How to present a picklist on mobile?
Devin Asay
devin_asay at byu.edu
Mon Feb 11 13:13:51 EST 2013
Ben,
I'd recommend following Elanor's excellent native scroller tutorial in the latest RevUP newsletter for your list. Once you've wrapped your head around mobile-native controls I think you'll see that they're not difficult, and they go a long way to taking the "clunk" out of your mobile apps.
http://www.runrev.com/newsletter/february/issue148/newsletter4.php
HTH
Devin
On Feb 11, 2013, at 5:47 AM, Ben Rubinstein wrote:
> I'm making yet another attempt to get more seriously into cross-platform mobile, having not focused on this for a long time, during which I know the state of the art has moved forward. I'm working on a little app for in-house use.
>
> I want to present the user with a list, for them to make a choice from. The list has short titles, and longer descriptions: eg
> Apple A round hard fruit
> Orange A soft round fruit
> Banana A long soft fruit, generally yellow
>
> The list may be quite long - anywhere from 5 to 30 entries. I may well want to present users with a shorter list of usual choices, with a "more..." or similar option to get the full list. (There are actually a bunch of these lists, and they're somewhat dynamic, generated from data periodically retrieved from a server.)
>
> On the desktop, I'd most likely just put it all in an option or popup menu, with a tab between the short code and decription - ugly, but easy and handles scrolling etc. If I was feeling generous I might make a more carefully formatted scrolling field, or even a scrolling group of styled objects.
>
> But I don't want to do this for the desktop; I want to do it for smartphones, iOS and Android, including 'retina' devices (not bother about iPads or other tablets).
>
> On iOS, last time I looked, a standard picker will just display the short codes in a reasonable manner. If I used the option menu approach, the description will probably be truncated to almost nothing (and I don't think tabs will format well). If I use the styled field approach, then it feels clunky to the user because the field doesn't have the native scrolling feel (ie bounce etc).
>
> I'm aware that in the long time since I last got into this, there's been all sorts of developments around giving more access to native controls, and other ways of giving a more native feel.
>
> I know close to nothing about how things stand on Android. I'm keen for this app to be as cross-platform as possible - both to minimise effort, and to demonstrate to colleagues the LC advantage. But I also want (especially for the latter reason) for it not to be clunkly, especially on iOS.
>
> So given all this - what would the wise heads recommend as my approach to this requirement, that ideally will give a good effect, on both iOS and Android, without massive work?
>
> (I'm aware that an ideal solution for all constraints may well not exist, and would welcome discussion of various approaches that represent different compromises between these requirements.)
>
> Many thanks in advance,
>
> Ben
>
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Devin Asay
Office of Digital Humanities
Brigham Young University
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