Potential upgrades to MeFi Mail on iPhone?

March 3, 2010 9:41 AM

Potential upgrades to MeFi Mail on iPhone?

You know what would be swell? If in MeFi Mail the iPhone interface had links to your sent messages, contacts and search, much like on the 'Standard Site'. All three of those links WORK in the iPhone interface - if you go to them in standard mode and switch to mobile view - but there is just no current way to get there directly.

This is a pony of such limited scope I hesitated to even mention it, but I personally would find useful. I guess maybe just put it at the bottom of the rainy day list?

posted by dirtdirt to Feature Requests at 9:41 AM (19 comments total)

Yeah we can do that. I just need to figure out where to add those links. The tabs are too small for the iPhone and we don't have an equivalent. Maybe text links at the top of the page would do it.
posted by pb (staff) at 9:46 AM on March 3, 2010

Can I ask for a pony, too? I noticed this a while back and kept meaning to ask about it but kept forgetting.

When you go to your profile (in the iphone/touch interface) and then click "view all activity", what you get is "showing posts from: [dropdown menu of subsites]" but as far as I can see, no way to view comments from all the mefi bits. Is it possible to add comments in addition to posts?
posted by rtha at 9:56 AM on March 3, 2010

Yeah, I've been meaning to mention that the mobile interface is missing some key links. For instance, when you're on the Recent Activity page you can't get to Recent Favorites, and when you're browsing your own list of favorites (which defaults to the posts you've favorited) there's no way to switch from that view to the list of favorited comments. Also, if you're browsing a user's posts, you can't easily switch to browsing their comments (and vice-versa).

I think there's one or two more examples like this, but it's what I ran into the last time I used the mobile site. It all stems from removing the tabbed links at the top of some pages, IIRC.
posted by Rhaomi at 9:56 AM on March 3, 2010

I just added the links to the iPhone footer menu for MeFi Mail pages. It looks like this. That makes the menu comically long, but I think that's ok and the lighter color separates those choices from the more permanent menu. I'll look into adding sub-menus for user activity and recent activity too.
posted by pb (staff) at 10:28 AM on March 3, 2010

Woo! Much obliged!
posted by dirtdirt at 10:34 AM on March 3, 2010

Thanks, pb!
posted by rtha at 10:55 AM on March 3, 2010

I added those submenus all around, so you should be able to switch between the various tabs in Recent Activity, User Activity, and User Favorites now.
posted by pb (staff) at 11:41 AM on March 3, 2010

pb moves swiftly like the wind, and more silently.
posted by jessamyn (staff) at 11:45 AM on March 3, 2010 [1 favorite]

thanks?
posted by pb (staff) at 12:09 PM on March 3, 2010 [1 favorite]

did you hear something?
posted by jessamyn (staff) at 12:10 PM on March 3, 2010 [2 favorites]

I think it's time to break out the pbisabigdamnhero tag again.
posted by moviehawk at 12:10 PM on March 3, 2010

Wow, this is terrific. Thank you pb, bawkbawk.
posted by shiu mai baby at 12:35 PM on March 3, 2010 [1 favorite]

Thanks, pb. It didn't have to be a SCR or go on a stoplight chart or anything. That is great.
posted by fixedgear at 1:33 PM on March 3, 2010

Minor bug: I just tested out the new links on my iPod, and they all work fine except for the one on the Recent Activity page pointing to Recent Favorites.

The link works okay, but after the page is loaded the top bar, with the Mefi logo and the "skip to menu" link, gets overwritten with a jumble of overlapping text that looks like it comes from the menu at the bottom (the only part that's readable says "My Contacts"). The logo link to the homepage and the link to the bottom menu are still there and usable, just covered up. If you scroll down far enough where the browser "forgets" what's at the top and then scroll back up, it returns to normal. Also, if you go directly to the Recent Favorites page it loads normally. And I can only get this to happen on the iPod, not my cell phone.
posted by Rhaomi at 3:39 PM on March 3, 2010

Thanks. Looks like there was an unclosed <div> on that page which could have been throwing things off. I don't have an iPod to test with so I'm hoping that fixed things up.
posted by pb (staff) at 4:33 PM on March 3, 2010

Thanks, pb! It was still doing it when I checked on mine, but when I tried on a friend's iPod that hadn't been on Metafilter before (same model and version number) it worked normally. So I restarted mine and now it loads normally. I guess it was a cache issue.
posted by Rhaomi at 4:51 PM on March 3, 2010

Great! Thanks for the extra testing.
posted by pb (staff) at 4:53 PM on March 3, 2010

And Search is finally available in the Mobile version. There's a new "Search" menu item on every page, and the search results pages have one of these new submenus in place of tabs so you can switch between posts, comments, tags, and user results.
posted by pb (staff) at 3:15 PM on March 4, 2010 [1 favorite]

*hugs pb*
posted by rtha at 3:18 PM on March 4, 2010