Non-iPhone mobile optimization?

December 15, 2009 11:23 AM

Any chance of getting a mobile-formatted MetaFilter for non-iphone devices?

I've been enjoying the streamlined version of the site on my ipod touch for a couple of months now, and am wondering if it would be possible to create something similar for other mobile devices? Right now using my Nokia E75's internal browser (on the Symbian S60 platform), I get the "whole thing" trying to load, whereas a slim, lightweight version would be much preferable.

posted by modernnomad to Feature Requests at 11:23 AM (36 comments total)

You should buy pb a Nokia E75 with Symbian S60 platform.
posted by carsonb at 11:25 AM on December 15, 2009

You know, that way he'll have an incentive.

pb, I can send you this super-awesome Samsung i700 if you wanna do Opera for WM next?
posted by carsonb at 11:28 AM on December 15, 2009 [1 favorite]

So glad I'm not on Symbian anymore. Screw those guys.
posted by Plutor at 11:37 AM on December 15, 2009

You'll get nothing and like it.

Oh sorry, I thought this was the healthcare thread.
posted by HP LaserJet P10006 at 11:42 AM on December 15, 2009 [2 favorites]

This came up in another thread. I think in there Matt said maybe.

The one complaint I have with reading the site on my iPhone is page load times, and monster threads won't load at all.

A paginated version might be nice. No idea without seeing it.
posted by cjorgensen at 11:43 AM on December 15, 2009

You know, that way he'll have an incentive.

You joke, but it's partially true. It is a bit challenging if we're not holding the device in our hands. I can use an emulator, but those inevitably have their own quirks that might not be in the devices themselves. The Blackberry emulator just plain sucks. I've used it a few times to troubleshoot Opera Mini issues. I played around with the Android emulator, but it wasn't until I was holding a real phone in my hand that I could really start tweaking and seeing the changes in person. And not to be greedy, but having two helped because I could see the changes on two different phones with different OSs.

We're basing which ones to optimize for on our server stats. Over 2% of all traffic comes in on iPhones or iPod Touch, .27% on Android, and only .05% on SymbianOS. If we were strict, we'd write Blackberry (.13%) and Danger Hiptop (.06%) stylesheets first.

It could be that our Android stylesheet will work fine for SymbianOS browsers and I could try turning that on, but there will probably be enough tweaks needed to make a separate stylesheet necessary. We need to decide which device is next, how to develop for it, and if it's worthwhile for the amount of traffic we get.
posted by pb (staff) at 11:44 AM on December 15, 2009

We're basing which ones to optimize for on our server stats. Over 2% of all traffic comes in on iPhones or iPod Touch, .27% on Android, and only .05% on SymbianOS. If we were strict, we'd write Blackberry (.13%) and Danger Hiptop (.06%) stylesheets first.

Thanks PB -- this makes sense, though of course it could be the case that people (like me) try it on Symbian, and then never try it again b/c it's so cumbersome... whereas I tried it with my iPod touch, liked it, and so kept using that when the opportunity arose.

I know nothing about coding, so apologies if I am confounding my terminology here, but wouldn't something written to take advantage of WML be equally accessible by any mobile browser, regardless of whether it was Symbian, BBerry, etc?
posted by modernnomad at 11:54 AM on December 15, 2009

holy shit, the hiptop? Really?
posted by boo_radley at 11:56 AM on December 15, 2009 [1 favorite]

Wait...why do you need an emulator or a device? Why not just a really stripped down, simplified page with few features (maybe even read only) that's the same for all devices (or all non-iphone devices)?
posted by DU at 11:58 AM on December 15, 2009

This may be hard to do from your side, but it would be nice for users (this user anyway) to be able to pick which, if any, of a mobile version to use. I recently picked up the N900, which is a great internet tablet and an okay phone by the way, and its built in browser microB (based on Mozilla/Gecko) renders sites fine, but the phone is just slow enough and screen just small enough, there are times were minimal versions are better.

For Metafilter, the plain theme works pretty well normally but it might be nice to try other versions for fun. I can probably do it with user agent spoofing (looks like it was just ported and basically works), but it's be easier to do it in my preferences.

(Only vaguely related: I've found that forcing particular web page versions on a browser is really annoying. With twitter, twitter.com works but its JS is kind of heavy for some reason. m.twitter.com is way too light-weight. Apparently they have a new mobile.twitter.com (which I think is meant for Andriod and iPhone), but visiting that from my N900 always redirects me to twitter.com so I can't try it and see if it's useful.)

Thanks for letting Metafilter be as usable as it is on portable devices. FWIW, the useragent on the N900 is "Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux armv7l; en-US; rv:1.9.2a1pre) Gecko/20090928 Firefox/3.5 Maemo Browser 1.4.1.21 RX-51 N900". I assume the N770, N800, and N810s will be similar.
posted by skynxnex at 12:00 PM on December 15, 2009 [1 favorite]

I sometimes load up the site from my Lg Incite, either via the onboard browser (mini IE) or via Opera Mobile...each has its own quirks.

I pretty much only read MeTa and Ask from it though, because yea...cumbersome as hell.

This does something, but IDK what. Links never work for me.
posted by TomMelee at 12:01 PM on December 15, 2009

Recreating the site in WML isn't an option. We have a sprawling empire here with only a couple developers, and the site is constantly evolving. We tried an experiment with setting up an iPhone-specific site with separate code for a while but found that the hassle of a separate codebase wasn't worth the effort. It was read-only, and folks continually wanted more and more features through it. So we decided to concentrate our efforts on tweaking our existing code for mobile devices, letting people comment, add favorites, and do many of the normal things you can do through the standard Web version.

...of course it could be the case that people (like me) try it on Symbian, and then never try it again...

True, though historically those numbers hold even before we had specific stylesheets in place for them. Of course, the iPhone is made to consume standard HTML more like a desktop browser so there will naturally be that skew.
posted by pb (staff) at 12:02 PM on December 15, 2009

I should say "links never work for me in either of those browsers."
posted by TomMelee at 12:02 PM on December 15, 2009

Buy a new phone, Symbian has-beens!
posted by GuyZero at 12:09 PM on December 15, 2009

You joke, but it's partially true.

I do? I really do think people should send you stuff like phones and cookies and mix cds etc. If it helps the site accessibility to do so bully! But it would be nice anyway, no?

As for my offer, I thought my fully operational i700 was out in the glove compartment, so I just cleaned out the cab of my truck looking for it. Not there, but I did find another one in a drawer languishing right next to its USB tether (srsly, when does THAT ever happen?), but this is the one with the half-functional screen. There's another one around here somewhere, I know it!
posted by carsonb at 12:25 PM on December 15, 2009

You'll get nothing and like it.


True on both counts... if you want.
posted by Nothing... and like it at 12:29 PM on December 15, 2009 [1 favorite]

where the fuck did you come from?
posted by gman at 12:35 PM on December 15, 2009

2006.
posted by Nothing... and like it at 12:40 PM on December 15, 2009 [3 favorites]

fwiw - i don't find the site to be too much trouble on my omnia (samsung i910), running WM and Opera Mobile. the only complaint i'd have is that the text box for commenting is too large once i'm "zoomed in" and makes posting my comment difficult, but that seems more of a limitation on the browser than metafilter. it just doesn't handle text box to browsing very well, especially if the text box takes up the whole screen.
posted by nadawi at 12:47 PM on December 15, 2009

You've tried using the skweezer.com proxy? It works most of the time for me on my WM phone.
posted by stupidsexyFlanders at 12:52 PM on December 15, 2009

It is a bit challenging if we're not holding the device in our hands. I can use an emulator, but those inevitably have their own quirks that might not be in the devices themselves.

There's actually a service out there that uses real hardware, but makes the buttons and screen controllable over the web. It's quite expensive but we used it at work when we needed to come up with a full list of Blackberry models we supported.

Perfecto Mobile (I'm not sure this is what we used, but it's the same idea.)
posted by smackfu at 12:56 PM on December 15, 2009 [1 favorite]

Please send Sarah Palin thread over via Aldis lamp, thanx.
posted by marxchivist at 12:57 PM on December 15, 2009

I use Opera Mini on my E71 and Metafilter loads like a champ. There was an issue with posting comments a while back but that got fixed.

And people hating on Symbian can suck it.
posted by kmz at 1:05 PM on December 15, 2009

My Nokia E63 (using the default browser - Opera Mini I guess?) handles the regular site fine - the only thing I'd change is removing the sidebar entirely since it appears above the posts and you always have to scroll past it on the main page(s).
posted by EndsOfInvention at 1:08 PM on December 15, 2009

When I had an S60 phone (N95) I found Opera mini could cope with Metafilter OK.
posted by pompomtom at 1:10 PM on December 15, 2009

I still can't get Metafilter.com to display properly using WAP.

Anyone have a link to the USENET FAQ for setting it up?
posted by blue_beetle at 1:20 PM on December 15, 2009

Don't forget your Palm Pre browsers. We want our pony, too.

(Well, you've got one such browser, at least.)
posted by oddman at 1:21 PM on December 15, 2009

For the record, Palm Pre OS has .03% of traffic, so it's not just you.
posted by pb (staff) at 1:42 PM on December 15, 2009

I'm pretty sure I'm using an Opera mini browser on my LG Lotus and it's a bit kludgy, but I've seen far worse. The only thing I find annoying is the stuff on top and stuff on the sidebar loading as page 1, and content on page 2. The sheer dord...er, density of text makes it a bit hard to read, but it's still less painful than reading/loading Fark on my phone.
posted by Weighted Companion Cube at 3:43 PM on December 15, 2009

While we're making mobile requests, is there a way to get notified that you have a memail waiting from the front page on an iphone, without going into the memail page first?
posted by empath at 4:39 PM on December 15, 2009 [1 favorite]

Oh, I thought you said Sybian platform.

Not sure how that formatting would work, but someone could have some fun finding out.
posted by Grangousier at 12:40 PM on December 16, 2009

I use a Sony Ericsson V640i, and browse Metafilter in Text Only format.

Logging in is a roll of the dice. Sometimes I'll log in several times before it takes. Sometimes I'll log in, think it failed, click through a few times and suddenly I'm logged in. Conversely, I can be logged in, post a few comments, click around, and suddenly I'm logged out.

It's a bit frustrating, and I wish I knew what I was doing wrong. Is there any way to improve my chances that when I log in the first time, I stay logged in?
posted by Marisa Stole the Precious Thing at 1:45 PM on December 16, 2009

empath, I added the number of unread messages to the MeFi Mail menu link. So if you have two unread messages, you'll see: MeFi Mail (2) in the menu. If you don't have any unread messages, you'll see: MeFi Mail.
posted by pb (staff) at 2:00 PM on December 16, 2009

Sorry, Marisa Stole the Precious Thing, I don't have any good answers for you. Most of the phones I used before the iPhone were insanely flaky at Web access. I'm guessing your phone isn't storing cookies properly. It's possible the phone browser has a hard limit on the number of cookies it can accept from any particular domain and MeFi uses a lot of cookies. If you happen to have the right combination of cookies stored, you're logged in. If you're missing one of the key cookies, you're not. Some mobile phone browsers also send all traffic through a proxy service, and that could be wreaking havoc in a number of ways too. But these kinds of intermittent problems with fairly rare browsers are very hard to debug.
posted by pb (staff) at 2:04 PM on December 16, 2009

No worries, pb, that actually does help. I have a few options when it comes to my cookies settings. I could, for example, clear them all before trying to log on to Metafilter.
posted by Marisa Stole the Precious Thing at 2:07 PM on December 16, 2009 [1 favorite]

I would love to be able read MetaFilter on my BlackBerry Storm. But I understand what you're saying about the challenges related to supporting a bunch of mobile devices, so I can continue to only feed my addiction when I am at a computer without complaint.
posted by lazaruslong at 3:23 PM on December 16, 2009