On Sat, Apr 28, 2012 at 11:07:18AM +0100, Kake wrote:
On Fri 27 Apr 2012, Stephen Jolly steve@jollys.org wrote:
Whenever I use an OpenGuide (and that's generally RGL right now) from a smartphone (which is the usual way I access it), I think "this is a faff" and start designing an elegant native application interface in my head.
It strikes me that perhaps in the absence of a native application, it might be better to bend our efforts towards (as you've alluded to before) a more responsive design that works more smoothly on mobile devices. I feel that the main reason for wanting an app over a website is when there's a significant amount of stuff you can do without communicating with the remote server.
For _updating_ an OpenGuide, I can definitely see a use for being able to enter all the data and then tell your phone to send it when it next has an internet connection - a good reason to have an app. But for accessing the data already in an OpenGuide while out and about, would a significantly more usable website solve most of the problem?
You've mentioned that offline editing would be useful, but why aspire towards offline browinsg too? That would presumably need a way of interrogating changes in a global edit timeline to update efficiently a local cache.
One of the main problems I foresee with native applications is the nonstandard wiki markup (feel free to tell me that I'm wrong and that the wiki markup is in fact interpreted by many standard libraries - I'm not particularly up-to-date in this area) so I wonder whether some improvements might be needed in that area.