Has the blue been embiggened? January 13, 2010 12:00 PM Subscribe
The mobile version of the front page is slightly too wide for Safari on my iPhone.
Post text scrolls off the screen to the right a bit.
It looked fine last week. Perhaps the server blip banner is to blame?
Post text scrolls off the screen to the right a bit.
It looked fine last week. Perhaps the server blip banner is to blame?
screenshot? It's working fine on my iPhone.
posted by mathowie (staff) at 12:01 PM on January 13, 2010
posted by mathowie (staff) at 12:01 PM on January 13, 2010
Nah, it's not the banner. It's one of the posts on the front page. If you click "Older posts" at the bottom and go to page two, that's just fine. I guess we could track down that post and edit it.
posted by pb (staff) at 12:02 PM on January 13, 2010
posted by pb (staff) at 12:02 PM on January 13, 2010
Oh weird, I guess it is for me too now. I swear earlier this morning it was fine.
posted by mathowie (staff) at 12:02 PM on January 13, 2010
posted by mathowie (staff) at 12:02 PM on January 13, 2010
Specifically, this post which contains a long non-breaking URL.
posted by pb (staff) at 12:04 PM on January 13, 2010
posted by pb (staff) at 12:04 PM on January 13, 2010
ok, edited. The front page should look better on the iPhone now.
posted by pb (staff) at 12:05 PM on January 13, 2010
posted by pb (staff) at 12:05 PM on January 13, 2010
Get a wider iPhone.
posted by grobstein at 12:19 PM on January 13, 2010 [2 favorites]
posted by grobstein at 12:19 PM on January 13, 2010 [2 favorites]
It happened last night, but if pb says it's fixed I believe him. Checks iPhone Yep, fixed.
posted by fixedgear at 12:23 PM on January 13, 2010
posted by fixedgear at 12:23 PM on January 13, 2010
BTW, awesome job on the new layout for iPhone viewing, pb.
posted by Aquaman at 12:51 PM on January 13, 2010
posted by Aquaman at 12:51 PM on January 13, 2010
In similar news, every time spikeleemajortomdickandharryconnickjrmints shows up in my contact activity, his name scrolls off the edge and breaks my front page. Is there any way to put in a line break if a username exceeds the width of the contact activity box?
posted by katemonster at 1:03 PM on January 13, 2010
posted by katemonster at 1:03 PM on January 13, 2010
Still no love for the Blackberry.
By design, I'm sure. Now get back to work, you. And don't slouch on company time, either.
posted by bonehead at 1:11 PM on January 13, 2010
By design, I'm sure. Now get back to work, you. And don't slouch on company time, either.
posted by bonehead at 1:11 PM on January 13, 2010
katemonster, sure no problem. We're trimming up long usernames now.
posted by pb (staff) at 1:32 PM on January 13, 2010
posted by pb (staff) at 1:32 PM on January 13, 2010
Yay! Thanks, pb, you're the best!
posted by katemonster at 1:34 PM on January 13, 2010
posted by katemonster at 1:34 PM on January 13, 2010
Still no love for the Blackberry.
Start a new request thread.
posted by Blazecock Pileon at 2:50 PM on January 13, 2010
Start a new request thread.
posted by Blazecock Pileon at 2:50 PM on January 13, 2010
Still no love for the Blackberry.
We unfortunately don't have one to test on. How bad does the mobile site look on it?
posted by mathowie (staff) at 2:50 PM on January 13, 2010
We unfortunately don't have one to test on. How bad does the mobile site look on it?
posted by mathowie (staff) at 2:50 PM on January 13, 2010
When you say mobile site do you mean
We're not going to fix any issues over there though, so your best bet for now is to view the standard site on your Blackberry. I assume we'll eventually create a custom stylesheet for the Blackberry like we've done for the iPhone and Android. But it helps to hold one of these devices in our hands. The Blackberry emulator is awful, barely runs enough for some quick tests, and even then piles up Java errors. As mentioned in the other threads about this, we just don't see as much traffic from the Blackberry OS as we do from other mobile devices. Part of that is because the iPhone and Android phones are made specifically to browse the web with larger screens and more full-featured browsers that don't require a special proxy server to crunch pages.
Writing a custom stylesheet for the Blackberry is possible, but it's going to require a certain amount of work to make sure everything can fit in the smaller viewport. And we have to weigh the number of people who want to visit on a Blackberry vs. the amount of development time involved. I know it's a bummer we don't have a Blackberry-specific version when that's your platform of choice, but it is something we're considering.
posted by pb (staff) at 3:09 PM on January 13, 2010
mobile.metafilter.com? We haven't touched the code for that in years, and we stopped all development on it. We should probably shut down that URL, but if people get some use of it that's fine.We're not going to fix any issues over there though, so your best bet for now is to view the standard site on your Blackberry. I assume we'll eventually create a custom stylesheet for the Blackberry like we've done for the iPhone and Android. But it helps to hold one of these devices in our hands. The Blackberry emulator is awful, barely runs enough for some quick tests, and even then piles up Java errors. As mentioned in the other threads about this, we just don't see as much traffic from the Blackberry OS as we do from other mobile devices. Part of that is because the iPhone and Android phones are made specifically to browse the web with larger screens and more full-featured browsers that don't require a special proxy server to crunch pages.
Writing a custom stylesheet for the Blackberry is possible, but it's going to require a certain amount of work to make sure everything can fit in the smaller viewport. And we have to weigh the number of people who want to visit on a Blackberry vs. the amount of development time involved. I know it's a bummer we don't have a Blackberry-specific version when that's your platform of choice, but it is something we're considering.
posted by pb (staff) at 3:09 PM on January 13, 2010
Pretty please make a stylesheet for the Palm WebOS phones. It shouldn't be too different from the iPhone and Android ones. You can get a real emulator that Just Works (it emulates the whole phone in VirtualBox) with the WebOS SDK.
posted by zsazsa at 5:31 PM on January 13, 2010
posted by zsazsa at 5:31 PM on January 13, 2010
To be serious, the default page on the BB 8900 doesn't look too bad.
Here is a page of screenshots taken directly from the device. The real problem is that the screen isn't huge and nothing on the web really looks great on it. Note that I usually use the white background style and since the BB web browser has terrible JS support, I can't edit my profile on the device.
The one tweak I would ask for is that the headers on the main page, or what ever they're called, be adjusted so that we don't have the huge amount of space on the right side. Other than that, I don't really see the need for a lot of BB-specific changes to the stylesheets.
posted by bonehead at 8:49 AM on January 14, 2010
Here is a page of screenshots taken directly from the device. The real problem is that the screen isn't huge and nothing on the web really looks great on it. Note that I usually use the white background style and since the BB web browser has terrible JS support, I can't edit my profile on the device.
The one tweak I would ask for is that the headers on the main page, or what ever they're called, be adjusted so that we don't have the huge amount of space on the right side. Other than that, I don't really see the need for a lot of BB-specific changes to the stylesheets.
posted by bonehead at 8:49 AM on January 14, 2010
You know, we could try tuning on the existing iPhone or Android stylesheet for Blackberry OS and just see if that works better. It's hard to tweak without a device in my hand, but maybe that change alone would be enough of an improvement to make things tolerable.
posted by pb (staff) at 9:04 AM on January 14, 2010
posted by pb (staff) at 9:04 AM on January 14, 2010
If you do, I can act as your test monkey. It's not that hard to pull screenshots off the device and onto the web.
posted by bonehead at 9:08 AM on January 14, 2010
posted by bonehead at 9:08 AM on January 14, 2010
BTW, if anyone else wants to help, I'm using CaptureIt to do the screen shots. Point your mobile browser to http://m.thetechmogul.com/ and install the application. It adds a "Capture" item to your browser menu, which saves screenshots in your pictures directory.
posted by bonehead at 9:11 AM on January 14, 2010
posted by bonehead at 9:11 AM on January 14, 2010
ok, I tried the Android stylesheet out on the 8530 emulator and it was 90% of the way there. Comment pages looked awful so I went ahead and created a custom Blackberry stylesheet with all the trimmings and turned it on. I didn't spend too much time on it so I'm sure there's more tweaking to do, but let me know how the new style is working. I'm also guessing there will be differences between various models, but hopefully these tweaks put us in the ballpark.
posted by pb (staff) at 10:22 AM on January 14, 2010
posted by pb (staff) at 10:22 AM on January 14, 2010
oh, didn't know about the B. I'll go ahead and remove that link altogether.
posted by pb (staff) at 10:36 AM on January 14, 2010
posted by pb (staff) at 10:36 AM on January 14, 2010
I agree, this looks much, much better. All of the nice BB shortcuts seem to work in the comment box too, including spell check.
Posted, not coincidentally, from my Blackberry.
posted by bonehead at 10:40 AM on January 14, 2010
Posted, not coincidentally, from my Blackberry.
posted by bonehead at 10:40 AM on January 14, 2010
Yeah, BBs have a lot of page navigation shortcuts. The most common are listed here.
The javascript buttons don't work on the BBs either: [add favourites] [+] or [!]. You may want to strip those out too.
posted by bonehead at 10:43 AM on January 14, 2010
The javascript buttons don't work on the BBs either: [add favourites] [+] or [!]. You may want to strip those out too.
posted by bonehead at 10:43 AM on January 14, 2010
I think some Blackberry models do support JavaScript, so I don't want to turn that off for everyone. I think the warning page is a good notification for people who are expecting something to happen when they click those buttons.
posted by pb (staff) at 10:47 AM on January 14, 2010
posted by pb (staff) at 10:47 AM on January 14, 2010
You're both right, I had JS turned off. That must be how my device came by default---I don't remember doing that. Sorry! With it on, the buttons seem to work fine.
posted by bonehead at 11:05 AM on January 14, 2010
posted by bonehead at 11:05 AM on January 14, 2010
If you dislike the way that the BB browser zooms or lays out metafilter (or any other page for that matter) please, please, please email them and complain (and get your friends too). Some poor soul who is working on this sort of stuff *cough* needs feedback from users.
posted by captaincrouton at 7:56 PM on January 14, 2010
posted by captaincrouton at 7:56 PM on January 14, 2010
why get rid of the skip to menu? Not every BB user has a keyboard. I would like a quick way to get to the bottom of a thread on my Storm.
posted by nimsey lou at 7:19 AM on January 23, 2010
posted by nimsey lou at 7:19 AM on January 23, 2010
oh, didn't realize that. I thought the keyboard was a defining feature of the BB. I added the skip to menu back and tested again with the 8530 emulator and it was working fine. I think it also gives a nice heads up that there is a menu at the bottom of the page for people viewing the site on their BB for the first time.
posted by pb (staff) at 9:17 AM on January 25, 2010
posted by pb (staff) at 9:17 AM on January 25, 2010
Yippie! Thanks pb. The skip to menu works great.
posted by nimsey lou at 4:29 PM on January 27, 2010
posted by nimsey lou at 4:29 PM on January 27, 2010
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posted by eyeballkid at 12:01 PM on January 13, 2010