mobile interface

I know I already whined about it once, but that was early in the "new-site" faze. Is there a chance of getting a phone phriendly version of the board so we NEVER have an excuse to not be on here?

Maybe, someday. It's not on the short-term to-do list, but it may happen eventually. The big problem with a "phone friendly" version is that the phones themselves vary so much--different capabilities, different browsers, different screens, etc--AND it's always changing, AND you can't really test without the device.

Also, our current mobile traffic is well under 1%.

If the iPhone/iPod touch's WebKit-based browser becomes the market leader (and I suspect it will), a mobile version will be more likely, albeit less needed (the site already works fairly well with them).

And that's the thing, really: right now, most of the mobile web devices are a mess--they can't decide on what to support and they've got crappy interfaces--but that's changing pretty rapidly. I think in a year or two a separate "mobile" version will seem quaint. Your mobile version will be your full version, with some optimizations for a smaller screen.

ooops. see, I posted twice because my phone locked up and I thought it didn't go through.

could, and I don't mean to be arguementative, but maybe the 1% mobile traffic is because you don't have a lighter version.

Here's a local site I go to that has a mobile theme that works really well. Just for conversation sake... www.starcityracing.com

Just support Blackberry.

What about something simple like WAP? I thought that worked with any mobile browser device.

I have downloaded Opera Mini to my Blackberry and the site is not imposible to read from there. Not perfect but not impossible

I'm pretty sure WAP is a dead technology.

From what I understand Blackberry just switched to WebKit, and given the way the iPhone/iPod touch pair are picking up market share I think within a year or so that will become pretty much THE mobile browser.

Tim Baxter wrote: Maybe, someday. It's not on the short-term to-do list, but it may happen eventually. The big problem with a "phone friendly" version is that the phones themselves vary so much--different capabilities, different browsers, different screens, etc--AND it's always changing, AND you can't really test without the device. Also, our current mobile traffic is well under 1%. If the iPhone/iPod touch's WebKit-based browser becomes the market leader (and I suspect it will), a mobile version will be more likely, albeit less needed (the site already works fairly well with them). And that's the thing, really: right now, most of the mobile web devices are a mess--they can't decide on what to support and they've got crappy interfaces--but that's changing pretty rapidly. I think in a year or two a separate "mobile" version will seem quaint. Your mobile version will be your full version, with some optimizations for a smaller screen.

i will mention that sometimes the board doesn't limit the ends of the lines on the right of the screen, and when it does this, you have to zoom in to be able to read thread titles on the touch. i don't think it's mobile-specific though, as it'll do it on the pc as well, it's just only annoying on the touch.

I use skyfire, it kicks ass. flash support too (no pandora though :( )

I'm no web-designer, but what prevents this from being done with just good ole' CSS?

You can do quite a bit with CSS, and that's the easy part. Where it gets tricky is in dealing with different capabilities: this one's just text, that one doesn't allow flash, this one over here resizes images differently than everybody else. CSS can't do anything about that. Also, it's nice if you strip out unneeded things to help folks on slow phone connections. CSS can only hide things, not remove them.

And some phones only support a limited subset of CSS

I browse here on my BlackBerry all the time in column mode. Not terribly pretty and I have to scroll down quite a ways to get past the stuff that's in the left hand column first, but it works.

Tim Baxter wrote: And some phones only support a limited subset of CSS

I can't stand for software that doesn't stick to standards! One of the biggest reasons I'm an Open Source supporter, no bs proprietary crap.