Eng-Tips Forum iPhone App

[SixOn]

Is there an iPhone app available for this forum?

If not, wont it be a good idea to have one developed?

 

[MiketheEngineer]

Well - not a bad idea - but I can already get Internet and e-mail on my smart phone -- so getting to Eng-Tips is really not a problem!

 

[IRstuff]

The only problem with the current situation is that the entire page attempts to be placed on the screen, which makes reading posts just a wee bit difficult. It would be nicer if there was an app or a mode that would allow you to switch from your forum list to a list of the posts to just a particular post. This would at least minimize the amount of zooming I had to do.

TTFN
faq731-376

 

[SixOn]

There has to be a good programmer on this forum willing to donate their time to develop an iOS and Android app for us

Spread the word, it will eventually reach the right ears.

 

[electricpete]

On the Android, using Dolphin Browser, select "Mobile View (GWT)" and the view of a given eng-tips web page will be re-arranged to fit the width of the Android screen without making any Fonts small. The Mobile view is sometimes inconvenient since it stretches the page very tall (a lot of scrolling to get to the bottom). But if you set it up for easy toggle back and forth between Mobile/GWT view and normal view (I have a gesture assigned to this on Dolphin Browser), it makes browsing the site easier.

Separate approach: talk the site Admins into providing compatibility with the Tapatalk application. Tapatalk costs a few bucks but makes forums more accessible. All of the tech sites (like Android Central, Android Forums etc) are on Tapatalk. I use that program and it certainly does make things easier, although it has a few frustrations that go with it (I have a hard time bookmarking a thread that I like, and sometimes if I leave and come back it resets me to a different "place" than I was when I left).


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[electricpete]

On the Android, using Dolphin Browser, select "Mobile View (GWT)" and the view of a given eng-tips web page will be re-arranged to fit the width of the Android screen without making any Fonts small. The Mobile view is sometimes inconvenient since it stretches the page very tall (a lot of scrolling to get to the bottom). But if you set it up for easy toggle back and forth between Mobile/GWT view and normal view (I have a gesture assigned to this on Dolphin Browser), it makes browsing the site easier.

I'll bet there is similar feature (Mobile GWT view) on iPhone... can anyone confirm that?

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[electricpete]

I noticed that after I select "mobile view (GWT), the address changes. Here is the address for this thread in mobile
brite view (gwt)

http://www.google.com/gwt/x?u=http://

http://www.eng-tips.com/viewthread.cfm?qid=320809

How does it look on iphone?

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[electricpete]

How does it look on iphone?

Why no response?



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[electricpete]

Seems like sixon who thought this was so important that someone else should undertake a programming project has decided it's not worth bothering to respond ?

Anyway, I'm guessing the link looks pretty good on i-phone as it does on Android. It is simply reformatted to remove the frames and some other formatting, so what's left flows naturally in your screen. And it seems to do a good job getting rid of a lot of clutter (for example it doesn't repeat "Inappropriate post? If so, Red Flag it!" and "Check out the FAQ area for this forum!" after every post). A good way to read a long post, but that's about it... there is no window to type a response and navigating back to forum or to other forums can be tricky (unfortunately some of the stuff it deletes is stuff you might need). So it's a good tool if you can easily switch back and forth between mobile/GWT view and standard view.

It should be evident from inspection of the link above that all you need to do to get the mobile/GWT view for any page is append that particular text in front of the address:

http://www.google.com/gwt/x?u=

You can do that with cut/paste in front of the address in your address bar if that feature isnot built into your browser.

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[LiteYear]

I doubt I'd ever use it in practice, but I thought I'd give it a go for you anyway.

It looks pretty plain. Only the thread text appears so the screen is not taken up by borders, images, headers, footers or side bars. Oddly the first three posts don't appear at all. There's nothing between successive posts, so if a poster doesn't have a signature it can be hard to see where new posts start. There's no breadcrumbs, just a "back to -General engineering computer programs discussion" link at the bottom of the page, so it would be pretty hard to navigate. And there are no links to login or post, so it looks like it would be view only.

So it's clearer than the original site and by default the text is bigger. But I'm not sure how much use it would be in practice.

 

[electricpete]

Thanks LiteYear (should I call you Buzz?).

That is roughly the same as I see. Please note you can see the first posts by going to the top of the page and selecting link "Go to page 1". Personally, I have no problem telling one post from the next post because each posts begins with poster's name in bold (happily it's the only thing in bold... no distraction from bold ads that we have on regular site, and we don't have the mindleslly repetitive purple star / red-flag / faq separators between posts).

If I did want to give little purple star or red-flag, I'd have to go back to regular web view to do so. If I want to post, I have to go back to regular web view to do so (I also tend to go to another application to compose my post and then cut/paste into the regular web view text entry window, because that eng-tips text entry window is just not well-behaved enough to type directly into on my Android).

The mobile GWT view does provide capability to also browse the thread list for a forum, but for some reason I have gotten into the habit of using the regular web page for that.... seems to work fine.

That pretty well outlines my routine for browsing eng-tips on Android. As I said, the mobile GWT seems good for one thing only (reading the thread), but for that it is very very good imo.





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[electricpete]

Here is example link to mobile gwt view for the forum thread list, for info. If browser is suitably configured, you should be able to toggle back and forth between mobile/gwt view and normal view with one or two keystrokes

http://www.google.com/gwt/x?u=http://

http://www.eng-tips.com/threadminder.cfm?pid=724&page=1

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[electricpete]

Weird, I'm not sure why that address didn't automatically linkify. Let me try that link again.

http://www.google.com/gwt/x?u=http://

http://www.eng-tips.com/threadminder.cfm?pid=724&page=1

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[electricpete]

Click here to access link created using tgml

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[electricpete]

If you go to the above link for the forum thread list in gwt format and click on a given thread, you'll see it does allow you to click on any of the thread titles and it will open the thread also in gwt format. Then you can use back key to get back to the forum and then go to other threads on same forum. Unfortunately the thing you don't have access to is a link to jump to other forums (no forum list on left side). That's the reason I use the regular forum threadlist page instead of the gwt forum threadlist page..... my typical run through eng-tips is to click on each forum and scan very quickly new stuff and 90% of time jump to next forum without reading any threads. The GWT does not provide any useful tool I can find for navigating among forums on the site.

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[electricpete]

One more option, this applies to BOTH iPhone and Android:

Use the "Dolphin reader":

http://dolphin-browser.com/add-ons/tools/dolphin-reader/

It displays a thread page somewhat similar to the GWT mobile view, perhaps "better" because it retains links for little-purple star, red-flag etc between posts, and retains the text entry posting box at the bottom of the page.

It is an Add-in for Dolphin Browser, which is a great browser imo. Customize by creating "gestures" for the stuff you do often. And that browser is available for both iPhone and Android.

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[beej67]

I use Tapatalk for other forums, and it works very well. I'm sure there's some back-end mumbo jumbo that would be required to host this forum on Tapatalk.

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