storageforum App

[sedrosken]

Would it be at all possible to develop an appear specifically for browsing storageforum at a greater speed and with more convenience than simply using one's web browser? Similar to Tapatalk for the android forums? Browsing speeds in Dolphin on my unlocked Illusion are... adequate... but I often find myself wishing it were a wee bit faster.

Off topic: I used Android Area51's special Proclaim ROM (Proclaim is the same as the Illusion, but with different carriers). It is much better than the stock ROM. It's still gingerbread, though, and gingerbread is hella unstable. I can't go ten minutes without something in the background crashing. I'm very disappointed no one made an ICS package for it. I've searched high and low and found nothing. If the instability gets too bad, I might find myself figuring out how to put together such a package.

 

[Handruin]

Would it be at all possible to develop an appear specifically for browsing storageforum at a greater speed and with more convenience than simply using one's web browser? Similar to Tapatalk for the android forums? Browsing speeds in Dolphin on my unlocked Illusion are... adequate... but I often find myself wishing it were a wee bit faster.

Off topic: I used Android Area51's special Proclaim ROM (Proclaim is the same as the Illusion, but with different carriers). It is much better than the stock ROM. It's still gingerbread, though, and gingerbread is hella unstable. I can't go ten minutes without something in the background crashing. I'm very disappointed no one made an ICS package for it. I've searched high and low and found nothing. If the instability gets too bad, I might find myself figuring out how to put together such a package.

Simple answer, yes. This vbulletin software has a mobile/app development kit. The longer answer is that a recent generous donation from ddrueding has given us a license for vbulletin version 5 along with a license for the mobile app development suite. In order to make this a reality, I need to first get off my ass and make this happen upgrade the entire forum to version 5 of the bulletin board software. Next, I need to begin taking their mobile app SDK framework and publish an official storageforum app in the Google Play app store (and maybe other Android app stores). As for an iOS app from Apple's iTunes store...that's not likely to happen for many reasons. First, I don't have a Mac product with OSX in order to write the official app and the last time I tried to get OSX running on a VM was a PITA. Second, Apple has costly fees for putting an app into their market place which are reoccurring yearly. Google has a small one-time fee which is very palpable and I'm not aware of any reoccurring fees. Since the mobile apps will be targeted for free download given our limited audience, it makes limited to no sense in considering an iOS app.

 

[sedrosken]

I never mentioned iOS. I just wanted an Android app. It'd be awesome if it ran on Gingerbread because I currently can't get anything newer to run on the device. A bit on that... I'm going to see about editing the package for the GTab to see about making it run on the "phone". Their hardware is very similar, the GTab just drives a far larger display. Both run a 1GHz ARMv7 with 512 MB RAM. Gingerbread is very unstable and locks up all the time.

 

[Handruin]

I never mentioned iOS. I just wanted an Android app. It'd be awesome if it ran on Gingerbread because I currently can't get anything newer to run on the device. A bit on that... I'm going to see about editing the package for the GTab to see about making it run on the "phone". Their hardware is very similar, the GTab just drives a far larger display. Both run a 1GHz ARMv7 with 512 MB RAM. Gingerbread is very unstable and locks up all the time.

I never said you did mention it. I was adding information for anyone else who might read your thread that the mobile app suite once deployed might not likely have an iOS app. I did address your question regarding the Android app in my first post. Android would be the only app developed once I get some time to crank it out. I don't know yet what level of Android backward compatibility it will offer until I look into the SDK/framework offered by vbulletin. The app is not built from scratch, we use their existing tools.

 

[sedrosken]

Looking back that's obvious. Sorry about that.

I really hate Gingerbread. Would much rather compile an ICS rom myself. I would too, if I knew the first thing about doing so.

 

[Tannin]

Excuse dumb person here. WTF is this caper with specialised "apps" for every damn thing? It's a web page. Use a web browser FFS! If your web browser is too slow, get a better browser. If that is too hard 'coz you have to break out of your locked-down phone/tablet/other POS, get a better phone/tablet/other POS.

The whole point of the friggin' Internet is that you can go to anywhere from anywhere. If you don't like technology that lets you view any page from any computer, move to China. You will be happy there.

 

[Tea]

^ Excuse Tannin, he is very grumpy tonight.

(Err ... Same as every other night, really.)

But he means well.

Err ... OK, so that was a fib. He just likes making trouble. Ignore him. That's what I do. Been ignoring the grumpy bugger for years.

 

[Howell]

Much longer post eaten by the system. Look up others attempts to upgrade from G. I think LiamC tried it. You may find while many things are possible, not everything is profitable.

 

[Handruin]

Excuse dumb person here. WTF is this caper with specialised "apps" for every damn thing? It's a web page. Use a web browser FFS! If your web browser is too slow, get a better browser. If that is too hard 'coz you have to break out of your locked-down phone/tablet/other POS, get a better phone/tablet/other POS.

The whole point of the friggin' Internet is that you can go to anywhere from anywhere. If you don't like technology that lets you view any page from any computer, move to China. You will be happy there.

It will remain a webpage. Don't use the app.

 

[LunarMist]

Excuse dumb person here. WTF is this caper with specialised "apps" for every damn thing? It's a web page. Use a web browser FFS! If your web browser is too slow, get a better browser. If that is too hard 'coz you have to break out of your locked-down phone/tablet/other POS, get a better phone/tablet/other POS.

The whole point of the friggin' Internet is that you can go to anywhere from anywhere. If you don't like technology that lets you view any page from any computer, move to China. You will be happy there.

:rofl::salut: [oldfart]Well apparently in the future there will be no more personal computers because nobody creates anything, at least in the US. Nobody needs storage, because everything will be in the clouds.
And everything in the world will be controlled by a stupid smartphone and a special, buggy app. Pretty soon one will not be able to flush the toilet without a wireless app.[/oldfart]

 

[ddrueding]

The webpage is fine if you have any two of the following: a computer, a fast internet connection, plenty of time.

The App is just an optimized view of the forums for slower devices with slower internet connections and smaller screens.

 

[Mercutio]

I believe the trend of building specialized single-site web viewers originates and is necessitated by older iThings, where some combination of missing Flash support and relatively low buy-in from web developers for mobile-friendly sites meant a fairly broken web experience.

Things have mostly gotten better, except that now the Fruit people expect Fruit-ified mobile versions; I've actually met a few who are not aware that they can use Safari to access the web, probably because the person who explained their device to them told them to go to the app store and download something for the sites they go to.

 

[Stereodude]

The App is just an optimized view of the forums for slower devices with slower internet connections and smaller screens.

More like something for the oblivious. Modern devices have a web browser and this forum isn't exactly heavy on the processing or graphics side. What exactly need to be optimized?

 

[timwhit]

I've been using Firefox lately on my S3 and this site performs pretty poorly. Scrolling is really choppy and slow and the page tends to redraw itself a couple times after loading a thread.

I never had this issue with Chrome on Android.

 

[Stereodude]

Firefox is a pretty piss poor browser under Android IMHO. It's barely usable.

 

[timwhit]

Chrome was pissing me off. Anytime I try to enter text in the address bar or anywhere else it's extremely choppy. What browser are you using?

 

[Stereodude]

Chrome

 

[Tannin]

The App is just an optimized view of the forums for slower devices with slower internet connections and smaller screens.

Err .. you mean .. sort of like a properly designed web page that loads quickly? Gosh! What an interesting idea!

(No disrespect to WebfuMeister Handruin here, just to the reams of useless, bloated, crappified code that nearly all web-content software generates.)

 

[ddrueding]

Indeed. vBulletin is probably one of the best forum management packages out there, but there is a fair bit of bloat in what it generates. I'm interested in seeing what the "App" version can do in terms of mobile performance. Of course, now he's put himself under a bit more pressure to get it out. Before only he and I knew it was coming.

 

[Handruin]

Err .. you mean .. sort of like a properly designed web page that loads quickly? Gosh! What an interesting idea!

(No disrespect to WebfuMeister Handruin here, just to the reams of useless, bloated, crappified code that nearly all web-content software generates.)

The mobile themed version of SF does load quicker than the regular page but it still doesn't perform as well as an app would. For most if not all websites I browse regularly via a mobile or tablet device I seek out an equivalent app because it almost always performs better than any of the three basic web browsers rendering their native website regardless of Android or iOS. I agree that the code is bloated and could stand some rework with mobile or tablet in mind. I also feel most mobile and tablet web browsers could stand an overhaul to perform better or mobile/table processors need improvement. I've yet to even see an Android device that hasn't felt laggy in the UI. They've gotten better but still have a ways to go to get to where Apple and Microsoft are for UI experience but that could be its own topic of debate.

There is a clear issue that most websites even with "mobile" themes just aren't truly built for mobile or tablet (ala Javascript). The web moves at a slow pace in turning with the tides so rather than force it to turn rapidly, the mobile and table market should work to meet it 2/3rds of the way there since it seems every other week a new device is released with 4 more cores and a screen the size of my 50" plasma. Despite reading that analysts, tech sites, and various news sites all wanting us to believe that no one wants a computer anymore and only wants a table or mobile, the web really has not synchronized with what mobile/table OSes have brought to the table. My web browsing experiences are always better on my desktop or laptop compared to any mobile or tablet device I've used. Even though my laptop or desktop are older than any mobile or tablet device I own, they still perform better. Why hasn't the experience improved in mobile-land with any of the major players?

 

[Howell]

More client-side processing means lower battery life?

 

[Handruin]

More client-side processing means lower battery life?

There's probably a way to measure it but if the browser itself it poor in processing all the client-side scripting (Javascript) then there could be an argument for that. With a dedicated app, you can gain network efficiency by not having to send over all the styles, images, etc but rather have the app manage them locally on the device. There could be some battery savings there in not having to use the network wireless connection so frequently.

 

[Tannin]

You could gain a heluvalot more performance - and not just n bRand X telephones - if the industry learned to code HTML properly in the first place. It isn't hard! Rule One is get rid of all the crappy Javascript! Sure, there are somethings for which JS is the only sensible answer, but the average website now consists of 5% content and 95% assorted bandwidth-hogging, buggy bloat, mosty of it Javascript, and nearly all of it readily replaceable by a little simple CSS and a few used-but-servicable brain cells.

Not that anyone is going to do that. The industry is so far up itself that you coul... <BLERT!>

 

[Tea]

Sorry about that. I just hit Tannin over the head with an elderly ASUS netbook, that being the closest blunt implement that came readily to paw. He seems to be sleeping peacefully now.

(Err ... is it normal for sleeping humans to bleed from the ear? I may have overdone it a little. Not to worry. He'll certainly thank me when he wakes up for saving him from saying something he would have regretted later. Well, most likely he will. Certainly he'll feel very thankful even if he is a little too shy to say so. Probably. At least it's certainly a possibility. Or maybe not. Anyone want to buy a slightly used netbook? One owner, hardly ever used. Elderly, small screen, but goes well and still packs a punch. Err .. possibly I could have phrased that a little better.)

 

[Handruin]

You could gain a heluvalot more performance - and not just n bRand X telephones - if the industry learned to code HTML properly in the first place. It isn't hard! Rule One is get rid of all the crappy Javascript! Sure, there are somethings for which JS is the only sensible answer, but the average website now consists of 5% content and 95% assorted bandwidth-hogging, buggy bloat, mosty of it Javascript, and nearly all of it readily replaceable by a little simple CSS and a few used-but-servicable brain cells.

Not that anyone is going to do that. The industry is so far up itself that you coul... <BLERT!>

You are definitely right that the performance of a website can improve by making it simple and coded properly. The tricky part is figuring out how much usability and user experience can be sacrificed/gained in order to gain a small percentage of improvement. Modern browsers on desktops/laptops have more than enough power to manage the client-side portion of the work but the mobile/tablet frontier doesn't (yet).

 

[Tannin]

Quite so. My view is that coders, and in particular people who develop automated coding systems and frameworks, are terminally infected with featuritis, with the result that we get vast, bulky, buggy code that, in reality, probably isn't much easier to implement than a more focused, simpler, lean 'n mean code base would be. Of course, that's not going to happen. People are stupid, and here we see living proof of the proposition in the very fact that we are talking today about needing a dedicated app to use even a very simple, mostly text-based website. How broken is the Internet when you can't get decent performance for even the simplest of sites? (I mean "simple" in the sense of "no demanding graphics or animations" There is considerable complexity to a site like Storage Forum, obviously, but the great bulk of it is handled by the server. On the client side, it should be perfectly usable on a 386.)

 

[Handruin]

Quite so. My view is that coders, and in particular people who develop automated coding systems and frameworks, are terminally infected with featuritis, with the result that we get vast, bulky, buggy code that, in reality, probably isn't much easier to implement than a more focused, simpler, lean 'n mean code base would be. Of course, that's not going to happen. People are stupid, and here we see living proof of the proposition in the very fact that we are talking today about needing a dedicated app to use even a very simple, mostly text-based website. How broken is the Internet when you can't get decent performance for even the simplest of sites? (I mean "simple" in the sense of "no demanding graphics or animations" There is considerable complexity to a site like Storage Forum, obviously, but the great bulk of it is handled by the server. On the client side, it should be perfectly usable on a 386.)

Featuritis along with "I need to create a reason to prove why my company can still exist" are both concerning problems that aren't new here. How else does vbulletin continue to justify selling a "new" product without putting in new bloat features. It's hard to market things like performance and streamlining as features...but I'd buy software upgrades just for those reasons if they could show concretely that it was there.

I don't think it's entirely that people are stupid (maybe a little). Sure, Mercutio's example does paint that picture but when people who aren't tech-savvy are given an appliance with a simple button (app) that does everything they need, why would they think they should browse the web the way you or I are used to? When mobile devices with some kind of internet capability started breaking into the market, bandwidth was at a premium and performance was at a snail's-pace. If the mobile market needed to work around these limitations by inventing an app that does some of the work locally (graphics, rendering, etc) vs transmitting all of that data from a website, sure it made some sense to do it this way. The app also simplifies things in several ways that you don't get from browsing the page directly. I think we are suffering from the leftovers of this market figuring itself out and there still isn't a great acceptance of properly-functioning mobile themed websites. I often find myself more as a consumer than a producer of content while browsing on my mobile or tablet. If I want to write anything more than a couple lines I wait until I get to a proper desktop/laptop. Many websites I visit offer a frustrating experience on either my mobile or tablet.

Have you looked into the HTML5 Boilerplate framework? I've looked into it a bit and I find it to be a nice compromise of what we discussed. It's probably still to laden with Javascript (JQuery) for your liking but I think it handles it well.

 

[Chewy509]

You could gain a heluvalot more performance - and not just n bRand X telephones - if the industry learned to code HTML properly in the first place. It isn't hard! Rule One is get rid of all the crappy Javascript! Sure, there are somethings for which JS is the only sensible answer, but the average website now consists of 5% content and 95% assorted bandwidth-hogging, buggy bloat, mosty of it Javascript, and nearly all of it readily replaceable by a little simple CSS and a few used-but-servicable brain cells.

Not that anyone is going to do that. The industry is so far up itself that you coul... <BLERT!>

Agree 100%. As someone who browses the 'net with JS turned off (via NoScript) it's becoming more disturbing how many websites use JS even for the most basic of functions. (Heck, any blog on blogger.com presents you with a blank page when JS is turned off). The new slashdot web site is completely broken with JS off, but the 'classic site works perfectly with JS off.

Following on what you've said, when I did the last release of gMTP a few months ago I redid the website (for it) removing all javascript from it, and I still consider it functional. (It's HTML5 + CSS3). For example, on the features page, have a look at the thumbnailed images and how they popup when mousing over (yep, CSS2 and CSS3 allows for that, zero JS needed), and yet other websites will bring in a few hundred KB of JS code just to do the same thing....

 

[Chewy509]

Quite so. My view is that coders, and in particular people who develop automated coding systems and frameworks, are terminally infected with featuritis, with the result that we get vast, bulky, buggy code that, in reality, probably isn't much easier to implement than a more focused, simpler, lean 'n mean code base would be.

Not trying to start a us vs them, but when at Uni there where 2 distinct groups of Software Developer in the Software Engineering track - web developers and system application developers.

Web developers where IMHO a bunch of monkeys (no offense Tea, actually you shouldn't be offended since you're an ape, and not a monkey), your though it was okay to bring in several MB of JS code for their site and when faced with, sorry site broken when JS is off (requirement under highest level web accessibility guidelines that sites are functional with JS off, so screen readers work predictably), would whinge and cry about not being allowed to use JS to bring beauty and functionality to the site. Also the other trend I noticed, was that most web developers where from art/design backgrounds and not CS/Nerd/Geek backgrounds as well... (make of that, what you will).

The system application developers actually cared about compute resources, what libraries they used, etc. The complete opposite. (Mind you, most were doing C/C++ in embedded or other resource restricted environments).

 

[Handruin]

Agree 100%. As someone who browses the 'net with JS turned off (via NoScript) it's becoming more disturbing how many websites use JS even for the most basic of functions. (Heck, any blog on blogger.com presents you with a blank page when JS is turned off). The new slashdot web site is completely broken with JS off, but the 'classic site works perfectly with JS off.

Following on what you've said, when I did the last release of gMTP a few months ago I redid the website (for it) removing all javascript from it, and I still consider it functional. (It's HTML5 + CSS3). For example, on the features page, have a look at the thumbnailed images and how they popup when mousing over (yep, CSS2 and CSS3 allows for that, zero JS needed), and yet other websites will bring in a few hundred KB of JS code just to do the same thing....

Your website is an example of a page that's fine to browse on my desktop, but on my phone it's less than ideal. It's manageable mostly because there isn't a lot of content but even the things like the image popups don't work properly on my mobile device. They popup, but won't go away. I also need to pinch/zoom navigate to look around the single page. I'm not suggesting I'd want an app for your website, but it doesn't take into account mobile devices for usability. Sure you've created a page with limited to no JS, but the issue at hand still remains.

 

[Handruin]

Not trying to start a us vs them, but when at Uni there where 2 distinct groups of Software Developer in the Software Engineering track - web developers and system application developers.

Web developers where IMHO a bunch of monkeys (no offense Tea, actually you shouldn't be offended since you're an ape, and not a monkey), your though it was okay to bring in several MB of JS code for their site and when faced with, sorry site broken when JS is off (requirement under highest level web accessibility guidelines that sites are functional with JS off, so screen readers work predictably), would whinge and cry about not being allowed to use JS to bring beauty and functionality to the site. Also the other trend I noticed, was that most web developers where from art/design backgrounds and not CS/Nerd/Geek backgrounds as well... (make of that, what you will).

The system application developers actually cared about compute resources, what libraries they used, etc. The complete opposite. (Mind you, most were doing C/C++ in embedded or other resource restricted environments).

It's incredibly rare to find someone with great talent in both development/programming along with graphic design and usability & user experience. The MVC architecture lends itself as proof to while one would create such frameworks to separate back-end logic with front-end presentation.

 

[ddrueding]

Featuritis along with "I need to create a reason to prove why my company can still exist" are both concerning problems that aren't new here. How else does vbulletin continue to justify selling a "new" product without putting in new bloat features. It's hard to market things like performance and streamlining as features...but I'd buy software upgrades just for those reasons if they could show concretely that it was there.

This is probably the strongest argument for a subscription model I know of.

 

[Tannin]

I don't think it's entirely that people are stupid (maybe a little).

Cheers Handy. I expressed myself poorly. What I meant wasn't that end-users are stupid (though we all know a few that are), I was referring to the people who go to university doing some kind of IT course and wind up developing websites, or else develop the framework/design software that people who develop websites then use. Chewy's posts have made that point very well. The people developing the crappy software and especially the people writing 140 kilograms of Javascript to make a simple web page display half-decently (albeit at glacial speed), these guys are stupid.

On your second theme, yes, web developers have been very slow to adapt to mobile-friendly design. They (we) must share a lot of the blame here. As a rule, it takes web designers something like 3 to 5 years to adapt to new things. I am an example myself. None of my sites are mobile-friendly, except by accident. Granted, the most important ones - the ones I spend any time maintaining and extending - are by their very nature only suitable for decent screens, so I've simply ignored phones. Hey, if you are daft enough to want to look at a collection of high-resolution pictures of wildlife using a screen the size of a cigarette pack, that's your problem. I'm not really interested; get a decent screen if you want to look at pictures. But tablets are getting half-decent now, and one of my Do-This-Soon projects is redesigning a few sites to be tablet-friendly. (Though I still won't care about phones.) But - and here is the point - it will probably be another few years before I get around to doing all that work on all those sites.

Have you looked into the HTML5 Boilerplate framework? I've looked into it a bit and I find it to be a nice compromise of what we discussed. It's probably still to laden with Javascript (JQuery) for your liking but I think it handles it well.

No. I suppose I should, but I never use frameworks for anything. Well, not apart from stuff I've written myself. I try to write reusable, modular code so that I can just lift stuff out of an existing project and slap it into new things. Sometimes I even succeed without spending hours making changes.

Right now, I'm doing a new site for a customer and (at this early stage of the project) I only expect to be re-using the php back-end that handles logic for site navigation and customer-fills-in-the-form bits (I have a module that accepts a sort of quasi-BBcode, which is handy). Everything else I'm doing from scratch because I want to take advantage of the latest HTML 5 and CSS 3 stuff, because I no longer care about compatibility with IE (who does?), and most of all because I want this one to work well on phones and tablets. Given my client's needs, that last is important. Hell, I might even have to buy or borrow a smartphone for testing. (And someone under 30 to show me how to use it.)

Edit: actually, I did look at it a few years ago. When I followed your link it looked familiar. Didn't go anywhere with it though, just have a half-hearted lay around for an hour or so.

 

[Santilli]

For what it's worth:

I just tried the site on my 600 Samsung Mega.

I use Puffin for my web browsing on Android
http://www.puffinbrowser.com/index.php

I turned rotation on, and reading the forum Horizontially, it fits nicely in the Mega's screen, and I don't have to change sizes like I do in vertical position.
Great app by the way.

 

[sedrosken]

Seems pretty nice...

I am sooo ready to compile an ICS build for my phone. I don't use it as a phone anyway and chrome would definitely be worth it. Seeing as ICS was worth it on my GTab, and it runs mostly the exact same hardware (the phone has a 320x480 screen where the GTab has a 1024x600 screen).