FC app / Tapatalk

MonkeyTime

Well-Known Member
I just find it renders pages better than Chrome (didn't like it at all), FireFox (which shows far too many like a full website view - very small) and the stock browser was just clunky to me. xScope was free for a number of years, but when they offered a paid version, I was one of the first to pay for it and felt good about supporting his work.

I've tried a few others, but always come back, maybe now some of it is just familiarity?
 
MonkeyTime,
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nopartofme

Over the falls, in a barrel
I heard Tapatalk 'upgraded' paid users to a new free version and is charging them again for the new pro edition. I love the idea of a native forum experience on Android, but that is so scummy...

I'd love to see XenForo come out with their own app.
 
nopartofme,

smokum

I am who I am and your approval isn't needed!
I miss tapatalk for FC on my ipad dearly....

I gave up on tapatalk completely and just use Puffin now on my ipad & iphone. Plus, I can watch justin.tv (and other flash needing sites) on apple stuff now ;)
 
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ru_frothi

Portable Vaporist
I gave up on tapatalk completely and just use Puffin now on my ipad & iphone. Plus, I can watch justin.tv (and other flash needing sites) on apple stuff now ;)

Thanks downloaded and playin with puffin. Its not tapatalk but its pretty cool....
 
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M00NEY

Well-Known Member
I heard Tapatalk 'upgraded' paid users to a new free version and is charging them again for the new pro edition. I love the idea of a native forum experience on Android, but that is so scummy...

I'd love to see XenForo come out with their own app.

I'm a paid Tapatalk subscriber (use it for many forums and am dying for it for my lurking here), and I did not get re-charged... There was a pretty major revision to the ap, but it remained licensed through the update...

No real info for FC to get use on it again, but thought the info may be helpful to some nonetheless...
 
M00NEY,

vtac

vapor junkie
Staff member
Sorry folks, nothing has changed. Tapatalk is still a poorly-coded, security and performance liability and I'm not willing to put the forum at risk again. Please read back through this thread if you'd like more information.

All of the forum styles are responsive and resize themselves to fit whatever device you're viewing the the site with. I realize that it doesn't provide push alerts and such, but it's usable on every device I've tried. :)
 
vtac,

vakedcow

Gentle cow vaper and halloween kiddo
thanks for the info Vtac :)

Agreed, the styles help and it's readable, my main problem is posting answers, typing window flies around and can't choose smileys not to talk about quoting but I will just try some other Android browsers (puffin was suggested) :peace:
 
vakedcow,

John Lewus

Well-Known Member
Have any of you thought of writing your own forum app? I would gladly pay for that. This truly is my favorite forum for many reasons. The advice here has made me a much happier person and the forum is well regulated thanks to the mods.
 
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vtac

vapor junkie
Staff member
typing window flies around and can't choose smileys not to talk about quoting
This shouldn't happen. What device/browser are you using? The xenforo authors are good about fixing these types of things, so if it hasn't already been addressed in their bug report forum you might want to do so. http://xenforo.com/community/forums/bugs/

Have any of you thought of writing your own forum app? I would gladly pay for that. This truly is my favorite forum for many reasons. The advice here has made me a much happier person and the forum is well regulated thanks to the mods.
Can you elaborate on what functionality the responsive styles are lacking that you'd like to see? Personally I'm of the firm belief that universally compatible responsive design is the way to go over proprietary viewers. I'm sure we'll see improvements to what we have now. :)
 
vtac,

John Lewus

Well-Known Member
This shouldn't happen. What device/browser are you using? The xenforo authors are good about fixing these types of things, so if it hasn't already been addressed in their bug report forum you might want to do so. http://xenforo.com/community/forums/bugs/


Can you elaborate on what functionality the responsive styles are lacking that you'd like to see? Personally I'm of the firm belief that universally compatible responsive design is the way to go over proprietary viewers. I'm sure we'll see improvements to what we have now. :)

The biggest feature missing is push notifications. The other issue to me is that typing in a window on a browser using a virtual keyboard is problematic. It is easy to to lose focus and accidentally type over what you just did when focus comes back or accidentally paste something in your window you have to delete. Some keyboards work better than others.

The final problem is that browsing around the mobile interface is a bit sluggish as compared to an app. It is more of an android problem I think than the website.

The mobile interface does what I need but the user experience is just average at best.

On another note is there a way to see what threads I am subscribed to from a single screen? Sometimes I miss looking at an alert and weeks will go by before I realized I had not gotten any updates and find I missed a bunch if posts to catch up on.
 

nopartofme

Over the falls, in a barrel
Can you elaborate on what functionality the responsive styles are lacking that you'd like to see? Personally I'm of the firm belief that universally compatible responsive design is the way to go over proprietary viewers. I'm sure we'll see improvements to what we have now. :)
Where to start...!

I'll take a crack at it and start a list here. Note that I'm coming from Android, so I may occasionally speak in terms of Android UI design principles. I spend more time using my smartphone than my computer, so this topic is of particular importance to me.

Personally, I'd like:
  • A text editor that is designed specifically for smartphone/tablet use. As it stands, the buttons are laid out all wrong, they're too small, and pressing them does not give the right sort of feedback. Integration with the official imgur app, or better, generalized support for any app that can upload publicly viewable photos, would be neat.
  • Signatures that are collapsed by default and can be expanded with a tap. As it is now, all signatures are hidden on my phone.
  • Larger and more responsive "Like", "Reply", and "Report" buttons. The responsiveness of tapping a hyperlink on a mobile device is poor in general. It should feel like a normal mobile UI button, no different.
  • Larger and more responsive page numbers at the top and bottom of threads. As it stands, it's very very easy to hit the wrong number, and then you have to wait for the new page to load before trying again.
  • A completely redesigned front page. As it stands, when you visit the main page the majority of the screen is filled with the various sub-forums. I almost never use any of that part of that layout at all. For a forum regular, the most important destinations are the Alerts page, the Unread Watched Threads page, and the New Posts page. UI design should reflect what is important to the user.
  • The ability to select multiple threads/messages when viewing Alerts, Unread Watched Threads, New Posts, your Inbox, or any sub-forum, combined with the addition of a button to open all selected threads/alerts/messages in separate tabs in the background. As it stands, I have to long-press on the thread title in each alert, which necessarily includes a half-second or so delay where I'm doing nothing but waiting for the long-press to register, and then press the Open Link in New Tab button, over and over. If I'm unlucky, I might barely miss long-pressing the thread title and will instead long-press on surrounding text, which causes the browser to select that text instead, which then makes it harder to actually try again because a long-press on that selected text will bring up options like Copy, etc., and getting rid of the text selection when dealing with the drop-down Alerts menu isn't quick and easy. Or, I might accidentally long-press the name of the user or the name of the sub-forum, which at best means I have to close the long-press menu and try again, or at worst means I won't notice and will open the wrong page in a new tab in the background.
  • The ability to easily use gestures to change between open tabs or close them (swipe left and right to change between open threads, like flipping through cards). Pressing the Android "Back" button should take you back to the thread list, alert list, or inbox that you came from, without closing the tab that you're presently viewing.
  • The ability to "save" posts or individual pages of threads to a special Saved page.
  • Push notifications, with the Android Gmail style of "rich notifications" that give a multi-line preview of the post's text and provide you with various options regarding how to deal with the notification right from the notification tray, like Dismiss, Open, Open Tab in Background, Save Post...
Some of these are issues with the browser apps. However, for the most part the functionality I'm looking for in the browser does not make sense when generalized to the average website.

I think if websites are ever to be able to be truly "responsive" and adapt into an ideal "native style" form for mobile viewing, an entirely new subset of HTML or CSS will be required. Google would be just the type to do something like that, and is in the best position to do so, so maybe it's in our future...

In the mean time, I don't think responsive design is ready to replace all the myriad benefits that well-designed native apps can provide. I'm a huge fan of the benefits in usage that consistent design principles can provide when applied across all apps in use on a mobile device. Visiting FC on my phone is like entering a different UX universe. When I have the choice to open a link in a browser or in a dedicated app, I will always choose the app (YouTube, Wikipedia, Google Play Store, Reddit, Gmail, Google Maps, Facebook, Twitter, Google+, etc., etc.).

As a side note, the default Rich Text Editor here is almost unusable in the Firefox app due to a strange bug which I've already reported to Mozilla. It was even worse prior to the last update, as seen in my other bug report. The present bug can be worked around by going into the FC preferences and disabling "Use the rich text editor to create and edit messages". Unfortunately, FC preferences can't automatically change based on the device being used, so when I move back to desktop I have to go in and change the preference again. The rich text editor works fine in the Chrome and Opera apps, but I prefer to use Firefox. I briefly tried using Puffin, but found I couldn't even long-press to open a background tab...

On another note is there a way to see what threads I am subscribed to from a single screen? Sometimes I miss looking at an alert and weeks will go by before I realized I had not gotten any updates and find I missed a bunch if posts to catch up on.
This is the page you're looking for:
http://fuckcombustion.com/watched/threads

It's the "Watched Threads" link at the top of the page.
 
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vtac

vapor junkie
Staff member
I think if websites are ever to be able to be truly "responsive" and adapt into an ideal "native style" form for mobile viewing, an entirely new subset of HTML or CSS will be required. Google would be just the type to do something like that, and in the best position to do so, so maybe it's in our future...
Thank you for the detailed post. Some of your wishlist items may be worth posting on the XenForo feature request forum. Others, as you point out, are beyond the scope of current technology. I'm confident that hardware and the devices powered by it will improve on these areas in the future. This is of course a debate suited for another thread. :)
 
vtac,

stickstones

Vapor concierge
This forum has been unusable on my phone without the app. I just upgraded to a new android and am having no issues whatsoever on the Chrome browser on it...my problem was obviously hardware, fwiw.
 

nopartofme

Over the falls, in a barrel
This forum has been unusable on my phone without the app. I just upgraded to a new android and am having no issues whatsoever on the Chrome browser on it...my problem was obviously hardware, fwiw.
I agree, today's newest hardware does make it usable. I never came here on my phone until I got my HTC One. Quad core processors, 2 GB of RAM, and Android 4.0+ have all completely changed the game. My last phone was a Galaxy S (original model, circa 2010), and it still blows my mind how much more useful this new phone is than the old one ever was. This one has replaced something like 75% of the use that my laptop used to get. My laptop was $2000 in 2008 and it's being bested in performance by a $700 phone in 2013. Time flies...

Anyways, my post above was written from the perspective of a phone like this.

Browsing FC on here (Android) is actually a better experience for me than browsing it on my computer, mostly due to how old my laptop is and how slow it has become, combined with how much I read FC (my laptop chugs when I open a lot of tabs, my phone doesn't skip a beat after).

But it's far from perfect, and that's why I wrote my long post up there. Particularly because all of my criticisms would be best solved by a native Android app IMHO... One that doesn't exist yet. The technology to do it that way is already here, though. Not so when it comes to responsive web design.

This is just my 2 cents on why responsive design is not the one true way yet, and may not be for quite some time. It's the same reason why other companies bother making native apps for their products while also modifying their websites with responsive design. Native code performs better than code inside a browser, and I imagine it will stay that way for the next few years at the very least, even with amazing hardware like the smartphones of 2013.

It's an issue with the standards of Web design, and those take a very long time to change. I've been waiting 5 years for HTML5 to finally kill off Flash, like it promised to do 5 years ago... Still no dice.

The technology is here today to solve these problems natively. I'm feeling inspired! Time to get back to that Android programming course...
 
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nopartofme,

swieder711

Well-Known Member
I use Tapatalk on my mobile devices to participate in many online forums. Its a great way to read and reply to various posts.

Do you have any plans to support Tapatalk on the FC.com website?

thanks
 
swieder711,

Stu

Maconheiro
Staff member
I use Tapatalk on my mobile devices to participate in many online forums. Its a great way to read and reply to various posts.

Do you have any plans to support Tapatalk on the FC.com website?

thanks
We have a thread about this topic in the Community Discussion area. That is where you will find these posts as well as they will be moved into that existing thread.

:peace:
 

hishighness

Well-Known Member
Just going to get in here and throw my support for tapatalk, I've been on other forums with it and I've never seen any drops in performance. Same with "security issues", if many forums much larger than FC are able to work successfully/securely with TT, what is it that prevents FC from being compatible?

The mobile site works fine but I just don't think it makes sense to keep taking dumps in an outhouse because you're worried indoor plumbing will make the house collapse. If it's a matter of "we don't have the time/care to try and make it work" then okay, I can get that, but if you're saying you don't want to do it because it's for sure going to make performance drop, well, there's a lot of forums out there that prove otherwise.

I have 0 knowledge on this subject and wasn't here last time you tried it so feel free to make fun of me if I'm wrong but my basic thought process is: if it works elsewhere, it should work here too.
 
hishighness,

vakedcow

Gentle cow vaper and halloween kiddo
what he said :D
also I like switching between different methods of interaction, similar to a vape rotation :2c:

:peace:
 
vakedcow,
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