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.
