10 replies to this topic

[Demiscient]

Hi guys!

I'm pretty nervous about posting among such brilliant web designers but I'm building a web app for a uni assignment (it's a prototype which means that it has no true back-end functionality, it just looks "pretty" ) and I was wondering if the good people of the W3Schools forums could tell me if the website looks nice and is functioning okay on your mobile devices (iPads, iPhones, Android, HTC, whatever). Or your browser is okay too of course

http://endemicdesigns.com/

Does anyone have any comments or suggestions in regards to the design or even added functionalities/information you think would be cool to see? The app is imaginary (read: impossible) and it's supposed to search through restaurant menus for particular items for food so that people who are as fussy as me don't have to do any second-guessing about whether they'll be able to eat at a certain restaurant or not. Also the images on the home page cycle through randomly.

It's not 100% finished (more like 99%), I still need to figure out some way to push the footer to the bottom of the page (none of the methods, I mean none of the ones I've found on the first three pages of Google work), and I'm working on building custom icon overlays for the map but so far this is pretty much it!

Thanks for your comments and suggestions in advance

[TheGallery]

Hello Demiscient. I tried your website in the latest chrome and in my Samsung Wave. I do like your design, but your refresh and home buttons could get an improvement. They don't look smooth on the edges. Other than that (and the footer that you mentioned that has to go to the bottom), i liked it. Now, shouldn't your Home butotn redirect to http://endemicdesigns.com/ ? It just displays in image when i press it (One of the random that are shown in the home page). In my mobile i can see the circles (refresh - home button) but i can't see the arrow and the house inside them. Not major problems

[Demiscient]

Really, the edges aren't smooth? I have no idea what that's about, I used preset buttons from Jquery Mobile so that it looks like an actual iPhone app, it's not like I even drew them myself. Weird weird weird.

I have NO idea what the home button is doing or why it's doing that. I set it to go to the id of the first page, but on first go, it goes to an image, then if you refresh the page, it miraculously changes to the first page. It's soooo weird. Still, I changed it to "index.html" in hopes that that will improve how it links back to home. It's a weird bug though, hey?

And as for the icons, another possible bug, but they only display in certain mobile devices. I checked it out on a three different devices and the icons only appeared on the HTC. I am going out of my mind trying to figure out what on earth is going wrong!

Ah, also, thanks for the comments, Stewie. Hehe. I'll try and get to the bottom of the weird corner icons. Maybe it would be better if I just put them in manually rather than relying on the Jquery Mobile code to do it for me.

[TheGallery]

I'd say wait for someone else to check them too. It might be me that is having a problem (talking about the buttons). I don't know what's going on with your about button, i am sure a more experienced developer will help you with that. And lastly i'd like to mention that i can't see the footer in your home page(works fine in the other 2 pages) when using chrome. I can see it in my mobile phone.

[Demiscient]

I'm fiddling with the first page's footer at the moment because some people in another thread are attempting to help me set it at the bottom but so far failing.. or I'm failing to follow their directions properly or something, I don't know, I feel totally retarded that I can't do something so simple.

[Fmdpa]

Some tools you may find useful are the Opera Mobile Emulator (the browser many tablets use) and the Opera Mini Simulator.

What's really cool is how Opera lets you debug your application with Dragonfly. In your Opera desktop browser, open up Dragonfly (Ctrl + Shift + i). On the Dragonfly icon bar click the remote debug button on the right and click "Apply". It will wait for a host connection.

While Dragonfly is waiting for a connection, go to your Opera mobile browser whether it is the emulator or on your phone or tablet. Enter opera:debug into your address field. If you are using the emulator on the same computer as your desktop browser, connect to 127.0.0.1. But if you are using a remote device, find your computer's IP address and connect to it from your phone.

If the connection is successfully established, the remote debug icon in Dragonfly will start playing an animation. Then you can add/remove CSS styles in Dragonfly and see the live results on your phone/tablet/emulator!

[Demiscient]

Sorry, the stimulator is of no use to me because it's not even displaying the website decently, all the CSS3 elements are gone, the stimulator browser doesn't even support geolocation, etc. I also don't want to download yet another browser on my computer (especially if the stimulator doesn't even work). They told me to download Chrome too, once, but I hated it. I'm a hardcore Firefox gal Three things that makes my life simple on Firefox: TooManyTabs, Adblock Plus, and Firebug.

Let me guess, your favourite browser is.. idk, possibly leaning towards Opera?

[thescientist]

I'm not sure why you wouldn't have all the available browsers on your computer, but I think most professional developers have a copy of the major browsers on their computer for testing. I prefer to use Chrome for developing and by default, browsing. But I still have FF, Safari, and Opera installed so I can view my work in those browsers as well. Same thing for Windows. On my Mac I have an XP VM for IE 7 and 8 each, and then a W7 VM for IE9, FF, Safari, Chrome, and Opera.

It should also be noted that CSS3 is not a standard yet, and can't be expected to work the same in all browsers, mobile or not. Personally the Opera simulator sounds like a pretty cool tool, even though I'm not much of an Opera fan in general.

[Fmdpa]

Demiscient, on 21 October 2011 - 01:08 AM, said:

Sorry, the stimulator is of no use to me because it's not even displaying the website decently, all the CSS3 elements are gone, the stimulator browser doesn't even support geolocation, etc. I also don't want to download yet another browser on my computer (especially if the stimulator doesn't even work). They told me to download Chrome too, once, but I hated it. I'm a hardcore Firefox gal Three things that makes my life simple on Firefox: TooManyTabs, Adblock Plus, and Firebug.

Considering that you're a Firefox fan, you might want to check out the Firefox Mobile browser. I just checked and they do offer a desktop version of it here. I don't think they have a browser like Opera Mini for tablets, but it may help anyway.

Quote

Let me guess, your favourite browser is.. idk, possibly leaning towards Opera?

Just maybe... As @thescientist said, any serious developer should have every one of 4 major browser rendering engines installed on your computer, i.e. Internet Explorer, Gecko (Firefox's engine), Opera, and Webkit (Safari or Chrome). To make it more complicated, you should also test for Internet Explorer 6, 7, 8 and 9. Even though it is more than a decade old, IE 6 is a very present web browser still. You can test all of these versions of IE in it's developer tools. Of course you'll lose some CSS3 styles in IE8-, but you may need to make some positioning fixes to make the web page readable. I know, it's a pain. You'll learn very quickly why web developers hate IE.

Last year when I was really starting to get involved in web development, I installed all major browsers for testing. I was primarily using Firefox/Firebug at the time, but I found myself gravitating towards Opera. Soon I was doing the majority of my testing in Opera and only opening other web browsers when I needed to. It just felt natural to me and I was attracted my its innovative features. It as some quirks, but for me, the advantages outweigh the disadvantages. I really like the features and feel of Dragonfly (Opera's developer tools). Dragonfly feels lightweight and sleek - just like the browser, IMHO. It's a bonus that Opera is doing very well with HTML5 support. It is particularly distinguished in the area of HTML5 elements, especially input elements.

I could rave about Opera all day, but that's why I posted this on my blog. It's a little outdated since Opera's made some significant updates over the last couple months, but Opera hasn't gotten any worse for those changes!

[Demiscient]

Well I have Chrome, Firefox and IE. Basically the tutor is marking us using his iPhone, so he says it doesn't matter if it's not compatible among all browsers. Also the assignment is to build a web-based application for mobiles using CSS3 and HTML5, so.. Haha. I already know about the perils of designing for IE, oh the horror! It won't even display my website properly, since it apparently hasn't heard about CSS3 yet. I don't like Chrome either because my website doesn't look its best on that browser. Looks far better on Firefox, but this isn't a place to debate what the best browser is I just have heaps of reasons for liking Firefox, myself.

[Krewe]

You gotta love how even the new IE (IE9) doesn't even support Text-Shadow... Text-Shadow can make pages look a lot better, any who, I like the site idea.
It looks nice, feels nice. Very user friendly.
One thing I would look at is in my Chrome browser the map doesn't show 100%, it only will show about 25% if that, on the left portion of the container.
In FF mine won't even load for some reason.

Also, I had to check what it looked like in IE , why isn't the background showing up? Would you mind showing the background code out of pure curiosity?

Thanks