D Forum Mobile Version - Beta

[Johannes Loher]

To begin with: Sorry if my last post came across a bit harsh. 
That was not my intention. I thought you were looking for 
feedback and I wanted to be honest regarding that. If you are 
simply doing it for yourself and others, who also like it, that 
is of course perfectly fine. But personally I would not want it 
under an official domain in the current state because it simply 
looks a bit unprofessional in my opinion (which is fine for 
personal use, but would reflect on D‘s image if made official).

On Wednesday, 27 November 2019 at
23:54:19 UTC, matheus wrote:
> On Wednesday, 27 November 2019 at 21:32:06 UTC, Johannes Loher 
> wrote:
>> ... What are your concerns with the regular forum on mobile 
>> devices?
>
> Look at the first post, I showed the diffs between both 
> versions:
>
> https://i.imgur.com/wfmm035.png <- For "me" the new is cleaner.

That’s personal preference, which is fine. Your version is more 
minimal, and actually does have one major benefit: You can read 
the whole topic names. On the other hand, your version is missing 
some things which I like very much, e.g. the breadcrumbs (Index » 
Learn » Topic name) which I regularly use to quickly navigate 
between different forums.

> https://i.imgur.com/LzvhrdQ.png <- I can read more.

Which is achieved mainly by removing the margins and decreasing 
font size. Depending on your device, this might actually work 
out, but it does not on my iPhone 8. There is a reason why every 
major website uses margins around the content. You might also 
want to take a look at what the „Reader Modes“ of some browsers 
look like. They reduce the style of pages to a minimum (only 
black text on white background), but they still keep the fontsize 
quite a bit bigger than what you are using and they also use 
margins.

Space is also gained because you remove some small parts. While I 
already mentioned that I personally would want the breadcrumbs to 
stay, there is a point to removing the „Log in, Settings, Help“ 
section, if this is really only for reading. Others who actually 
use this part of the website might disagree of course.

> https://i.imgur.com/BM13xTw.png <- At the bottom there is a 
> shortcut to change pages on a topic.

While I personally hate absolutely positioned navigation bars 
(they just look weird to me), this is actually helpful because 
you do not have to scroll down all the way to navigate. What I‘d 
personally prefer though would be to have a navigation at both 
the top and the bottom, but that‘s just personal preference.

> Well I'll not enter in a battle which design is better, all I 
> know is the current design doesn't works for me on my old LG K4.
>
>> * Weird spacing in general. As mentioned before, there is 
>> missing space to the screen border, but in other places, there 
>> is disturbingly much space, e.g. between the different forum 
>> „groups“ (new users, ecosystem etc.)
>
> Let's see this closely and compare these 2 versions:
>
> 1) https://i.imgur.com/n2N7Tfx.png <- In the original you need 
> to scroll down first to see the topics.

Agreed, there is a lot of info in the original version that 
regular users probably don’t need to see all the time. Removing 
this is actually good (at least for my usage, the missing 
introduction might be bad for new forum users).

> 2) After scrolling down you will see this: 
> https://i.imgur.com/tijpNip.png So between the 2 versions, the 
> new version is only missing one topic (LDC).

And this is mostly because the spacing between the different 
forum groups is quite big (too big in my opinion). I already 
mentioned that your version has one major benefit here: you can 
read complete titles. But this comes at the cost of the „Last 
Post“ link, a feature I use on a daily basis, which I would not 
want to miss. It basically brings me to the latest post which I 
have not read yet, so it allows me to quickly find all the new 
information which has been posted since my last visit. This is an 
extremely important feature to me because it basically defines 
how I use the forums.

>> I‘m sure, I could mention a lot more, but these are the major 
>> points I immediately noticed. I‘m looking at it in an iPhone 8.
>
> I'd like to see screenshots running on your iPhone 8.

https://ibb.co/qgYhvZm
https://ibb.co/HxBBFDS
https://ibb.co/jZD89Fq

>> ...you mentioned that is intended as readonly. a readonly 
>> Forum Is basically useless imo. Also if it is readonly, why 
>> are there reply and create thread buttons?
>
> Again look my first post where I said:
>
>> I use to access this Forum mainly through the WEB version, and 
>> so far It never bothered me when reading on my PC.
>>
>> But on my phone (An old LG K4) with tiny screen it's not very 
>> pleasant, I use this phone when I'm on the road, I lately I 
>> gave up to read this Forum through it.
>
> So I use this mobile version only when I am on the road, to see 
> what's happening here, if you ask the mods, all my posts came 
> from the same IP (Desktop), this mobile version was intended 
> only to read on my tiny and old mobile phone.
>
> Yes the button (Create a Topic) was decorated while I was 
> testing ("Beta"), but the page inside (Submit Form) wasn't.

If a readonly version does it for you, that‘s fine of course. I 
like the possibility to interactively use the forum on my 
mobilephone very much. In fact, I am writing this post on my 
mobilephone. However, I still don‘t think it makes sense to have 
those buttons in a readonly version. You could save even more 
space by removing them.

> Finally I wrote this for myself and I shared with some C# 
> friends which currently are in doubt between a new language 
> (C++, Rust and D) for some projects, and they complained about 
> the layout too, and for what it seems maybe we are the only 5 ~ 
> 6 persons bothered with this problem.
>
> I'll let this running if my friends showed some interest, 
> otherwise I'll turn this private for my own use, since I'll be 
> only user.
>
> Matheus.
>
> PS: I'm foreigner so my English isn't good and I am not a web 
> designer.

Again, all of this is fine. If you and other people get value out 
of it, that is great. But as already mentioned, I don‘t think it 
should be made official (i.e. hosting on an official subdomain) 
in the current state.