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Hi friends!
As an iPhone owner & recent SF enthusiast, I have often found myself thinking, while browsing SF on said iPhone, "This is slightly inconvenient! I have to occasionally move my fingers to make text legible. I wish I didn't have to do that."
Rather than more sensibly emailing the SF admins and asking if there were a mobile skin or something similar they could just switch on, I took it upon myself to build a horrible contraption that turns SF iPhone-friendly. In the interest of saving other iPhone owners the trauma of also having to occasionally move their fingers, I present it here:
http://sfmobi.bigtoast.in/
As the title suggests, this is completely unofficial and mostly unsupported. Use at your own risk. Availability subject to my being able to afford hosting. &c.
Here are some questions I might ask in your no doubt beautiful shoes, answered!
How does this thing work?
Very briefly: it passes requests for pages you send it on to StyleForum proper, fetches the page you've requested, and rebuilds it in mobile-friendly manner.
What's with that ugly URL?
It's the one provided by default by my host. I haven't shelled out for a domain name yet. I'll edit this post once I've got a proper domain name sorted out.
What's with the ugly everything?
Apologies -- I'm a software developer, not a graphic designer. Any suggestions on prettying things up will be very gratefully accepted.
Why can't I log in and post?
Re. the former: you can!
Re. the latter: coming soon!
Soon!
Am I really meant to trust my login details to you?
Short answer: yes, but I am trustworthy!
Long answer: your login details aren't stored anywhere aside from your browser and SF"”the mobile reader just receives your login credentials from your browser and passes them straight on to SF.
That said, if I were evil it would only take a few lines of code to start storing login details. I'm not, though! But if I were evil, I would say that. Buyer beware.
Not a concern, presently, as you can't log in!
The iPhone sucks. Where is my Droid/Pre/Blackberry/whatever-the-heck SF reader?
Android & Pre phones use a WebKit-based browser, so (hopefully!) this should work as well on them as it does on the iPhone. For everybody else -- sorry! I only own an iPhone.
Bonus nerd question: What's this thing built out of?
It's written in Python and served by Apache and mod_wsgi. I useWerkzeug Flask and httplib2 for doing HTTP stuff, lxml for parsing SF's HTML, and Mako Jinja2 for templating.
Bonus nerd question #2: Can I see the code?
Sure, if you promise not to laugh. The source is on bitbucket. If you have Mercurial installed, the command for cloning the repo is:
Note that I am a bad developer and have not commented my code. Apologies. Patches are welcome!
Soon!
NICETIES
* When you're viewing a thread, tap the thread title to jump to the bottom of the page.
* (Related: this is an iPhone feature, but it's very handy and a lot of people don't know about it. Tap the iPhone's status bar to jump to the top of any page or application.)
* When you're in a forum, clicking the arrow to the right of a thread's title takes you to the last page of the thread.
* Tap a thread's page count to navigate to a specific page in that thread.
TO-DOS & OUTSTANDING ISSUES
* Logging in, posting, replying, etc. all need to be re-jiggered for the new system.
* B&S is completely broken.
* Unescaped characters outside the ASCII character set range (like my precious en dash) are being lost in translation.
* Whitespace between inline tags & text is occasionally being dropped.
* Am thinking of how best to build in not-strictly-thread-&-forum stuff (subscriptions, private messages, etc.).
Let me know if you run into any issues using it or have any other questions, feature requests or comments.
Updated: 2011-08-03. New system!
As an iPhone owner & recent SF enthusiast, I have often found myself thinking, while browsing SF on said iPhone, "This is slightly inconvenient! I have to occasionally move my fingers to make text legible. I wish I didn't have to do that."
Rather than more sensibly emailing the SF admins and asking if there were a mobile skin or something similar they could just switch on, I took it upon myself to build a horrible contraption that turns SF iPhone-friendly. In the interest of saving other iPhone owners the trauma of also having to occasionally move their fingers, I present it here:
http://sfmobi.bigtoast.in/
As the title suggests, this is completely unofficial and mostly unsupported. Use at your own risk. Availability subject to my being able to afford hosting. &c.
Here are some questions I might ask in your no doubt beautiful shoes, answered!
How does this thing work?
Very briefly: it passes requests for pages you send it on to StyleForum proper, fetches the page you've requested, and rebuilds it in mobile-friendly manner.
It's the one provided by default by my host. I haven't shelled out for a domain name yet. I'll edit this post once I've got a proper domain name sorted out.
What's with the ugly everything?
Apologies -- I'm a software developer, not a graphic designer. Any suggestions on prettying things up will be very gratefully accepted.
Why can't I log in and post?
Soon!
Am I really meant to trust my login details to you?
Long answer: your login details aren't stored anywhere aside from your browser and SF"”the mobile reader just receives your login credentials from your browser and passes them straight on to SF.
That said, if I were evil it would only take a few lines of code to start storing login details. I'm not, though! But if I were evil, I would say that. Buyer beware.
Not a concern, presently, as you can't log in!
The iPhone sucks. Where is my Droid/Pre/Blackberry/whatever-the-heck SF reader?
Android & Pre phones use a WebKit-based browser, so (hopefully!) this should work as well on them as it does on the iPhone. For everybody else -- sorry! I only own an iPhone.
Bonus nerd question: What's this thing built out of?
It's written in Python and served by Apache and mod_wsgi. I use
Bonus nerd question #2: Can I see the code?
Soon!
NICETIES
* When you're viewing a thread, tap the thread title to jump to the bottom of the page.
* (Related: this is an iPhone feature, but it's very handy and a lot of people don't know about it. Tap the iPhone's status bar to jump to the top of any page or application.)
* When you're in a forum, clicking the arrow to the right of a thread's title takes you to the last page of the thread.
* Tap a thread's page count to navigate to a specific page in that thread.
TO-DOS & OUTSTANDING ISSUES
* Logging in, posting, replying, etc. all need to be re-jiggered for the new system.
* B&S is completely broken.
* Unescaped characters outside the ASCII character set range (like my precious en dash) are being lost in translation.
* Whitespace between inline tags & text is occasionally being dropped.
* Am thinking of how best to build in not-strictly-thread-&-forum stuff (subscriptions, private messages, etc.).
Let me know if you run into any issues using it or have any other questions, feature requests or comments.
Updated: 2011-08-03. New system!
Last edited: