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Someone has asked if we have any plans to create a mobile app for the OA website. See below:
Type: General Comment
From: banedragon@gmail.com
Message: do you have any plans on makeing an app for mobile os' of your site
Not sure how this would work exactly or if it is practical with our set up, but it certainly seems worth discussing. Something to look into as part of the eventual site redesign, perhaps?
Todd
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I'm currently learning android. So could assist at some time in the future if you go ahead. Though I have a lot on my plate atm
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Hi, i'm accesing to this forum with an Android 4.4 at this moment. And i noticed that the multiples pages (OA Homepage, EG, this forum) are not responsive.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Responsive_web_design
Responsive design allows better viewing and interacting with the page and the project in other devices such as smartphones, tablets and so on.
Are planned in the future something to ease the viewing of OA and the interactions from mobile?
Greetings
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Our current 'wish list' of updates doesn't include this any time soon, for the simple reason that we don't have the know how and resources to do it. Also, the OA site has been around for a while and I'm not sure how much (or if) redesigning would be needed to make this work.
As has been mentioned on another thread, we are a volunteer organization and have somewhat limited resources and time for this kind of thing. Not to say we don't want to or aren't planning to do various things to the site. But there are other things that will be coming sooner.
I've actually been speaking to our webmaster recently and we are cautiously hopeful that we may be able to make some progress on some parts of this in either later this year or sometime next.
So, we'll see what shakes loose.
Todd
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One of the reasons i've personally held off redesigning the website is i'm slowly learning responsive web design. Making the website mobile responsive as well as desktop responsive would involve putting some css and html commands into the EG's page templates. So, it's not incredibly complex necessarily, just.. It's definitely something i'd want to do right the first time in one go. I'm not sure why you'd want to make a mobile app if the website looked fine on mobile anyway.
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The website and forum generally look fine on a tablet, but things get a bit trickier on a smartphone. The screen shrinks down on my Android phone but that makes the text so tiny that it's near impossible to read without expanding it, flipping the phone to horizontal, and letting some portion of the screen 'fall off the edge' so yo can read the part you want.
I am definitely not a computer person, but my sense is that an OA mobile app (if such existed) would automagically adjust the way site content is organized depending on what was being used to view it.
While it's probably not a vital item, given how common mobile apps are, it is increasingly going to become expected that we should have such a thing simply because everybody else does. So it's probably something that will come along eventually.
Agreeing with Dfleymmes, we definitely want to get things right when we do make this sort of thing happen. That may include first fixing some deep 'foundational' elements of the sites coding that date back to our early days and therefore could stand to be updated, either because the state of the art has moved on or because what seemed like a good idea at the time might not seem so great when we look at it now.
Todd