I've written a tool that functions as a specialized iPhone interface for Commons. It is quite rudimentary at the moment, but with support might develop into something. I note that there is currently no "official" commons.mobile interface AFAIK.
The URL is: http://toolserver.org/~magnus/iCommons.php
As most of you don't have an iPhone (yet;-) I'll prefix my demo links with an iPhone simulator. Note that the annoying scrollbars that appear occasionally will not do so on the iPhone itself.
The entry page shos the Picture of the day (with description, en only ATM): http://www.testiphone.com/?url=http://toolserver.org/~magnus/iCommons.php
All pages have a clickable "Wikimedia Commons" header that will lead back to this page. Also, all pages have a search box at the bottom. As this uses the opensearch API, it seems to be limited to a single word... Green links will lead to external pages (Commons and others), normal blue ones stay within the tool.
Try searching for "Alexandria". (This search even found one of our videos, but as video thumbnails are /still/ not rendered in the requested size, it broke the layout; so, no videos for you...) Click on the title link or the image itself, and you go a special description page.
The description has a larger thumbnail, and all kinds of details about the image. This uses my "Commons API" [1], which eases my data parsing considerably.
My Commons API also recognizes images with a location, and will add a Googlemaps link to the description page: http://www.testiphone.com/?url=http://toolserver.org/~magnus/iCommons.php?mo...
The next step would be categories, obviuosly...
Feedback, please!
Magnus
On Sun, Aug 3, 2008 at 3:39 AM, Magnus Manske magnusmanske@googlemail.com wrote:
I've written a tool that functions as a specialized iPhone interface for Commons. It is quite rudimentary at the moment, but with support might develop into something. I note that there is currently no "official" commons.mobile interface AFAIK.
I believe that the iPhone runs Safari 3, which supports CSS3 media queries, so it should be possible to create an iPhone compatible variant of the current MediaWiki skins simply through the css. Given that Monobook is achieved entirely with css positioning anyway, it should be fairly straightforward to implement.
On Sun, Aug 3, 2008 at 11:46 AM, Stephen Bain stephen.bain@gmail.com wrote:
I believe that the iPhone runs Safari 3, which supports CSS3 media queries, so it should be possible to create an iPhone compatible variant of the current MediaWiki skins simply through the css. Given that Monobook is achieved entirely with css positioning anyway, it should be fairly straightforward to implement.
Digging into the code, I see that SkinTemplate::transformCssMedia() appears to redirect the iPhone to use the "handheld" stylesheet if $wgHandheldForIPhone is set to true?
In this case all that is necessary would be to define a handheld stylesheet for the particular skin, and the iPhone will use it?
On Sun, Aug 3, 2008 at 4:15 AM, Stephen Bain stephen.bain@gmail.com wrote:
On Sun, Aug 3, 2008 at 11:46 AM, Stephen Bain stephen.bain@gmail.com wrote:
I believe that the iPhone runs Safari 3, which supports CSS3 media queries, so it should be possible to create an iPhone compatible variant of the current MediaWiki skins simply through the css. Given that Monobook is achieved entirely with css positioning anyway, it should be fairly straightforward to implement.
Digging into the code, I see that SkinTemplate::transformCssMedia() appears to redirect the iPhone to use the "handheld" stylesheet if $wgHandheldForIPhone is set to true?
In this case all that is necessary would be to define a handheld stylesheet for the particular skin, and the iPhone will use it?
Probably. But that has two (IMHO major) disadvantages: * It won't allow using the "full" skin on the iPhone, which is sometimes what you want * It still uses screen-based layout, which usually results in text too small to read or wrapped in some tiny column. You'll have to zoom in/out a lot, which is annoying. My approach offers a native (or close enough) iPhone interface that takes the special features and limitations of the device into account to create a more pleasant user experience.
Magnus
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