On Sat, Apr 28, 2012 at 11:07:18AM +0100, Kake wrote:
On Fri 27 Apr 2012, Stephen Jolly
<steve(a)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.
--
Dominic Hargreaves |
http://www.larted.org.uk/~dom/
PGP key 5178E2A5 from the.earth.li (keyserver,web,email)