech synthesiser to read the screen and output it to your speakers. Although the original style works fine, it is cluttered with images, strange links and all that kind of fancy stuff, the simplicity of the mobile view allows the screen readers to not get confused and have a spaz as they like doing a lot!

No I cant find anything wrong with it or anything you could improve, but I'll let you no if I find something!

I don't want to take the light away from the fact that it is a feature for mobile users lol, so yeah that's great as well!

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