Hey Jon, one guiding principle that might help: 

In most cases, the usefulness of the reference is about the source, which often appears in the second line (a single column in a two-column layout maybe resembles the width of a smartphone screen). So I would imagine 3 lines could be the standard size. Your idea of clicking on the reference to reveal the whole thing is a good one.

There is also the requirement of showing only the beginning or domain portion of long URL's, but that might naturally happen with the standard sized window.

Maybe we should talk on Skype fairly soon? I am gone next week so it would be good to clear up anything before end of this week.

Phil


On Mon, Mar 19, 2012 at 8:03 AM, Jon Robson <jrobson@wikimedia.org> wrote:
> Fun. I'm eager to get this into our beta pretty quickly as there is
> nothing like testing with real wiki data.

hopefully it will get deployed to beta today. I pushed Erik's
suggestion earlier today [1]

> * Can we make the new footer slide up rather then down? Hitting the
> more info, scrolling, and then seeing the links takes too long. I'd
> like to see my options right after hitting more info.

Agreed. This is proving a bit of a pain and I can't find a nice
solution for this yet.

> * Whenever you tap on a reference we 1) Expand the reference 2) Start
> the overlap animation 3) Show the reference. We should skip #1

I'm not sure what you mean here. Currently clicking a reference just
fades it in or out. There should be no expansion animation - just the
opacity changes.

> * Could we see a version of references that both a) fades/appears
> faster b) rolls up like the footer ... so that we can a/b them with
> people
I've added options to allow experimentation with animation speed. As
for a slideup animation due to issues with fixed positioning in mobile
[2] this is proving a bit of a pain. I've had to resort to using
absolute and top positioning which is making things like rolling up
not as clean as I would like. Again I'm in thinking mode on how best
to do this.

> * Lets pick a standard size for the ref box and leaving a trailing
> '...' in case we run over. Currently if i tap on multiple references
> then the size of the box can and usually does change per reference.

I'm not sure about this.. where a reference is long how would I get to
the full text? Would tapping ... reveal the rest of it?

[1] https://svn.wikimedia.org/viewvc/mediawiki?view=revision&revision=114134
[2] http://www.quirksmode.org/blog/archives/2010/12/the_fifth_posit.html



--
Phil Inje Chang
Product Manager, Mobile
Wikimedia Foundation
415-812-0854 m
415-882-7982 x 6810