Hi Mihai, I'm glad to see some work being done in this direction :-)
Please see my comments below. On Mon, Nov 28, 2011 at 11:45 AM, Mihai Paun <[email protected]> wrote: > Hello devs, > > As some of you may know, I recently took on the challenge of developing a > mobile compatible version of XWiki Enterprise. The objective of this > development is to come up with an optimized solution for smartphone and > tablet users, both from a technological point of view (using HTML5, CSS3 > and perhaps mobile oriented JS libraries) and from a contextual perspective > (when do mobile users use a wiki and most especially how they interact with > it). > Regarding this, do you have a list of the main actions you expect mobile users to perform? For instance I'm not sure that many users will even want to edit wiki pages (it's going to be really complex on a small screen and the WYSIWYG editor will not work). Adding a comment might be a more frequent use case for instance. The targeted platforms that I plan to support, since I'm only one guy with > limited time, are post Android 2.2 and post iOs 4.x platforms. The first > release is planned for the end of January 2012. > > Because simply applying media queries to an existing desktop site won't > completely optimize a mobile experience, I thought of building one from the > ground up - this would imply a complete overhaul coupled with > server/front-side adaptation (what Facebook, Google and most top internet > brands are doing) > > Some of the key aspects that I plan to focus on are: functionality and user > experience (establish what needs mobile users have in a wiki context), > performance, future-proofness (easily adaptable for the ever-changing > market of mobile devices, particularly in terms of screen size, resolution > and browser changes), flexibility (easiness of adapting the skin to a > clients' needs) > > I am considering using an adapted version of mobile boilerplate, which is a > very popular baseline template being used by a lot of individuals who are > developing a mobile web app (http://html5boilerplate.com/mobile), and > build > on top of it a new yet familiar user-experience, adapted to mobile context. > > In terms of functionality, my take is that the primary function of a user > who is navigating a wiki is either looking for information (content) or > trying to edit information. Administration or using the wiki to build > structured applications falls under the use cases that the user won't be > interested in doing. Thus, in the proposed attached mockups there's no > schema for an Administration area or editing a document in object/class > mode. > +1 The advantage of starting from scratch will allow me to strip everything > that's unnecessary from the .vm files thus increasing performance; one > example would be reducing requests => saving bandwidth. > > Following a discussion with our designers, Caty and Max, we came up with a > couple of mockups that I believe can stand as the foundation for this > mobile experience. Please find them here: > http://incubator.myxwiki.org/xwiki/bin/view/Improvements/MobileSkinv3 or > here in a higher quality: http://db.tt/8vX9OcBZ > > Another approach, for which I also gave a lot of thought, is to make an > existing skin work passably well on a range of mobile devices by using > media-queries and adjusting a great deal of .vm's. This will offer an > "responsive design" experience, similar to the examples that can be found > here: http://mediaqueri.es/ > > This approach has a lot of advocates and has gained quite an enthusiasm > lately (there's even a book written on the topic: > http://www.abookapart.com/products/responsive-web-design). Note that one > particularity of the websites is that most of them have been built with a > "mobile first" (http://www.lukew.com/ff/entry.asp?933) approach in mind, > not having to adapt an existing desktop website. Secondly, these are mainly > presentation websites, far from the scope of our product. > > However, I've been pondering about this alternative a lot recently, and I > am thinking about going back to the drawing board and make an analysis of > what exactly would take to develop the mobile skin this way and also have a > thorough look at the code to see if the current markup can be easily > adjusted to offer a responsive experience. My mainly concern is that > instead of coming up with something clean, things will become instead > messier, probably having to be forced to adopt varios unorthodox techniques > or bad practices in the mobile web, such as using extra JS code to move > markup around. > Both approaches are interesting. I've seen several examples of responsive layouts lately and I must say that I was quite impressed by their quality. One such example is the new version of the Boston Globe website: http://bostonglobe.com/ which adapts from large screens to phone screens. The other advantage of this is that there is only 1 skin to maintain instead of several different ones, and new applications automatically benefit from the fluid design. A big question would be, what to do with livetables in that context? I would definitely be interested in an exploration of this option (complexity, advantages, features to expose...) before we engage in a redesign using an external, mobile-only framework. Looking forward to the final product, Guillaume I am gladly accepting any kind of input on this. > > Thank you, > Mihai > _______________________________________________ > devs mailing list > [email protected] > http://lists.xwiki.org/mailman/listinfo/devs > _______________________________________________ devs mailing list [email protected] http://lists.xwiki.org/mailman/listinfo/devs
