jQuery Mobile Implementation Of SubjectsPlus

[Gavin]

Hello everyone,

I have a *start* on a jQuery Mobile implementation of SubjectsPlus. I'm trying to make it so anyone with a SubjectsPlus installation can simply download and extract the tarball of my code into their sp/subjects directory, do very minimal customization of a few files and have a mobile version of their research guides. My work in progress can be viewed at:

   http://www.lib.cwu.edu/subjects/mobile/

If you don't have a smart phone with a web browser, I know of one emulator for Macs that you can download, iPhoney. (IMPORTANT: Make sure you deselect the "Zoom to Fit" option from the View menu or mobile sites won't look correct; not sure why this is the default or why it can't save this option) If anyone knows of any other similar emulators, please let me know!

If anyone is interested in trying it out with their SubjectsPlus installation, I would be happy to provide the code. Keep in mind however, it is still a work in progress, it may not work if you've done a lot of modifying of the SubjectsPlus source code and not everything has been implemented yet. But if you try it out and have some issues, please provide the url of your SubjectsPlus site so I can troubleshoot it.


- Gavin

[Mariela Gunn]

Gavin,

This sounds awesome. It'll be very useful to have a mobile version.
Can't wait to check it out and test it!

~Mariela

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[Andrew Darby]

That's fantastic, Gavin!  Definitely would love to roll this into the main sp distribution once it's ready.

Andrew

[Gavin Spomer]

Cool, I'm glad there's some interest in this. I'll keep plugging away at it. :)

[Sigrid Kelsey]

Agreed- I have had this project on my backburner for a while, and
haven't had a chance to start- thank you!

[Gavin Spomer]

I know what you mean, Sigrid. I think I took a stab at this a year or two ago, but was just too busy with other stuff & I think jQuery Mobile was still in Beta (and indeed had some problems). My new boss actually wants me to concentrate more on web programming now, even though I'm a systems programmer. I have no problem with that, I love web programming! :)

- Gavin

[Gavin Spomer]

Though it's not complete, I'm at a point where I have a tarball of my code for people to download and test what I have so far:

   http://www.lib.cwu.edu/~spomerg/mobile.tar.gz

Feel free to download the code, read the readme.txt file, try it out and tell me what you think. Not everything is implemented yet, so keep that in mind. It also might be a good idea (or maybe someone has a better idea) to add feedback to this thread so we don't repeat each other.

I look forward to any and all feedback. :)


- Gavin

[Gavin Spomer]

I see one problem right of the bat. If you have the "pretty urls"/mod_rewrite stuff going, it won't work because it will think "mobile" is a guide subject. I'm looking into the correct think to add to the .htaccess file to get around this...

[Gavin Spomer]

Okay, this can be remedied easily with adding an .htaccess file to your sp/subjects/mobile directory with the following line:

   RewriteEngine off

I'll add this and re-archive the tarball. Thanks to anyone who is/will help with testing this. :)


- Gavin

[Gavin Spomer]

Hi everyone. Just wanted to know if anyone downloaded and tried this out? If anyone did, how'd it go? Did it work? Did it suck? (LOL) I would like some feedback if anyone has some.

   http://www.lib.cwu.edu/~spomerg/mobile.tar.gz

Thanks y'all.


- Gavin

[Andrew Darby]

Hi Gavin,

Sorry for not looking sooner . . . this is great! Plug and play,
nice. Some thoughts:

It would be nice to add the ability to exclude/include pluslets in
mobile via the regular subject guide screen (instead of, or addition
to, the $exclude_ids array in the config file). I'll look into that
for the next version.

I see you have mobile browser detection coming soon . . . that would
be good. I wonder if the mobile folder should live under subjects, or
be parallel?

Anyway, this is really cool, seems to work well. I see that this is
available on the CWU site--is it publicly linked yet? Have you gotten
any feedback from users?

Andrew

[Gavin Spomer]

Great, I'm glad it worked with another SubsPlus install. :)

Yes, GUI would be better than editing a config file for pluslet exclusion, I agree.

I've thought a lot about mobile browser detection, and whether it's better to automatically redirect, provide links to/from mobile/regular versions or some combination of both. I haven't come to a conclusion yet. I think it depends on the application somewhat too. Which do you think would be better for SubjectsPlus?

The mobile.tar.gz isn't publicly linked yet. I was hoping to have more testing done from people on our SubjectsPlus Google group here. :) I certainly would like some feedback, but you are the only one that I know of that has downloaded and tried it out.

- Gavin