Hey there, Grobsie! You. Been good?

Grazie

I thought this Vegas forum was custom-designed to be viewed on an iPhone 4.

In landscape mode, the index fits perfectly and the threads wrap perfectly to look custom formatted for the iPhone, with perfect readability..

The only pinching I do is on myself to make sure I'm not dreaming!

:O)

The index fits, but there's no way to fit the individual posts and still be able to read anything without a magnifying glass. Someone should write a web app for the forum:

http://developer.apple.com/devcenter/safari/index.action

I find myself using my 4 more than my desktop and laptop, except of course for editing.

Thanks Jabs - the Cow sites have a Mobile option which MEANS that each and every text frame word wraps to size that is perfectly readable. I'm starting to realise just how much It is essential for any web presence to be Mob-Aware. And YES Jabs, I'm most certainly using this amazing device more and more each day. I can only hope Sony respond with the type of website that is responsive to this most Creative and accessible form of Internet communication.

How about it Sony?

Grazie

For those over 60---who can see the tiny screen (diminished vision skills) and who has the tiny fingers (diminished finger skills and adult fingers cover three buttons at one time) to push the buttons? I see the website on a 32" monitor and it is just fine. The buttons on my keyboard fit my fingers just fine.
JJK

agree entirely with jjk....

frankly i don't give a damn about producing for iphone - i produce programs that are meant to be seen on a 'normal' screen - if a client wants for iphone i'll supply the necessary file, but honestly, who'd want to watch any 'serious' video on a piddle-shit screen, or come to that, read a forum....

sorry to say grazie you need to get another life if the iphone is going to start running this one ;-)

i just find this move towards being 'wired / multitasking' 24/7 quite ludicrous - it seems to generally translate (among my students and friends children) as doing so many things at once that actually none of them get done to any satisfactory degree - life is suoerficial with no real substance... ymmv

head down, deeply buried in the sands of time.

Smartphones (with good screens) are great for work while traveling.

I easily read this forum (when I'm not working 80-hour weeks) on my iPhone 4 in portrait mode, and in landscape mode the text is almost too big.

I understand some people need reading glasses, but this forum is highly readable in 960x540 resolution.

The links are tiny, but the UI is so well developed that it doesn't matter if you're fat-fingered. I wear size XL work gloves (which are a tight fit!) and have no problem with clicking in this forum. It just takes a little bit of practice, and it seems to be more about self confidence than about any kind of precision work.

sorry to say grazie you need to get another life if the iphone is going to start running this one ;-)

Well, that's put me in my place.

Grazie

I think I've said it before, but for the most part it just requires good use of CSS stylesheets to make a site usable on a tiny screen. You can even use the exact same pages because CSS can deal with multiple output targets, so the same page can be repurposed for desktop, mobile, print, etc. Some parts of the page can be hidden for certain outputs, and the look can be completely changed.

This forum isn't done that way, unfortunately, and requires a mobile browser that can resize and flow pages in spite of their design. I find the pages pretty readable on Android but you have to use a non-threaded view of the forum (something I resisted for years).

The problem, probably, is that SCS has a website that works on laptops and desktops. It costs money to redesign a site and that's a hard sell to management when they've got a site that works on the platforms you can run Vegas on.

I think it's a waste of money for SCS to develop an Iphone app. That ship has sailed. They'd be much better off working on a page design that, with good use of CSS, works anywhere.

Rob Mack

Rob, you make intelligent, valid points.

Grazie

There are a few forum apps, but they are designed for the lowest common denominator and feel a bit like the old WAP sites of yore.

CSS is obviously the ticket for platform flexibility, but I haven't seen any need for that with either iPhone or iPad. Using these to browse this forum, there is nothing I would change for CSS layout.

Since Android is also using WebKit for browsing, shouldn't that give it the same or similar experience as the iPhone?

Could it be the lower effective text resolution of the amoled pen tile pixel layout?:



(The above is a closeup of a Nexus One Android phone, the right side is the clean signal seen from the debugger. This model has a claimed resolution of 480x800, other models have as little as 320x480.)

It is tricky even with CSS to make a site look good on so many different types of small screens with different effective resolutions and using different browsers.

I can't imagine Apple having a patent on re-flowing web sites, so it would seem to be up to the phone designers/browser programmers to fix this, not SCS.

I wonder how much NY Times spent on developing an app that feels like reading the newspaper through a keyhole.

www.nytimes.com OTOH feels like reading the real newspaper, far superior.