TiddlyWiki for Mobile

[Adam Antios]

Having spent a lot of time trying to use TiddlyWiki on Android and after seeing that a lot of people have the same issues I can't help but wonder what are the plans regarding the development of a full working solution exlusively targeting phones?

Is there any reason why this has not been implemented yet? Is there any technical difficulty or is it just not a priority?

[@TiddlyTweeter]

Erm ... this thread seems to have no title! :-)

[Adam Antios]

Oh, you are right! I fixed it.

[Jed Carty]

I of course can't talk for the full dev team so this is just my reasoning. But my answer is both it is technically difficult and not a priority.

First, contemporary Phones are designed to be limited. Touch screens are, for people who can use them (I can barely use touch screens so I am a bit biased), very good at a very limited set of input functions and very bad at everything else. Phone designers seem to have taken this and decided it is a good thing and run with it (I could probably write a very long post about just that, but that is off topic). Editing text is one of the things that they are bad at. I am used to using computers that I have customised a lot to work well for me, this makes using a phone to edit something like a wiki a very unattractive prospect. So I haven't bothered to try and make anything to work with a phone.

Second, phones seem like they are designed to be difficult to use for local productive work. Almost all of the development tools for android and iOS are designed around delivering content to a phone from a remote location and having the phone be a more or less passive recipient of the delivered content. They are easy to make things for where the phone is essentially a thin terminal for a remote server, but local content outside of the built-in media libraries is difficult to use. Some of this comes from the security model of phones which treats the person using the phone as an adversary (locked-down app stores aren't reasonable if you own the hardware. Sorry, some ranting is going to slip in). One way that this comes up is in access to the local file system and how aggressively sand-boxed applications are.

Third, developing for phones uses different languages and for the most part what you can use is pretty restricted. Unlike osx, windows and linux where I can write something in node (or python, or c) and then generate executables that will mostly work the same on all three operating systems without changes to the code, anything for iOS or android needs to be written only for iOS or android. There are some exceptions but in general that is true. If someone can find a way to compile an apk for android the way that I can compile for desktop operating systems that would let us make a version for android, but otherwise it would be a pretty large project and there are no guarantees that it would even work after the next update with how permissions on phones can change. For now the best option that I have, and the only one that has any reasonable expectation of working in a year or 5 years is to have a server that the phone connects to and use a browser like on a desktop. It isn't a good solution but I don't have any others.

Those are my thoughts and reasoning anyway. Others probably feel differently.

[TonyM]

Adam Antios

Can you list at a high level where you are finding tiddlywiki on android falling down?

I support Jeds comments and add there are solutions such as PhoneGap that try and be a dev environment for multiple phone platforms, but it seems they are always coding to the lowest common denominator of phones, specialists may have a different view to me.

Since TiddlyWiki lives in a browser it is in fact a long way to being a universal phone app, already, except perhaps in its integration with the phone such as geo-location, consuming sms etc...

If we new a bit better where it is failing you we may have some answers.

Tony

[Adam Antios]

Hello Tony,

when I press the more actions button in a tiddler then I am not able to see the full window listing those actions and no matter what I do then without seeing them I can't press them.

Also when I move through tabs in the sidebar in Android it is very slow.

Generally the layout of my TiddlyWiki doesn't scale nicely and it is very cumbersome to use.

Lastly editing tiddlers on a TiddlyWiki in a phone is very painstaking.

I want to point out that I used it on Firefox as I believe it is intended, although having tried it on Chrome and Firefox Focus was exactly the same experience.

-Adam

[TonyM]

Adam,

So you are using tiddlywiki out of the box on mobile firefox. and there you are finding performance and user interface difficulties? OK

Creating entering text strings, editing blockes of  text is a kind of activity that small screen touch devices do not do well with, in many different applications and apps not only tiddlywiki. Most apps have very little input that is not a button or drop down, and when it is, such as user ID and Password we always find it fiddly. If there is an input field it is often the only one visible at a time and then you move on to the next when finished.

All this is to say your observation is I believe not about tiddlywiki but about mobile first use.

TiddlyWiki has one of the most user configurable user interfaces and I may suggest it is within your power to design tiddlywikis that do favour mobile usage. 

See the discussions about material theme etc... 

http://j.d.material.tiddlyspot.com/

http://j.d.simplemobile.tiddlyspot.com/

Do these not help you build mobile first wikis?

Regards

Tony

[Adam Antios]

Tony if you check the thread you referenced then you will see that I have commented extensively there because that is my main theme!

Nonetheless I tried many themes on mobile and obviously the vanilla one.

I want to mention, given how many people use their phones for things like that, that I mainly asked to see why there is not an app interface for TiddlyWiki that makes it easier to handle all the editing on a phone.

I wanted to see what is the opinion of the dev team regarding this and not to complain.

I don't have any issues with TiddlyWiki I was just curious because you understand that these days devs a lot of times try to provide a mobile interface even before they have a desktop one, not that I agree with that...

Thanks for your answers though they were illuminating

Cheers,

Adam

[TonyM]

Adam,

Understood. I suppose I am suggesting it is all possible with out coding, but it would certainly help more if we placed more importance on mobile use.

Regards

Tony

[@TiddlyTweeter]

I think it a good question. A very good question.

To answer properly I'd like to take some time to think into it more.

There are several issues to un-bundle. For instance, your comment about the "More" menu is spot-on, but can also be a PITA on desktop too. So some issues on Mobiles are also issues on Desktop. The limited screen space on mobiles simply highlight those existing problems more.

Another issue, quite central, is whether TW on Android should aim to replicate the motherload? Whilst JD has done a great job in the CSS for Mobile, there is a bigger issue about whether for Mobile the actual functioning, the code of doing stuff, needs tweaks.

Jed's three points I think are accurate. And excellent to work from. But the implication of them he gives is far too negative. I think his facts are spot-on, but his view of what they imply is very partial.

IMO, Android is important to support WELL. Not least for wider adoption of TW since its one of the most widely used OS on the planet.

Best wishes
Josiah