[Building Sakai] How to support proliferation of new tablets in CLE

Tue Oct 30 19:03:39 PDT 2012

Just as a note, the only tablet I've tried recently, a Nexus 7 (smaller
than the mentioned small iPad) works really well with the regular neoportal
in 2.9. I wouldn't want it to go to PDA mode on any of these newer Android
tablets. All functions and general navigation works well, including the
CKEditor. The biggest problem is that some of the buttons (specifically on
the editor) are small, requiring lots of zooming. Though for 2.10, we
probably should be looking at eliminating most of the buttons and getting
down to one row and a hidden optional row.

Though most of these tablets still aren't super convenient for use in
serious content creation. I also haven't tested all of the tools (like
Samigo). Obviously a few functions (like audio questions) that either use
flash or java applets which will never work on mobile. Those will have to
be updated someday.

I believe by the time next year rolls around, the majority of devices will
support CKEditor, so detecting for that won't matter anymore, though users
on a phone will get a better experience on the PDA portal still, not having
to scroll and zoom as much.

On Tue, Oct 30, 2012 at 4:46 PM, Keli Sato Amann <kamann at stanford.edu>wrote:

> Hello
> Following up on an old thread, there are certain things I was hoping for
> with 2.9, but from my reading of the mobiledetect page (
> http://code.google.com/p/php-mobile-detect/), it doesn't sound like we
> can actually detect the device attributes that would be necessary. So I'll
> describe what I wish we could do, then describe what it sounds like we may
> have to actually do. As a lay person, I'm doing my best to follow along in
> JIRA (SAK-22302 and related), but can those in the know describe what
> *actually* is going to happen for 2.9?
>
> 1) Direct users to PDA portal if screen size is 7.9 inch or smaller (iPad
> mini is the largest of the small tablets). However, it doesn't seem like
> mobileDetect can detect screensize though, only if something is a tablet
> versus a phone. So we would have to choose to direct all iPads to full
> site, or all iPads pda skin. Personally, I think we would opt to direct
> tablets to full site; at least 2.9 will make it easier for users swith
> smaller tablets to then switch to pda skin. But if we could build in some
> other way, other than size detection in the future to direct users to the
> proper skin (save preference, use some other detection method), or expand
> on our detection methods to include form factor detection, that would be
> ideal.
>
> 2) Suppress CKEditor when it won't work (browser doesn't support
> contenteditable OR when iOS5+ or Android3+) AND when screen size 7.9 inch
> or smaller. However, it doesn't seem like mobiledetect can detect
> contenteditable and even it it did, it doesn't accurately predict whether
> the browser actually supports CKEditor, per Matthew's note below. Sounds
> like OS version detection is in beta for mobile detect so we might have
> some luck there eventually, but without it, it sounds like we should to
> suppress CKEditor whenever ANY phone or tablet detected, unless there are
> some OS out there that have supported CKEditor from their first version.
> This is not currently happening on Qa server though --when I go to 2.9 with
> a Nook running a custom version of Android, my screen freezes when I touch
> the ckeditor.
>
> If at some point we do implement something like the form factor detection
> that Matthew mentions AND we could also detect version, we could target the
> right experience a little better. It is kind of a bummer that we're finally
> able to support CKEditor use on current smartphones, in theory but not in
> practice. But for now, simple text is probably better for new content
> creation on ALL touch screens anyway, since it's a little unwieldy to
>  control cursor position in CKEditor to format text and the tool bar takes
> up precious space. The only drawback is when you are editing something that
> was originally created in rich text, it would be nice to see CKEditor
> instead, because otherwise you'll see html.
>
> Keli Amann
> User Experience Specialist
> Academic Computing Services, Stanford University
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Matthew Jones" <jonespm at umich.edu>
> To: sakai-dev at collab.sakaiproject.org
> Sent: Monday, January 9, 2012 6:32:54 AM
> Subject: [Building Sakai] How to support proliferation of new tablets in
> CLE
>
>
>
>
>
> Yea, this is a somewhat tough issue (contenteditable) because as this post
> says
>
> "This works great but for someone looking to get this going on
> iPhone/iPad: the contentEditable property IS defined. Trouble is the OS
> doesn't actually support " -
> http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1882205/how-do-i-detect-support-for-contenteditable-via-javascript
>
> So if you try to use feature detection (like Modernizr) then it will still
> succeed. And if you do device detection, then it works in iOS5 but fails in
> iOS4!
>
> Getting rid of WURFL as Steve suggested is a good idea though. Both
> because of licensing problems and because it just sits there taking up
> 100MB in the heap at all times.
>
> The good news is for your original question (1) is that the new mobile
> browsers (iOS 5+ and Android 3.0+) are finally supporting this specific
> feature for editing ( http://caniuse.com/contenteditable ). And as far as
> I've seen in usage reports and overall usage (at least at Michigan),
> tablets are still either lightly used or used as as secondary option when a
> notebook is also available. So there's still a year or two till they're
> everywhere. :)
>
> For the (2) part, Steve's solution will make changing the string easier
> and more legal than changing the WURFL, so that really should be done. I
> think that the more important thing for the medium term future will be
> combining feature detection with device/form factor detection (
> https://github.com/PaulKinlan/formfactor ) to ensure the optimal user
> experience. You're realistically not going to want to present the same view
> to a mobile phone with a 10 cm diagonal as one with a 25 cm diagonal.
>
> It also seems like if the feature detection was available client side
> (like in one of these js libraries) disabling specific features in certain
> places (like forums) would be much easier.
> On Jan 9, 2012 1:56 AM, "David Horwitz" < david.horwitz at uct.ac.za > wrote:
>
>
> Just a point for people looking at making a feature
> available/unavailable it is far better to query the service (being WURFL
> or Mobile detect based) for capabilities rather than specific devices.
> Part of the fragility of the current use is that it ask "is this an
> iPhone" rather than "does this device support feature x".
>
> D
>
> On 01/09/2012 01:01 AM, Steve Swinsburg wrote:
> > Hi Keli,
> >
> > The portal currently uses the WURFL library to detect mobile devices,
> however recent license changes means we cannot upgrade, so I am looking at
> switching it to an alternative project called Mobile Detect, which is based
> on MobileESP and available in the maven repositories. It is Apache2.
> >
> > https://jira.sakaiproject.org/browse/SAK-21334
> >
> > Once the code is cleaned up then tools will be able to check the mobile
> device easier, and via an entityprovider.
> >
> > cheers,
> > Steve
> >
> >
> > On 07/01/2012, at 11:42 AM, Keli Sato Amann wrote:
> >
> >> Hello,
> >> We are running 2.6 locally, but we added the patch that suppresses the
> rich text entry of the fckeditor and replaces it with simple text entry
> that comes with 2.8. We have manually updated that patch to do this switch
> when it detects additional useragents (iphone, and now Android phones and
> iPad).
> >>
> >> I was hoping this also covered Android tablets, but we just tested it
> on a Nook and we still see the non-responsive rich text options. So we will
> have to manually update this to include the useragent for the Nook and I
> guess the Kindle Fire if we can find one to test.
> >>
> >> My questions are this:
> >> 1) Is the rich text entry of the ckeditor (which I think comes with
> 2.9) supported on iOS and Android devices or will we need to continue this
> workaround?
> >>
> >> 2) If we have to continue this workaround, is there a different string
> we can search on that isn't quite so specific that would cover all iOS and
> Android devices so we can stop updating this?
> >>
> >> 3) We created another dependency: in Forums, we hid the Delete and
> Setting options for Topics so that they only show during a hover. We want
> to completely hide these options on touch devices (while it is possible to
> get this to display with a double click, this is confusing). So now we need
> to do the useragent check in two locations. Is there a way to maintain the
> approved list in just one location?
> >>
> >> I may not understand any of your answers, so I'm cc'ing Lydia ;-)
> >>
> >> Thanks,
> >> Keli Amann
> >> User Experience Specialist
> >> Academic Computing Services
> >> _______________________________________________
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