Er what? I use the iPhone 7 with Discourse literally daily and I have no such issues.
The OP was talking about new topic creation, which I agree was a blind spot because I just don’t tend to create topics on mobile, I read and reply as 99% of my activity time on mobile. I suspect that’s true of most people as well.
The only alternative is this, but it has no provision for width or height:
Most of that “computerese” is the path to the image. Compare with this:
I suggest taking this to a different topic, though… further elaboration on it here is intensely off-topic.
Toolbars are generally quite crap on mobile for a variety of reasons. I wasn’t too happy that @sam brought them back, but there are a handful of power user things that can’t be done without them (like replying as a whisper, etc).
Anyway, better for this topic to stay focused on Create New Topic improvements.
Another note, on our community we sort all our categories alphabetically, but showing the hierarchy on the dropdown makes it difficult to use the selector. Perhaps if there was an easy wat to target the first category, we could hide them…
This is another argument in favor of typing to complete category rather than making people scroll through a list as I have suggested multiple times in this topic.
I’'m not sure about type-to-complete category - if you’re newish, or not a daily user of the community, how would you know what to type? A two-step process or perhaps a simpler dropdown without the descriptive text for each category might be better.
I was under the impression that the select dropdown wasn’t going anywhere; but it would have the same kind of type-to-complete as the desktop experience does currently. Then selecting a topic could keep focus on the autocomplete element. This in turn would keep your keyboard, so as to not have the composer “jump” when the keyboard disappears.
Great to see discussion on improving the mobile experience. It is truly a mobile first world - in many countries the 50:50 in between mobile and desktop happened quite some time ago, and now mobile has globally surpassed desktop. It is also worth mentioning that in the developing countries the peoples’ first internet enabled device is very likely a mobile (of a lower price category). So they do not walk the desktop-laptop-smartphone path, but go straight to mobile.
That said, I don’t have a silver bullet how the mobile UX should be optimized. The screen estate remains to be a challenge. Proposed solutions may call for some A/B testing?
One thing that works particularly poorly in mobile is topic templates. They are not great on desktop and are close to unusable for mobile topic creation.
I just noticed that on desktop, there’s a auto-complete for category selection. Is this new in 1.7 or had I just never seen it before? Any reason why not to add it to mobile?
I’ve had a user recently report that she can’t use our forum (besides for reading only) on her 8" Galaxy Tab 4, which is a 2014 device.
This is not only ‘Create Topic’ specific problem, but also applies to replies. Here is the screenshot she shared:
Shouldn’t the header of the page disappear up, as it does on my iPhone 5S (both in portrait and landscape) when the keyboard appears, so that you can see at least a little of the editor window?
Here is the editor appearance on my iPhone screen, which is well smaller than the Tab 4.
is it ok?