I've recently been planted from the mobile team into the Flow team to get the code between these two teams more closely aligned and also get Flow optimised and working on mobile phones.
I've constructed a list of cards in the Flow backlog under the list heading 'Mobile' [1] which should set a path for us getting to a good mobile experience. As a first goal I'm aiming to get Flow working nicely without JavaScript in mobile. Most of the initial work will be around polishing non-JavaScript workflows so they are less jarring.
It would be pretty trivial to simply enable all JavaScript and CSS on mobile and get it up and running, but I suggest we use this as an opportunity to improve on our track record of UI standardisation.
After polishing the non-JS workflow we should get Flow to a point where it is using MediaWiki UI as much as possible and use this as an opportunity to drive some development resources into MediaWiki UI.
There are various components that in Flow that should be polished up and pushed into MediaWiki UI. We should polish these up as much as possible, thinking about how they render in mobile, whether they are important and get them upstreamed to core. Flow also ships its own version of MediaWiki UI buttons (flow-ui-button). We will have to standardise and improve MediaWiki UI where necessary before even thinking of shipping these styles to mobile. MediaWiki UI is already loaded on mobile so this would be an easy win.
Please let me know if you see any huge flaws in my approach or you think there are any chunks of work I've overlooked.
Jon
Thanks for the update Jon.
On Mon, Jun 30, 2014 at 2:41 PM, Jon Robson jrobson@wikimedia.org wrote:
There are various components that in Flow that should be polished up and pushed into MediaWiki UI. We should polish these up as much as possible, thinking about how they render in mobile, whether they are important and get them upstreamed to core. Flow also ships its own version of MediaWiki UI buttons (flow-ui-button). We will have to standardise and improve MediaWiki UI where necessary before even thinking of shipping these styles to mobile. MediaWiki UI is already loaded on mobile so this would be an easy win.
I see Shahyar already has a patch to mediawiki.ui which is a step in this direction. It's at https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/123804/
As I commented on that patch, we need to see some example implementations to understand how these new button styles are intended to work (in general, not just in Flow). I think this is a task for the UX team to tackle, and probably involves updating the mediawiki.ui style guide for desktop and mobile.