Ninja Dom's early observations

[Ninja Dom]

Hiya - Good work on what you've managed to achieve so far.

I've spent a good hour with the app and have made these first
observations.

I'm testing the app on an iPhone 2G (2.2.1) using WiFi. I had 45Mb of
Free Memory in my iPhone's RAM before launching Mobile GAF. I used the
app iStat to tell me my memory status.

1) Loads very quickly although a Title Screen is required.

2) User should be able to Sign In and Out using the app itself and not
through the Settings option outside of the app.

3) App should recognize that the user is signed in or not and display
the relevant info to the user.

4) Sticky threads should be separated and marked.

5) Loading a thread takes too long - far longer than the NeoGAF web
app.

6) Not all threads load. Some threads load and display nothing
(Upcoming Releases) and other threads hang the whole phone (Official
Punch Out thread).

7) The avatars of the posters are normally not displayed. Only a few
avatars are ever displayed in a thread. I cannot determine what causes
an avatar to be displayed or not.

8) I don't think that writing or images should be seen displayed
through the colored border at the bottom of the screen - I understand
that the opacity can be adjusted though.

9) I know it's early but the posters time and date isn't yet
displayed.

10) Thread title should be displayed in full at the top of each thread
page. It's currently displayed in the top bar but the title rarely
fits in there.

11) It's great that links open in Mobile GAF's own browser instead of
auto quitting the app and launching the Safari browser. It's just that
there isn't a landscape option for this browser.

12) Landscape option for the whole app would be a wonderful addition.
Especially for typing.

I know that the points I made can come across as being a bit negative
and I appreciate that this is ongoing work in process. Let me know
what you think.

Thanks.

[Justin Searls]

On May 18, 12:30 pm, Ninja Dom <ninja...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Hiya - Good work on what you've managed to achieve so far.
>
> I've spent a good hour with the app and have made these first
> observations.
>
> I'm testing the app on an iPhone 2G (2.2.1) using WiFi. I had 45Mb of
> Free Memory in my iPhone's RAM before launching Mobile GAF. I used the
> app iStat to tell me my memory status.
>
> 1) Loads very quickly although a Title Screen is required.

By title screen do you mean splash image? I disagree. Just like in the
early days of the web, splash pages tend to be both useless and
overused. As it is, the app launches in under a couple seconds, a
splash would require a delay

> 2) User should be able to Sign In and Out using the app itself and not
> through the Settings option outside of the app.

I imagine a login/logout button row on the main forum listing could
work. Not sure what I like for this yet. Really would rather not
clutter up the interface any more than necessary for this. The more I
think about this problem, the more I like the idea of keeping login
status silent and in the background. The app will never require anyone
login, and once you're logged in, you should just quietly stay logged
in. Not like you're allowed to have multiple accounts, anyway :)

> 3) App should recognize that the user is signed in or not and display
> the relevant info to the user.

This seems reasonable. Like above, I just really don't know how I want
to implement this in the UI.

> 4) Sticky threads should be separated and marked.

Noted, this is on the to-do list

> 5) Loading a thread takes too long - far longer than the NeoGAF web
> app.

This isn't always true. In low bandwidth situations, I've observed
MobileGAF as being significantly faster than the web app. When
bandwidth is readily available, MobileGAF is CPU constrained for now.

I need to go through a round of optimizing this, but frankly for the
number of transforms the (~220KB) GAF HTML needs to go through in
order to ultimately become styled text is pretty silly. Still, much
better than just loading 50 web views at a time.

Given how fast this thing is in the Simulator (fast!), I trust that
future iPhone revisions will also make this (and all style-intensive
Three20 apps faster). I realize "buy a faster phone" isn't all that
encouraging a response. I'll see what I can do to optimize the X/HT/ML
parsing and printing.

> 6) Not all threads load. Some threads load and display nothing
> (Upcoming Releases) and other threads hang the whole phone (Official
> Punch Out thread).

I'm convinced this has something to do with the host OS version. I've
experienced this as well, but only on 2.2.1. I have yet to have a
thread fail to load or render in the very latest OS revision.

Because I'm having a hard time repeating this, it'll be hard to figure
out what's exactly going on. The only thing I've noticed in image-
intensive threads is that (1) all images scale up or down until one
edge is 300px (this is just working around a constraint with Three20
for now) and (2) tons of images can make it slow to scroll as they all
finish loading.

> 7) The avatars of the posters are normally not displayed. Only a few
> avatars are ever displayed in a thread. I cannot determine what causes
> an avatar to be displayed or not.

Images only load while (1) the post is visible and (2) you aren't
scrolling. The underlying library is optimized to wait to load images
until they're visible and to suspend image loading during touches.
This actually makes good sense, because most iPhone apps perform
terribly when the UI thread doesn't get any love.

For what it's worth, in the latest build, I only rarely see an avatar
fail to load. If images aren't loading, try lifting your finger off
the screen for a second or two.

> 8) I don't think that writing or images should be seen displayed
> through the colored border at the bottom of the screen - I understand
> that the opacity can be adjusted though.

I don't like having a navigation bar, tab bar, and toolbar each rob 40
pixels of reading room. Being able to read-through the toolbar (which
itself doesn't present very useful information once you know what the
buttons are) is something I like quite a bit. Like you said, there's
no functional downside to just making it opaque in the settings.

> 9) I know it's early but the posters time and date isn't yet
> displayed.

Indeedy.

> 10) Thread title should be displayed in full at the top of each thread
> page.  It's currently displayed in the top bar but the title rarely
> fits in there.

Believe it or not, the plain-jane iPhone SDK doesn't give you more
than a dozen characters or so to play with. As it is, I've got a
custom label added there now that will auto-adjust the text, but
that's really about as small as I can get it without being
unreadable.

Unless I'm missing something, I believe you can thank Apple for not
supporting font size adjustment on multi-line labels, which is what
you'd need to always see the entire title here.

> 11) It's great that links open in Mobile GAF's own browser instead of
> auto quitting the app and launching the Safari browser. It's just that
> there isn't a landscape option for this browser.

Good idea. There's actually a chance that the web browser would
support landscape if I turned it on. I can give that a try.

> 12) Landscape option for the whole app would be a wonderful addition.
> Especially for typing.

Yeah, I agree. I'm promoting this item now that a few people have
asked for it.

> I know that the points I made can come across as being a bit negative
> and I appreciate that this is ongoing work in process. Let me know
> what you think.
>
> Thanks.

No worries; apologies if my replies come across as dry. Feel like I've
heard a few of these a couple dozen times by now. :)

- Juice