ソ-ラ-バ-ド-のおん: Solarbird Makes Noises

Coexistence Alpha RELEASE CANDIDATE TWO is out. Fixes an issue with horizontal scrolling and the proto-emoji/"subject icon" functionality in More Options comment boxes.

UPDATE 2018/12/4: QUESTION 1: Yes, this respects your colours; I just like green.

UPDATE 2019/2/6: QUESTION 2: Yes, this sat fallow for a while, but no longer. We have a second RC.

You Want Mobile Dreamwidth, Artie? You Got It.

Coexistence Alpha: a mobile-friendly CSS patchset for Neutral Good - v0.846 RELEASE CANDIDATE TWO
(2019/2/6)
This is a fully-responsive mobile-ready theme modification layer intended to make Dreamwidth's default style fully functional on both mobile and desktop devices wherever it can be applied. Features include journal and reading pages with near-zero horizon scrolling on mobile, including in long comment reply cascades, and more-comfortable comment creation, including on iOS.

To install: Choose style "Neutral Good" for "Practicality" in the journal style selector. Copypasta all of the linked CSS into the Advanced Seettings Custom CSS box, and save. (This may require a desktop device.) Apply "your style" to everything you can.

This build includes Navbar 2, which is mostly cosmetic but somewhat mobile-aware upgrade of the Navbar.

( Revision history and bleeding edge code (there may be an RC3) )

Coexistence Alpha has had no bugs reported externally for the last three code releases, and all internally-discovered bugs are resolved; the open bug count is zero; we are now officially in Beta 1.

If you are a Coexistence Alpha user, please upgrade to this version and report bugs! If you aren't: do you want mobile-friendly Dreamwidth? This is how to get it. Installation instructions and bug reporting belong at the link above. Thanks.

Version 0.833 released - a reimplementation of Navbar 2, which is also the first (vaguely) mobile-aware Navbar. It's no Navbar 3, but it's a bit of an improvement, hopefully on Android in particular.

I just dropped Coexistence Alpha v0.82. If you are on Dreamwith on mobile, like, ever, you want this, because it makes it work.

Seriously, nested comment chains are trivially readable and replyable on mobile with this applied. Horizontal scrolling? I mock your horizontal scrolling. It honours user customisation through the settings panels now (including left and right user icon positioning, which the first alpha didn't) and I just dropped a bunch of Navbar 2 fixes for Android browers so hopefully that's better now too. And comment depth markers on mobile now work on comments without subject lines.

If I could just stick Navbar 3 on this, goddamn. But I can't, that requires more changes than I can do just in CSS.

You want mobile Dreamwidth, Artie? You got it.

The base style REQUIRED is Neutral Good. That's the default "new user" style and is why I went at that one first. This is an extension (and something of a rewrite) of that style, entirely in CSS. It fixes many bugs on desktop, and gives you a functional mobile view of your reading list and your journal. It makes NO attempt to address system style issues on mobile.

The CSS overlay which you need to copy and paste into the "custom css" pane of the advanced style customisation interface is here:

http://solarbird.net/Livejournal/2017-04/neutral-good-update-solarbird-2017-04-27.txt

This will ALSO get you Navbar 2, the upgrade of Navbar I've been running for a while. (Yes, you can still disable it.) It will NOT get you Navbar 3, so you won't have the mobile version you see in the screenshots in my previous post. But the navbar will be better looking on desktop, and no worse on mobile.

THIS IS AN ALPHA RELEASE, only tested so far against Safari and Firefox. Please report bugs.

(Except for the one where replying to an extant comment in single-entry view causes iOS to autozoom still. I know about that one and I'll fix it. But other than that. Comments are particularly rough at the moment tbh.)

eta: Version 0.7 alpha replaced with version 0.8 alpha, same link. Abovementioned bug fixed, several other bugs fixed, more cleanup, vitally improved handling of cascading comment threads on mobile, a few other things.

Looks like Navbar version 3 might get fast-tracked. Mobile and desktop both. Might even be in next Monday's news post. Excellent.

I've given mobile navbar some more thought. Welcome to Navbar 3.1 for mobile: now with swipe chevrons and better previous/next spacing, but without up arrows anymore because they couldn't be made to fit. Also a completely different login bar which will pop up dialogues because the more desktop-like one simply did. not. work. and never would. BUT: it's zero additional clicks as specced.

Here's a bunch of mockups of a version 3 navbar. This one does a bunch of stuff I can't do in CSS. It's still fairly close to baseline, but they want to see that, so.

(The link is temporary but it's fine for now, it's to a dropbox directory.)

These versions can't be done with custom CSS on the existing platform, they require actual code changes in the back end. But as far as I can tell, it should all be UI code changes, pretty simple stuff.

Some functionality changes, in addition to a few new links:

• getting rid of dropdown-plus-button to trigger a view reload on the reading view filter, and just having the dropdown selector do it directly
• prev message/next message arrows (when in single-post views)
• prev page/next page arrows (when in journal or reading page views)

And I bumped up the RSS functionality a little bit, that's a nice feature I suspect others would use it more if they knew about it.

I've asked whether the style selector needs to be a set of top-level links or whether it could also be an action-on-selection dropdown, like reading view filter. Right now I'm showing it the old way.

Anyway, I don't really consider these really final but they do accomplish the general task of dividing into three consistent groups (user/login, current location, exploration) and adding some basic functionality (like prev/next) that really is kind of implied by "navbar," and so on.

The background gradient is just the standard system gradient and could be replaceable with anything.

eta: My thoughts are on mobile are that the three cells remain, but one is displayed at a time, and the other two are reached by swiping. Default to the middle pane, simplify the relationship permutation text for space, display a few fewer options perhaps.

eta2: Yeah, I may've gone a little nuts. Here's a run at mobile view mockups. 640x60 because iPhone 5 is 640 pixels on the short axis and Dreamwidth likes things 60 pixels high. Stupid science-related memetic disorder.

eta3: One bit of feedback I got from someone who does this regularly is that having Help on the far right is an industry standard, so I need to swap "Help" and "Home" in desktop. Also, despite the lack of space for it, I need some kind of visual indicator of swipe on the mobile bar (which I knew but was kind of hoping I'd get away without), which means we're talking chevrons for that since that's well understood.

eta4: This is getting long, so a new post: Trending tags.

I've added a couple of feeds for a blogs and such of interest:

seattletransitblog_feed (Seattle Transit Blog)

friendshipping_feed (Friendshipping podcast)

crosscutnews_feed (Crosscut: Cascadian news)

seattlish_feed (Seattlish: Seattle news and politics blog)

The big list of existing feeds is here.