has anyone used boards on a mobile

thebaz

Reading the herald tonight, boards is proclaimed as Ireland leading blogger spot, but apparently performs badly on mobiles ... has anyone used boards on a mobile ?
it scored one out of 5 for performance on a mobile, so i guess its 1-1 to boards ... top blogger ... but poor mobile performance

Silverfish

Yes.

It cost me 371.60.


I don't anymore.

Owen

It depends on your mobile. When I stay in herself's house, her neighbour has unprotected WiFi, so I use boards on my n93's WiFi in landscape mode, and it's fine. Sure, I have to scroll a little, but it's as good as any web browser on a PC.

Ruu_Old

Used to a few years but internet on the phone is terribly expensive especially when you have prepaid!

thebaz

i have a tiny Sony mobile, the thought of reading or posting to boards is giving me a headache , forgot about all those with fancy big screeens and half decent keybads , the sony is even irratating for texting , with its tiny keys ... but i still like it

Ruu_Old

You can use the Mobile skin if you aren't already.

robinph

I've used it plenty of times on small screens via wifi, but not on a mobile phone though. Have used gmail on a mobile though which wasn't too bad.

parsi

I used it on my Blackberry - not a great experience.

Ghost Train

done it once or twice to check stuff
but too expensive
and pages are big for a phone

ebay mobile is good, page file size is small, good design for mobiles

Random

Problem with this is that you need to change themes each time you go from mobile to desktop. You should be able to naviagate to boards.ie/mobile and have it show up in mobile mode or something!

source

used it on an xda mini s, using unprotected wifi, twas fine, no problems.

Quackles

Like others, not on mobile, but terrible site to visit on pocket pc. Really tough to get around.

Quackles

Like others, not on mobile, but terrible site to visit on pocket pc. Really tough to get around.

brianthebard

When I'm in maynooth I have access to broadband so don't need to browse on mobile. When I'm in Sligo I might think about it, but tbh I would only use it (for anything, not just boards) if I was really bored or needed to find something or pictures. What sites perform well on mobiles?

Karoma

Nudged over to Feedback, with a redirect from AH.

xebec

brianthebard wrote:

What sites perform well on mobiles?

The mobile version of gmail is actually very handy, it's pretty much the only site I look at on my mobile and then only if I'm really stuck.

Random

I find www.breakingnews.ie/text is alright aswell if you're sat in the doctor, on a bus, sleepless nights ... whatever ...

Also...
www.mail2web.com/pda or www.mail2web.com/wap - check your POP3 email on the go

oscarBravo

I've used the Mobile theme on my iPaq, using a bluetooth connection to a mobile with a Vodafone connect SIM. It's harder to navigate, but just about usable. I've been meaning to suggest some changes to the theme to make it more usable, but haven't had time.

Sam Vimes

ciaranfo wrote:

Problem with this is that you need to change themes each time you go from mobile to desktop. You should be able to naviagate to boards.ie/mobile and have it show up in mobile mode or something!

what you can do is log into http://boards.ie on your mobile and http://www.boards.ie on the computer. logging into one doesn't log you into the other

i do it quite often now. 6 euro for 100 megabytes on the 3 network has me permanently on the net on my phone

Random

Vimes - theme is set via profile so when logged in your idea won't make any difference. I never browse boards when logged out, as it prevents me from my nonsense posting

Thanks though.

oscarBravo

I'm pretty sure theme is set by cookie, and is URL-dependent. Open to correction, though.

DeVore

This is something we have given a considerable amount of thought and work to and now that the upgrade is coming to an end (still some things to fix, as you might expect) we will start back on the race to get some new things done with the site before inevitably the existing hardware can't manage the increased growth and we have to go into another upgrade period!
I think you will hear about this inside the next quarter.


DeV.

Random

You sound like Vodafone annoucing revenues or something dev

Thanks for the update though, I do hope you get a proper www.boards.ie/mobile up and running - there's hundreds of us here eager to test it I'm sure.

Cheers

stevenmu

A suggestion (that I haven't fully thought through yet) would be, instead of trying to make a fully mobile optimised skin/site, to make raw post/thread data available. Clients could then be written for the various types of mobile device to use the data more flexibly.

One reason for this is that I imagine it would be failry difficult to design a navigation system for a site this large and complex, I think it would be much easier for a phone based client to download (and cache) the forums list which could then be navigated or searched any number of ways. I know this could be duplicated on a web based interface easily enough but I think it would run a lot more usably, smoother and involve less hits to the server in a client app on the phone.

Another reason is that it would allow people both to browse the live site, and also to say select a number of their favourite forums of which the last say 10 active threads could be downloaded to the phone for later reading. Very handy for people who have wifi access somewhere, they can 'sync' their phone in a hotspot, then read it later while they're on the bus or whereever. It may also be possible for people to write out any replies while offline and then their posts are made next time they 'sync'.

A lot of this would be easily made possible just by extending the existing RSS feeds to include the full text of posts/threads, plus an RSS feed for the forum list. I'm not sure what the best way of making offline posts would be, possibly an authenticated web service or maybe just making the relevant HTTP calls through the existing page for that. I'm sure something similar would be possible too for recieving and sending PMs. I suspect this would be easier on the servers too, to just be serving up post text data instead of formatted html, style sheets etc (altough I've no idea what kind of overhead RSS has).

The downside of course is that client apps for phones have to be written, I'd gladly write a windows smartphone app, and if I can resurrect my XDA a pocket pc one too.

oscarBravo wrote:

I'm pretty sure theme is set by cookie

Yes, it definitely is, on my smartphone it defaults to the mobile skin and my PC defaults to the white skin, every time I login on each of them.

Random

@oscarBravo/stevenmu - I'm gonna have to look at it again. Last few times I tried it defaulted to the one theme when I logged in.

DeVore

Steven, I could have sworn Cloud have one of those funny XML/Foaf/new-fangled-web-stuff feeds for the site. I will look into this and see if we can't simply offer a feed of it. I thought vB did it natively in fact. Will look into when I'm back (from Malta) this week.

DeV.

Steveire

Well, for a start there's

http://www.boards.ie/vbulletin/external.php

which you can add to a rss reader.

Then there's
http://www.boards.ie/vbulletin/external.php?forumids=82,7

where 82,7,... are comma separated forumids that you want the feeds from.

Not ideal though.

DemoniK

The easiest way to do this is setup bookmarks with the styleid variable set to what you want. That way when you open that bookmark you get the profile you want.

On the PC I have a bookmark set to create the style I want there (29=evil)
http://www.boards.ie/vbulletin/index.php?styleid=29

then, on the phone/PDA I use the mobile style (40)
http://www.boards.ie/vbulletin/index.php?styleid=40

Works a treat

Random

I didn't know you could do that RikD, I'll need to try that out. My problem is that my links don't come through with styles attached in new reply notificatiosn to my blackberry though. That's handy though if I just connect to browse!

daveirl

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