The Unofficial Airfix Modellers' Forum

As a new dad and new smart phone user, thanks to being given my wife's iPhone 4 cast off, I've found myself having to navigate the forum single handedly whilst holding baby in the other. The full website requires a lot of pinch zooming to click buttons like 'last post', 'next page' etc. even with two hands it's not the best experience in the world.

There seems to be two extremes of what can be achieved with mobile versions of forums. A fully mobile specific interfaces such as that on BM or a low bandwidth version, same layout but text only on others.

I think that we should go for something in the middle which:

1) looks nice and can be styled to match the current theme, with our branding
2) provides a reduced text interface with 'touch screen' UI (ie big buttons)
3) Opt out button to view the full website

There are a few styles and plugins available for phpBB3 available and I think we should start testing some out. Part of the reason of hosting our own forum is so that we could have full control of it and can provide additional features that easier and better to use.

Popular and simple style:
http://www.artodia.com/phpbb-styles/mobile/;
http://www.colorizeit.com/browse/22/php ... tyles.html;

Interesting project but v2 not at release stage yet.
http://phpbb-mobile.com/;

While all that goes on James, try Opera. I find that it's much more small screen friendly for our website than Safari, on my iPod Touch.

cheers

Andrew

I utilize a Droid Bionic courtesy of my work. Check in and post often with it. Should be compatible for both iphone and Droid users.

And we are talking about what??? all that was way over my head guys sorry.

When you visit a website you are often presented with a different version of the website that is more suitable for the small screen format of the device. Sometimes this is done by directing you to an alternative version of the website or more often nowadays by applying a different set of style rules which can change the layout.

I agree.

I have no idea about this sort of thing, so I have no idea what I am agreeing to........

As an example, here's the mobile version of the BBC News website

http://m.bbc.co.uk/news;

and here's the "desktop" site - the normal format.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/;

If you have a small screen device, you are normally automatically directed to the mobile site, but you have the option of changing to the desktop site.
From a computer with a larger screen, you are directed to the desktop site.

At the moment we have no mobile site!

And now for the weather...

I'm trialling Tapatalk on the development forum. Tapatalk is available for both iOS and Android, and although it isn't free it isn't expensive either at £1.99. If you want to take a look, install Tapatalk on your device (NOT Tapatalk 2) then in the search facility enter the URL to the development site;

http://www.sensible-design.co.uk/forum;

This isn't a bad solution, and as I'm not sure quite when I will have time to develop a mobile version of UAMF it could be a useful short to mid-term solution for those members who regularly access the forum on their mobile device.

What we're talking about is giving folks the opportunity to particpate on our site on a mobile device, say while they are driving

I think that's a great idea, so many tabletish (Android/IOS) devices around now, certainly worth considering.

jssel wrote:I utilize a Droid Bionic courtesy of my work.

"Gentlemen, we can rebuild him we have the technology...."

Ok, go here on your mobile device and let us know what you think.

jssel wrote:I utilize a Droid Bionic courtesy of my work. Check in and post often with it. Should be compatible for both iphone and Droid users.

I also have the Droid Bionic. While not as easy as a desktop or laptop, I figured out long ago how to post pics into a thread. It can be a pain sometimes. It might be nice to have an easier way to upliad photos from a smartphone,. It may not be possible, but one can hope and wish....

coptermech wrote:

jssel wrote:I utilize a Droid Bionic courtesy of my work. Check in and post often with it. Should be compatible for both iphone and Droid users.

I also have the Droid Bionic. While not as easy as a desktop or laptop, I figured out long ago how to post pics into a thread. It can be a pain sometimes. It might be nice to have an easier way to upliad photos from a smartphone,. It may not be possible, but one can hope and wish....

If you use Photobucket, there's an Android app to do that, I believe.

Ok, UAMF is mobile-ised. At the moment it's just in a standard mobile theme but it should be easier to use on tiny screens.

flakmonkey wrote:Ok, UAMF is mobile-ised. At the moment it's just in a standard mobile theme but it should be easier to use on tiny screens.

Nice, but how do you get back to the full site if you are on the mobile one?
I'm used to browsing the full site on my iPod touch.

Cheers

Andrew