iPad testing of SS3

[Sigurd Magnusson]

Hi all, I've done some informal testing of the current SS3 interface on an iPad to gauge where we are. I don't expect hordes of iPad content authors but it's a useful activity nonetheless. Mostly, it works. In an ideal world, the interface would be a bit more responsive and adopt larger font sizes and a bit more of an iOSesque feel, but I think that it's great that you can even have the experience you get to date. Some aspects of the interface were slightly sluggish on this device (an original iPad 1) which I assume would be faster on an iPad2/3. However, very few actual problems exist, with things like TinyMCE and the general ability to add, edit, and remove pages all working okay.

The issues are at http://open.silverstripe.org/query?status=!closed&keywords=~ipad ... ready for other core devs to triage and do with them as they wish :)

Cheers,
Sigurd.

[Ingo Schommer]

That's encouraging! TinyMCE will most likely be the biggest blocker here,
and one we can't really fix ourselves. Spocke from TinyMCE calls
it "buggy" and "kind of works" as of Jan 2012:
http://www.tinymce.com/forum/viewtopic.php?id=21314
http://www.tinymce.com/forum/viewtopic.php?id=21314

On a related note, we have a crude abstraction layer
to plug in other rich text editors in 3.0,
so that might be a way forward as well.
Does anybody know of other iOS-compat RTEs
with a similar feature set than TinyMCE?

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[Ingo Schommer]

Sorry, wrong link.

Spocke: "It kind of works on iOS. You can edit and format contents on an iPad for example though a bit tricky and Safari tends to crash a lot. Nothing we can do about that tough since it's totally random. I would guess it leaks memory here and there hopefully future versions of Safari for iOS and also Android will work a lot better."
http://www.tinymce.com/forum/viewtopic.php?id=22209

[sig...@silverstripe.com]

I didnt discover that many issues with tinymce actually; in fact it was only outside tinymce that I discovered truly broken features, and the only blocker I can see is the lack of iOS file input support in HTML. Perhaps prolonged editing raises the memory leaks referred to.

It may just be worth upgrading tinymce just before SS3 release candidate 1 and sticking with what we got - I'm not sure that the work in plugging in another editor for iPad is worth it. Ain't it better we point out bugs we find to spocke and help him improve his editor?

Sig

On 13/03/2012, at 6:49 AM, Ingo Schommer <in...@silverstripe.com> wrote:

> Sorry, wrong link.
>
> Spocke: "It kind of works on iOS. You can edit and format contents on an iPad for example though a bit tricky and Safari tends to crash a lot. Nothing we can do about that tough since it's totally random. I would guess it leaks memory here and there hopefully future versions of Safari. for iOS and also Android will work a lot better."

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[Sam Minnée]

Agreed - from the sounds of the comments, the problems are with iPad Safari's WYSIWYG editing support, rather than the JS component that talks to them. If we stick with TinyMCE and keep it upgraded as 3.1, 3.2, etc, come out, then iPad editing will get better, either with TinyMCE upgrades or with iOS upgrades. (iOS 5.1 just came out, maybe that improves things).

Given that there are no longer any showstoppers, I'd suggest that we includes iPad in a 2nd tier testing category, where bugs can be identified and won't be marked as "wontfix", but that they won't block release, either, and they might be bumped down a priority category from where a similar bug in IE8 or Firefox would lie.

Even if 3.0 isn't particularly good on iPad, I think that moving the project's focus towards supporting the iPad is a good move.

Thanks,
Sam

[James Pluck]

Sam,

Can I suggest that we add Android tablet testing along with the iPad testing?  I'm finding that among my clients there is a roughly 60/40 split iPad/Android table usage.  

For example I've found that the current CMS screens don't really play nice with the small footprint Android devices.  I would really like to see SS3 working as well as possible given the rapid adoption of mobile devices in the current market.

Kind regards

James Pluck

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[Sigurd Magnusson]

James, perhaps you could do a little testing with a device and raise a couple of bugs like I did last night?

If they are the same issue as one mentioned last night, just add a ticket to an existing issue. I assume anything I raised yesterday would be applicable to Android tablets.

I think for the moment we'd be more interested in broken functionality over situations where the layout is a bit cramped or awkward.

I expect the cheaper prices and more open nature will enable Android tablets to gather considerable momentum, partly riding off the appeal of people wanting iPads, but they're certainly not going to be high on the usage charts in terms of CMS content authors for a while, I'm betting.

Cheers,

Sigurd.

[Sam Minnée]

It's probably worth testing on a large-format Android tablet if you want, but the focus right now is larger-format touch devices, like the iPad. Opening your CMS on your cellphone (or an android device as small as a cellphoen) is still an edge-case and we're not going to put any effort into that for the 3.0 release.

[James Pluck]

Sam,

I completely agree re the cellphones.  Doing anything based on a full web-screen on a small-footprint mobile device is an exercise in futility!  But definitely testing on a larger footprint device like the 7" and up tablets would be a good idea I think.  

Kind regards

James Pluck

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Courage Web Solutions Ltd
P: +64-7-929 4960
M: +64-21-236 6900
E: ja...@courage.co.nz

W: www.courage.co.nz

[James Pluck]

Sigurd,  Understood.  Although I imagine that live-blogging events and similar will be on the increase which may push the need for a tablet supportive interface.

Once my tablet arrives I'll start doing some more in-depth testing from the tablet pov. As you are no-doubt aware one of the main points where a web-interface can fail on a tablet device is around the use of dropdown or hover menu systems versus pulldown menus.  Although judicious use of long-touch on a tablet may help in this regard.

Kind regards

James Pluck

--
Courage Web Solutions Ltd
P: +64-7-929 4960
M: +64-21-236 6900
E: ja...@courage.co.nz

W: www.courage.co.nz

[Sigurd Magnusson]

Thanks James for offering to do some testing - most appreciated - and reply back on this thread when you've come up with observations.

Things like hovers and pulls downs etc should be have surfaced and be applicable to iPads so I look forward to you finding things that I didn't … I only spent a couple of hours last evening so I bet there's other stuff :)

Cheers,

Sigurd.

[Hamish Friedlander]

Every open source javascript WYSIWYG editor I looked at requires the browser to support contenteditable to function. Since contenteditable is pretty loosely defined, you also need some browser specific code to clean up cross-browser differences.

http://caniuse.com/contenteditable

iOS has only just added support as of 5.0, so it's not terribly surprising TinyMCE doesn't support it well. According to that post Ingo quoted it's still buggy anyway, in ways that are pretty impossible to work around. CanIUse says Android supports it as of 3.0, so as long as your tablet is 3.0 or 4.0 you'll be able to at least check it out.

For tablets that don't support contenteditable there's only two options - non-WYSIWYG editors (i.e. a Markdown textarea) or native apps. I'd definitely like to see that first as an option. It'd be nice if this was possible as a module, but maybe we're still too tightly integrated with TinyMCE.

Hamish Friedlander

[Sam Minnée]

Yeah, my thinking is that we basically track stability with TinyMCE rather than trying to do better than that, but that because stability is getting a lot better, we should be keeping an eye on the iPad stability off all the non-WYSIWYG parts of the CMS.

For 3.0 I see iPad and Android tablet support as a nice-to-have.

[zoao]

Have tested the CKEditor? Apparently works on iPad and seems more
stable than TinyMCE.

[Chris Hope]

I've never liked TinyMCE, mainly because copy and paste are problematic in Webkit based browsers. Having said that, current vanilla TinyMCE seems to work OK, but for some reason the same current version I tried in SS 3.0 alpha 2 didn't play as nicely and kept putting unwanted <span> tags around the pasted text. Perhaps this has been fixed in the beta version but I haven't tested it yet.

I have been considering creating a CKEditor module to use instead of TinyMCE for this exact reason. I spend a lot of time each day writing content and there's a fair amount of copy and paste and anything that saves time is a good thing :)

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[Sam Minnée]

OK, Ingo, you mentioned that there was a crude editor-abstraction API available. Would you be able to give Chris and others a few pointers about how they would go about creating a CKEditor module?

[Chris Hope]

I'm happy using TinyMCE if the paste issues are solved. I must try out the latest beta. In fact if it still does put spans around when pasting when the same version vanilla TinyMCE doesn't, then I suppose it's a bug really and I should file a bug report. If there are still paste issues that you (or I) can't solve, then I would consider creating a CKEditor module, but there's little sense doing extra work if we don't need to.

I'll do some tests early next week and if the paste issue is still there then I'll see if I can work out why.

Going back to iPad support, I can try out CKEditor on an iPad and see how well it works. Although I have an iPad myself I can't really think I'd ever be very likely to edit a site with it myself, but I suppose if I was away somewhere and had it, and needed to fix a content error, then it could be quite useful.

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[Ingo Schommer]

Hey Chris,

You can see the editor abstraction in HtmlEditorField.js:
https://github.com/silverstripe/sapphire/blob/master/javascript/HtmlEditorField.js
Editors have huge APIs, I've just lumped everything we need into one wrapper.
Haven't had the time to try it out with a different editor, but CKEditor
would be a great reference implementation!

Regarding "SS TinyMCE behaves differently from vanilla", there's
a lot of configuration being set, so it would be good if you can track it down to a specific setting.
We haven't patched up TinyMCE core, just added our own plugins for link+image insertion.
And we're running a fairly new version, less than two months old IIRC.

Ingo

On Thursday, 15 March 2012 at 1:41 AM, Chris Hope wrote:

> I'm happy using TinyMCE if the paste issues are solved. I must try out the latest beta. In fact if it still does put spans around when pasting when the same version vanilla TinyMCE doesn't, then I suppose it's a bug really and I should file a bug report. If there are still paste issues that you (or I) can't solve, then I would consider creating a CKEditor module, but there's little sense doing extra work if we don't need to.
>
> I'll do some tests early next week and if the paste issue is still there then I'll see if I can work out why.
>
> Going back to iPad support, I can try out CKEditor on an iPad and see how well it works. Although I have an iPad myself I can't really think I'd ever be very likely to edit a site with it myself, but I suppose if I was away somewhere and had it, and needed to fix a content error, then it could be quite useful.
>
>
>
> On 15 March 2012 13:34, Sam Minnée <s...@silverstripe.com (mailto:s...@silverstripe.com)> wrote:
> > OK, Ingo, you mentioned that there was a crude editor-abstraction API available. Would you be able to give Chris and others a few pointers about how they would go about creating a CKEditor module?
> >
> > On 15/03/2012, at 1:12 PM, Chris Hope wrote:
> >
> > > I've never liked TinyMCE, mainly because copy and paste are problematic in Webkit based browsers. Having said that, current vanilla TinyMCE seems to work OK, but for some reason the same current version I tried in SS 3.0 alpha 2 didn't play as nicely and kept putting unwanted <span> tags around the pasted text. Perhaps this has been fixed in the beta version but I haven't tested it yet.
> > >
> > > I have been considering creating a CKEditor module to use instead of TinyMCE for this exact reason. I spend a lot of time each day writing content and there's a fair amount of copy and paste and anything that saves time is a good thing :)
> >
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[Chris Hope]

Thanks for that. I'll have a look next week and see what I come up with.

Cheers,

Chris

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