Be Excellent To Each Other

I'm sure this question has been asked before but what's the best way to view the forum on an iphone/ipod touch? It's a bit fiddly with Safari.

a quick google found this app
http://www.messageforums.net/iphoneforumreader.php

http://www.beex.co.uk/m

There are some app things plugged into the forum - Gaywood will be along shortly.

oh yes, thanks that is good

My favourite is this skin:

viewforum.php?f=3&style=16

Although it still jumps back to the top of the page every fucking time.

Whenever I try to load that link on my mobile - a Sony Ericsson k800i - the progress bar gets to about 97% on a blank screen and then absolutely refuses to go any further.

Urg, that's nasty on a PC screen.

Well duh.

Yeah, we found why, and it's integral to the way that skin works.

It was written by a fucking muppet, one assumes.

Fix it, you fucking layabouts.

More seriously, what's bizarre is that it loads the page on exactly the right post. Then a couple of seconds later leaps back up to the top.

Still fitting in quite well!

Did you miss the word "integral"?

No. I want you to rewrite it from the ground up. By the end of the week, ta.

Fix it, you fucking integral layabouts?

You'd think searching for "bush finger" would bring back some interesting photos, wouldn't you? But no, none at all

You can hit Back at that point, most of the time. It's because the theme brings in a standard library iui.js file which is messing with the URL at pageload time. We did try to fix it but without success.

Neither of the app options we've looked at were as good as the mobile theme.

Style 16 is better than the mobile theme, even with that page jump - the CSS resizing on the mobile theme is horrific.

Uhh, that's what I meant. The other mobile theme has been banished from my memory and bookmarks.

I still don't get what's wrong with it.
Especially as we wrote it so it worked perfectly on your phone.

Also - what's "CSS resizing"?

It loads the page, completely. Then it spends about ten seconds resizing all the elements on the screen. Then it decides that the link you clicked on when it first loads has moved somewhere else, so it loads something entirely different.

Your phone sucks.
Does it really do that? You'll have to show me at the weekend.

[edit]Is it only on a certain page? I could test it on the iPad.

It's the main forum view. It's only really an issue because there's so many links so close together.

If the OP had been a new poster I would have put money on it being spam. Heheh.

It is spam 99% of what comes out of my mouth (or in this case I type) is crap

Has someone been fiddling with the original mobile site, or have my eyes aged another notch lately? The font size in threads seems a fair bit smaller, and there aren't any really long links breaking it.

Nobody else seeing the same, then?

Yeah, I get that. Don't use the mobile site, so wouldn't normally see it.

It looks like that in "column view" on the blackberry touch, but I have to manually make it look like that on every page.

I've not touched it.

Malibu... have you updated the software on your phone? Maybe they changed something in the rendering?

Looks like the write-a-post screen is buggered on the iPhone site under iOS4.2. Grrr. However, the developer of TouchBB is promising jump-to-unread in the next version, which might make it the best choice.

Only ever-so-slightly buggered. For me, the 'Subject' text is misaligned and the 'submit' bar has switched to a button. That's it, still works fine.

Or style=5

Tapatalk is still my favorite but I'm sure the plugin (or whatever) needs updating now because it's unable to quote and a bunch of stuff like attaching pictures has never worked. Pretty please?

You know, I actually sat down and started to look into a complete overhaul of the mobile site the other day, until I looked at the gigantic mess the underlying HTML is.

The font sizes are still totally fucked on my iPhone, but I can't seem to reliably track down the problem in the CSS. I went as far as making a complete copy of some forum pages and had a good fiddle around, and still couldn't fix it.

Humbug.

I think tapatalk and touchbb have the right idea, by effectively grafting a web service into phpbb then starting with a clean rendering system running locally on the handset.

I'm not sure I agree. The whole point of CSS is that it lets you take the content and rearrange it pretty much as you wish. It shouldn't be difficult to transpose the forum to a 6"x3" screen without fucking things up.

You are assuming PHPBB has clean, easy to work with HTML. Sadly it's rather more like your Visual Basic code.

Only if the underlying code is any good. This site is just hundreds of tables, nested within one-another, and tables are not a fun thing to be touching with CSS.

I said it first, and with more zing.

The big advantage of tapatalk, as I see it, is that you're typing into a form in an application - the entire device is optimised to do that, and it works as well as possible.

Typing into a text box on an HTML page is always going to be less than ideal. On the iPhone at least, it's slow, spellcheck doesn't work, and you can't scroll the text box to see what you wrote.

Plus there's a massive data overhead sending the entire rendered page over HTML every time compared to just the text.

Get fucked, beardy

You did indeed. What puzzles me is why the likes of Tapatalk and TouchBB are so....shite, given that they have direct access to the data.

TouchBB is shite. Tapatalk isn't. But please can we update the plugin!

Not it if involves fucking about updating half of the forum again.
I will take a look at some point.

Also, your phones are shit at the Internet.

I have non of these problems of which you all speak.

I agree with everything you've said, so this is more of a "didyouknow?" kinda thing - if you hold down two fingers on the screen inside the text box you should be able to scroll it.

Ah, I didn't know! Thanks for that.

Or, if you hold inside the box until the little magnifying ball pops up, then move slightly down, it scrolls down through the text.