[Commons-l] Wiki(p|m)edia page display on iPad

[Magnus Manske]

Hi all,

since there's already several million iPad (and soon, other tablet)
users out there, I thought I'd try one in the Apple store to see what
Wikipedia looks/feels like. Generally, I think it's very nice, with
one exception. In "portrait" mode, the sidebar takes up a lot of real
estate. Especially when you scroll down a long page, there's this
annoying white bar on the left that serves no real purpose. Also,
IMHO, it destroys that "book feeling" that would fit so well with the
iPad.

So I wrote a quick JS hack that /should/ hide the sidebar on the iPad.
Instead, it shows an icon in the top left corner that, when
"finger-clicked", will show the sidebar again, in case you really want
it.

Demo (on Commons, because of the "withJS" option there):
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Main_Page?withJS=MediaWiki:Adjust4iPad.js

Now, that should /only/ work on the iPad. Could someone please confirm
this and tell me if it's an improvement. On image pages it probably
doesn't matter a lot, but more text-laden pages like
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Welcome?withJS=MediaWiki:Adjust4iPad.js
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Reusing_content_outside_Wikimedia?withJS=MediaWiki:Adjust4iPad.js
it should make a visible difference.

If it is as good as I suspect, we could use it by default on the
Wikipedias etc. There's lots of room for improvement; maybe the
sidebar could appear when switching to landscape mode (as in the mail
app). The usability experts may want to take a look :-)

Cheers,
Magnus