Be Excellent To Each Other

Pfft. The scum counters can do it. Now reply-all buttons, they're tricky.

Well, they don't write an app to parse the forum, they write a load of php code that I have to upload onto the server to do that.
Their app parses the results of that code. It shouldn't be that hard, but it appears it is.

The real question is why phpbb doesn't have a native, supported webservice for apps like these to hook into.

Obvious feex

Style=16 is lovely on WP7. Much better than on iPhone.

I really don't see why this couldn't be solved with a nice / simple theme.
They'd be no push notifications for PMs, which would be a shame, but that could be Gaywood's My First App.

It couldn't, but it's such an arse to make by the look of things.

Not really, I made one, then the iPhone stopped liking it, or something.
I'll make another one one day. I'm mad busy for the rest of this year, though (hence the lack of Space Cows).

Ooh - what's the style number for the original mobile theme? I've not tried it on the HD7.

Oh, first post. INR1P.

It can except we don't have one, of course, and it may not exist.

Also, I think offline caching is a nice add-on and I've never seen a theme that offers HTML5 Storage support for that.

It always had the same problems, but we got more and more whiny as time went on.
Well, yes, it's a web service. The glitches come (I suspect) from the fact that all these pieces of software support multiple forum backends (phpbb2, 3, vbulletin, etc), most of which are changing rapidly and all of which have a habit of encouraging their sysadmins to hack plugins directly into their codebase rather than use neatly segmented APIs.

Forum runner seems pretty good! Have jumped ship for now.

Is there any way to make it preview the last post in the thread like tapatalk does?

Oh, and PMs don't work. Rolls eye.

I do like this a lot on iPad. However, if you go to the forum normally on an iPad, you get a popup saying "This forum supports browsing using Forum Runner! Find out more?" which is a bit shit.

Liking it less. While 'jump to unread' works, it doesn't seem to tell you which threads have unread messages. Couple that with the preview stupidly showing the first message in the thread only, and I have no idea whether there's anything new to read.

On the iPhone version, threads with unread posts have bolder text and a little blue circle icon. It'd still be nice to hide threads with no unread posts, of course.

Ah, I see the little blue icon.

I daresay it's lovely but how do I stop the message trying to flog it to me every time I log in from my phone? (I find the normal desktop site fine.)

I got Forum Runner and don't really like it. It is much less efficient with the screen than just using Safari, it doesn't seem to display the little amusing secondary thread titles either. It also jumps to the most recent post, which is annoying.

I think I will stick with Safari, which is already like a dream compared to two years trying to browse with the ones on the N95.

Very much

I'd stick with Safari, but I'm sick to death of the wildly inconsistent font size rendering a large number of the pages unreadable. This'll do me fine for now.

@Nik - Grim... will have to fix the advert thing. Is it every time? I saw it once, but only once, for iPad.

@Meaty - you want it to jump somewhere other than the next post to read? Why, man, why?!

And nothing supports subtitles, including normal phpbb themes, because Grim... wrote them for us.

He didn't say next unread, he said latest. Can't say it does that for me though.

What version of phpBB are we running? If it's fairly old, then PM's not working could be down to a function being missing from the codebase, I had the same issue with the GT4OC forum until I figured out what was missing and copied it in from a newer version of phpBB.

(incidentally, phpBB's insistence on making you insert modifications directly into its codebase is the bane of my existence - updating the forum on that site to 3.0.8 was a pain in the bum with all the mods that were installed)

Man, when did the world get so lazy?

I'm not sure, and can't be arsed looking it up.

3.0.Grim..., unfortunately. I had to update bits of it to get Tapatalk to work, fucked if I'm going through that again.

Oh fuck me, I could update Bill and stick these on there.
Next year.

I've already decided that's a bad idea.

So make a theme. Dance for me, JavaScript monkey.

Actually just a couple of times, so nowhere near as annoying as I thought it was going to be and definitely not worth Grim... going to any trouble.

Tough crowd.

I was expecting it to be you shaking your booty.

So I tried Tapatalk and Forum Runner.

Tapatalk is nice with the way it logs you into the forum and that, but not having the ability to jump to the first unread post means I have dropped it like it was hot.

Forum Runner is all kinds of aces though, and I've paid for it without hesitation after trying the Lite version first. I don't think it's as flexible as Safari, but it saves on data downloading, and is a lot faster to browse with.

Unless it works differently to how I imagine it to, it downloads all of the HTML you'd normally download and then parses the post data out of it.

Maybe it caches aggressively?

I'm still using Forum Runner, but the way it crashes and burns when it switches between data connection types can be quite frustrating. It's always a toss-up between it ignoring your cookies (logging you out? I'm not sure) and a hard crash back to the home screen. It's a really badly made app, but much less of an arse than Safari.

Hmm, have not experienced that yet, but it doesn't sound promising.

No, it's backend, so it only gets what it needs. It's also astonishingly badly written, and chump here has to fix it every time they bring out a new release.
There was a parse error in it last time, can you believe that? Missing closing bracket on an if statement.
When I emailed and said "OMGWTF" they said that I "shouldn't adopt so fast".

No, all these apps add a web service to phpbb, some better than others, as Grim... has said.

Does anybody else using Forum Runner find that some posts don't show properly? Wullie's posts seem to be particular culprits.

Yep. You can see what's there if you quote them though.

Register on the dev's own forums and bother him directly (or wait for me to do it). He seems to be quite responsive.

Yeah, I do. It's strange how it seems to affect certain users more, though.

Will do.

Yes. It seems to happen more when there's a pic or a link inside a quote. The most update was supposed to do something with smilies but I still can't see them.

I also saw Gaywood's thread reporting the weird login issues. So hopefully that'll be fixed soon.

Do you find that happens more when your connection type changes?

Done. Apparently it's fixed in the latest version of the Forum Manager, so I guess Grim... will have to update it when he can be arsed.