Is there a Doomworld app?

I just got a new smartphone and I'd like to get a doomworld forums app on it. Does that exist? If not, what are my best options to quickly access the forums?

Your best option is to use something bigger than a phone. DW isn't fun on a phone.

Yeah, well, neither is Doom. And yet...

Why don't you use the normal web version? It isn't as if Doomworld uses some heavy client-side scripting or is some super-duper "rich internat app" mumbo-jumbo that requires a dumbed-down version in the form of an "app" to run on a smartphone. It's a regular vBulletin-powered forum, FFS.

But it's clumsy and requires constant resizing that way. Not to mention I need my browser uncluttered.

There's always the print-friendly version of each thread, but you can't navigate in that form.

Otherwise, there are generic forum viewer apps that strip most formatting, graphics, etc. and leave you with a minimal view of the forum -presumably still easy to navigate. Dunno how well they handle accounts, special features, etc. though.

The Doomworld forums aren't really known for being up to date.

I think they're great for mobile browsing. I spend most of my time here in my Blackberry, and the quality of my posts is only effected considerably! :P

I found it ok when I had my blackberry but I needed to set the text is large as it was too small for the screen otherwise. I also could not view threads with lots of pictures as it crashed the browser.

I find it easier to use on my newer iPhone but it still works best viewed as landscape and I have to zoom in to click the little arrow to go to most recent unviewed post. If that icon was bigger it would work perfect

Ugh...

Beware of the smartphone-impaired... :(

Graf Zahl said:

Ugh...

Beware of the smartphone-impaired... :(

Did you type that on a keyboard? Lol, what a Luddite. Kind of ironic, since you're known around here as a sort of advanced scripting guru.

The lack of obnoxiously large avatars and sigs, and Doomworld's rules re image sizes make it perfect for mobile browsing. Although most of the time I browse with images off, unless I want to see screenshots.

schwerpunk said:

Did you type that on a keyboard? Lol, what a Luddite. Kind of ironic, since you're known around here as a sort of advanced scripting guru.

Where's the irony? On the contrary, VERY advanced programmers/scripting gurus/power users are known for kinda sticking to the "past" (or, rather, to more "professional" and "advanced" technologies). E.g. kinda like those who used UNIX when everybody else was using MS-DOS, or those using vi when everybody else uses Word.

Word and vi are a bad example. Those are do different things. Unix geeks like to use LaTeX to do Word-ish things (even then they don't quite serve the same purpose).

I find DW nearly impossible to read on a phone. Too much scrolling and zooming. I can do it on tablets, but then I find Android to be lightyears ahead of iOS. The auto-zooming of ambiguous link activations and superior keyboard make a lot of difference.

I usually do the Maes thing and just use a huge PC with a 1337 gaming keyboard, though. Faster, easier, greater chance there will be something I want to read by the time I get home rather than every five minutes, etc.

Maes said:

Where's the irony? On the contrary, VERY advanced programmers/scripting gurus/power users are known for kinda sticking to the "past" (or, rather, to more "professional" and "advanced" technologies). E.g. kinda like those who used UNIX when everybody else was using MS-DOS, or those using vi when everybody else uses Word.

Keep in mind I was being tongue-in-cheek, but you're not wrong. That said, I still find it funny because he's a big supporter of UDMF. Which is seen as very newfangled, at least to most of us Doomers. I.e. he's not a 'purist.'

Aliotroph? said:

Word and vi are a bad example. Those are do different things. Unix geeks like to use LaTeX to do Word-ish things (even then they don't quite serve the same purpose).

Yeah, but the LaTeX scripts must be prepared in vi (unless you're into emacs) ;-)

I know they are bad examples, but then again I got tired of vi fans claiming that "vi is as powerful as Word and you can do exactly the same things, only better" (their words, not mine). The Jargon file calls this principle "Worse Is Better" or somesuch...

Maes said:

Yeah, but the LaTeX scripts must be prepared in vi (unless you're into emacs) ;-)

I know they are bad examples, but then again I got tired of vi fans claiming that "vi is as powerful as Word and you can do exactly the same things, only better" (their words, not mine). The Jargon file calls this principle "Worse Is Better" or somesuch...

Unfamiliar with vi, but what about Open Office? I started word processing with Word Perfect, eventually switch over to Microsoft Word, but now that I've tried Open Office, everything else just feels weird.

Main downside is finding a dictionary for spell-checking in your language(s). Unless you're American, I guess. Bastards...

Maes said:

Yeah, but the LaTeX scripts must be prepared in vi (unless you're into emacs) ;-)

Or if you don't give a fuck, like me, you use gedit. Haters gonna hate.

I browsed these forums on the 3DS browser for shits and giggles. They were usable enough; this forum isn't some web 2.0 unscalable mess with graphics everywhere. Are smartphone browsers actually worse than the browser on a gaming handheld with low resolution?

Um, I have browsed the forums occasionally on my pos 6 year old nokia and everything works just fine.

I have zero issues browsing the forums with a phone and I never have. Even my Motorola Droid X displayed everything perfectly that thing was a certifiable fugazi of a smartphone.

I like how the forums are simple and efficient so they use up less data on capped connections, new sites nowadays don't give a shit.

I guess it would theoretically be possible to make a CSS stylesheet for the Doomworld forums so you could use it on a smartphone. Given that this is just vbulletin, maybe such a thing already exists?

But on a side note, this thread shows exactly what I hate about the trend for "apps". Instead of the cross-platform, open web, people are switching to closed, single-platform "apps" that should just be websites. It's a huge step backwards that makes me sad.

fraggle said:

But on a side note, this thread shows exactly what I hate about the trend for "apps". Instead of the cross-platform, open web, people are switching to closed, single-platform "apps" that should just be websites. It's a huge step backwards that makes me sad.

I was literally just thinking this. It took me until this thread before the light bulb went on, but essentially all apps for accessing any specific web material (Facebook, Washington Post, IMDB, etc.) are all mobile browsers dedicated to one specific site. Which means we are essentially cluttering the app market with browser upon browser upon browser when ideally we should want an app that can correctly render all (if not most) of these sites.

DW forums are pretty spartan as is. Maybe just crank up the text size...?

Come to think of it, an app for idgames/newstuff might be awesome.

Bucket said:

Come to think of it, an app for idgames/newstuff might be awesome.

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=nl.exl.doomidgamesarchive

Kirby said:

I was literally just thinking this. It took me until this thread before the light bulb went on, but essentially all apps for accessing any specific web material (Facebook, Washington Post, IMDB, etc.) are all mobile browsers dedicated to one specific site. Which means we are essentially cluttering the app market with browser upon browser upon browser when ideally we should want an app that can correctly render all (if not most) of these sites.

What the trend shows is that the current web standards are inadequate. Modern smartphones have features (like multitouch screens) that can't be accessed through HTML/Javascript. There's also the basic fact that having an "app" means your site can appear as an icon on peoples' phones, which must be attractive for developers. I'm hoping that once the web catches up, the "app" trend will disappear.

I recently got to try out a friend's Firefox OS phone, which is really interesting in this regard: the entire interface is web-based. You can "install" apps, but the apps are really just websites that are integrated into the phone's interface. This has some interesting consequences: for example, you can "use" apps without even installing them. I doubt that Firefox OS is going to seriously rival Android or iOS at this point, but it maybe they'll end up incorporating features like this.

Kirby said:

I was literally just thinking this. It took me until this thread before the light bulb went on, but essentially all apps for accessing any specific web material (Facebook, Washington Post, IMDB, etc.) are all mobile browsers dedicated to one specific site. Which means we are essentially cluttering the app market with browser upon browser upon browser when ideally we should want an app that can correctly render all (if not most) of these sites.

THe overhead of running all that background Javascript is also non-trivial: memory usage/waste in most Javascript engines is ridiculously high, and smartphones have CPUs that are at the level of a Pentium-3-class Celeron per core, and what's more they can't keep them cranked up at 100% all the time due to power and heat concerns, so basically it's like surfing the web with a first-gen Pentium, even if the CPU in your smartphone is nominally 10 times more powerful than that.

With this state of things, it's no wonder that dedicated website surrogate apps became attractive once again, after they were deemed dead on the desktop market. Then again they keep "mobile app developers" busy....

Now, as far as forums go, there are indeed some "generic" forum viewing apps around, but I don't know how well they can handle the different degrees of customization and special features of each forum. You gotta try and see. It's not particularly encouraging that most have not been updated since 2010-2012, though.

FWIV, there's even a (non-free) software that supposedly auto-generates a customized app for each forum, and is aimed at the forum's administrators:

http://www.forumrunner.net/

I guess this should give them some leeway to handle customized layouts, functionality, etc.

schwerpunk said:

Unfamiliar with vi, but what about Open Office?

It's only good if you're going to make documents for your own exclusive use, only hand out printouts/immutable PDFs, or work with a group of users using the same version of Open Office.

Sadly, anything that is not 100% Word compatible will fall flat on its face as soon as you will have to do some collab editing (and no, separating content from form is NOT something everyone does) or exchange editable documents with Word users, and preserving the format is paramount. It's not fun opening a document only to find out that it has been irreversibly mangled just because someone opened and saved it in Open or Libre Office.

Google Docs is not any better when importing/exporting to Word, for it uses a very similar engine to Open/Libre Office, and even produces the same glitches on nontrivial Word documents.

I've stopped worrying about this time ago though, by simply not mixing the two, and sticking to whatever my job/collab environment requires.