User:TheDJ/Mobile

For the past weeks I have been working on improvements for the Wikimedia Mobile portal. In this time, I have mostly worked on some small bugs, added a few new dedicated interfaces and cleaned up some of the section collapsing used by the iPhone/Android interfaces. During this experimenting, I have realized some things, and this is where i'm jotting them down for now.

Graphics
First and most importantly, we need to get some graphics and interfaces design support for the portal. Hampton, myself and fellow contributors have engineering skills, but we lack skills in design. In browsing around the web on my mobile devices for the past week, I have noticed how much a superb design contributes to my enjoyment of the websites I visit.

There is one big problem in this area and it is called multi-language support. When you browse around, notice how many mobile websites use images for their design and are targeting a single language. When you have limited screen real-estate the difference between a button with "Search" and "وڪيپيڊيا:مضمون_ڪيئن_ڳولجي؟" is rather large…. (don't get me started on adding left-to-right support). The problem with pictograms however is that they are not always as clear as you might expect, and floating tooltips are useless on almost all devices.

So we need someone to help us here, and we need to tackle the specific interfaces one by one. Making an enjoyable interface for Wii for instance should be a simple task. Improving the interface for iPhone is important and has the benefit of "larger" screen real-estate and touch interface. Making the Opera Mini/NetFront mobile interface great is the most difficult task (keyboard interface with small screen). Making WAP really great is almost impossible (easier to just redirect everyone to mobile.wikipedia.org in my opinion [rename it wap.wikipedia.org?] ).

That last problem we have here, is that at the same time, we will probably expand on functionality, and the interface needs to be able to account for that. We probably need designers to return to an interface once in a while, to update some of the graphics.

Ideas

 * For small devices, something alla: http://m.nos.nl/ http://m.facebook.com and http://m.twitter.com
 * For iphone, add a static bottombar all facebook, for edit/share/history/discuss etc ?

Editing
We need mobile editing. The way to do this is using the API and section editing. Let's bypass user login/passwd for now and focus on IP editing. I'd like to work on this, but I need to get a good tutorial on Ruby/Merb first, because I'm new to this platform. The edit API side of this should be easy for me.

Share
We need "share" functionality (actually this goes for both Wikipedia and Mobile wp). We should give people quick links to tweet/facebook/email/sms articles to/with their friends.

Optional

 * Support for categories and interwiki ? I'm not sure how useful it is, but Wapedia can provide it, so why shouldn't we be able to do it, it's a simple parser job
 * Language selection on m.wikipedia.org
 * Find wikipedia articles close to your location. http://arstechnica.com/software/news/2009/03/location-awareness-spreads-to-opera-browser.ars, alla geopedia.

Document
Document our "lessons learned" from the devices we work with. For instance, NetFront seems real bad at absolute positioning with CSS. Where shall we make our home wiki ?

Mobile standards
We should try to make our "small" interfaces as XHTML-MP compatible as possible. That makes them backwards compatible with older mobile browsers that are not as HTML 5.0 compatible as some other browsers.