i can access glocals on my iphone using safari.

Several months ago I have implemented such a facility myself and it took me less then one week of my spare time using a so called sceen-scraping and a bunch of simple regular expressions to retrieve all the nessesary info =) I did it just for fun for my own use and for a couple of friends. I do not think it can be shared somehow since it needs your credentials to act on behalf of you but it shows up that this can be easily achived. It's defenetely far easier then to implement a full-fledged website that the main site is.

Hi guys.

I know some of our pages / functions don't work well on mobile phones, and this is something we intend to tackle very soon.

Vitaly - can you elaborate a bit?
What can be easily acheived?  Optimizing the site for mobile phones, building a 'mini' version, something else?

Thanks

Oded

Simplicity and visibility of most important items: upcoming events, messages and requests...

The best one to look at:
http://www.meetup.com/?set_mobile=on

Other examples:

http://wap.yahoo.com/w/ygo-mail/home.bphttp://sn101w.snt101.mail.live.com/m

http://m.facebook.com

http://m.20min.ch/

http://m.usgang.ch/de/regionevents/display/6

...and http://www.opera.com/mobile/

PS: I even use mobile versions on my desktops :)

Great. Can you access m.glocals.com as well?

:)

Cheda - who is this question addressed to?

m.glocals.com does not exist yet...

Oded - I meant building a 'mini' version. This is how it looks in my case (a home page running in debug mode right on my desktop).

Thanks Vitaly.

The screenshot you attached is a mini version you created for glocals?

O

Sorry, a newbie on the forums... It was intended as a funny response to epicure's comment, in which he did not answer my original question... You can delete it.

Oded - The intention was to play a little with mobile technologies and to build a simple prototype of a system that can grab data from any social network which does not expose its API. And since the glocals was around I plugged the system to it. I had no intension to make it puplicly available so you have no point to worry about. I am just showing here that it appears to be a relatively simple task.

Thanks Vitaly.

I'm not worried about you making it publicly available :-)  I'd love to quickly create and launch a 'mobile phone friendly' version of glocals and I was curious to know whether the screenshot was a mockup or an actual 'App' you created.

O 

It's the real app. I wasn't using it for a while so some of the links are broken coz you have changed them I guess (I didn't check the logs yet). It also has some issues (like font sizes for different screens and opera mini ajax workaround are yet to be done) and of cource it's just a prototype (it has never been carefully tested). It was easy btw to plug it to glocals also because you tend to use ajax calls frequently which makes things a lot easier and I didn't have to resort to a brute sceen-scraping in most cases =)

Interesting. I was thinking about the same thing earlier.

My immediate thought for extracting data was to use the web GUI testing framework Selenium (seleniumhq.org) which I used for similar tasks.

Interesting that you can actually use the "private" AJAX API. Time permitted digging any further into that... Is this Apache Wicket you are using?

Regarding a simple mobile UI presentation you should have a look at iUI (http://code.google.com/p/iui/)

Cheers,
Tim

   Tim - Selenium is for testing and a little bit heavy as I could see. Regarding the look & feel I was inpired by Android (I like Android & just hate Apple ;)

oooh, this is very interesting and something I'd love to work on in collaboration with others. I'm actually learning to program the iPhone, so maybe we could make an iPhone app, Vitaly's position notwithstanding.

Of course, another option is to make a slimmer, svelter version of the CSS for glocals that targets mobile devices....

You guys are funny!

My current shopping question is Android vs. iPhone.

I might even wait until mid June for the iPhone 4G... However, the openness of Android is definitely a plus for developing great apps (and so is Java).
=> Before we start collaborating, we need to decide on a platform first ;-)

Vitaly, Selenium is quite nice for repetitive jobs on any website. Even complex table grids with AJAX sort and refreshing can savely be browsed. Combined with the Python API it's just slick.

Hi guys

@Zonker - An Iphone app would be nice, but I want to first create a mobile phone friendly version that works on all mobile phones.

@ Tim & Vitaly - Our plan is to have our tech guys create a minimized version for mobiles, so any tips or advice on how best to do this and/or which platform to use would be much appreciated.

Thanks alot

Oded

@oded - you don't need a platform. you just need to decide what you want on the mobile device and then create CSS for it. That's it. Done. You should be able to do this in about a week or two. Check this out for ideas: http://www.elementfusion.com/tutorial-optimizing-your-website-for-mobile-devices

As always, happy to help with this if asked

  It's not always true. This advise is good if you just want to make your site available for mobiles and you need to have it quickly. This way you get it up and running in a week or so (I would call it "mobile friendly version"). But if you need a truly mobile version with an enhanced mobile usability making a mobile experience really enjoyable the CSS way is not enough. You have to change the site layout substantially, rethink the navigation principles and maybe add some extra functionality available/needed on a gadget.

If a site is designed properly using CSS, then yes, you can indeed completely change the look/feel/etc with only CSS. That's what CSS was designed for - one HTML file can have vastly different layouts just by changing the CSS file - one for screen, one for presentation, one for mobile devices, one for print.... 

Using CSS you can hide the elements you don't want/need on a mobile device. You can rearrange the elements in a way that makes sense.

The 'problem' is that many (most?) websites still don't know how to use CSS effectively.

The CSS technology is good thing up the point when you rely on it too much. I can't even remeber how many sleepless nights I spent fixing CSS problems ;) It highly depends on the site layout complexity and if you want to have the best of desktop and mobile worlds just by having different CSS rules you may end up with a maintenance nightmare (having said that even the "big glocals" is not equaly friendly for all major desktop browsers). But I agree with the whole idea that the glocals is better off having both version in the same place. You can change the look by using CSS when it's appropriate or somehow differently if the CSS way is not enough (e.g. because of the browser incompatibilities).

Thanks guys.

So the options are either to create custom CSS on glocals.com for mobiles, or to create a seperate site (like m.glocals.com) for mobiles.

Correct?

Oded

A seperate site doesn't mean that you have to use a different programming language, a different framework, a different hosting and different developers to put things together. Right? You have a lot of options besides using a different set of CSS rules and your tech guys should know better what will be more appropriate in some particulat case. I would maybe just note that it seems to be better having a different domain like m.glocals.com then to let the site code autodedect a client agent. This would leave the user a choice whether he/she wants to use a full or a mobile friendly version.