Paradox Designs

Work has been progressing on Reddit mobile nicely, and we are looking to roll it out soon. New features have been continuously added, and its really shaping up to be a good app.

Comments!

Comments now function fully! I have been posting, replying, and editing comments for quite some time on the mobile interface. The mobile comment interface is very easy to read, and I suspect many of you will want to use it not only on your phones, but as the main site as well.

The “big” reddit comment listings are, frankly, a little hard to read. Its hard to tell where comment threads go. Mobile reddit solves this problem quite elegantly. Each comment is a box, and sub comments appear inside the box. The last comment in a box has a close margin to the bottom, instead of a larger margin. This is a little hard to explain, but a picture will do it justisce.

Dropdowns

While this may not seem exciting, anyone who has ever done web development knows how hard it is to make a decent dropdown menu. For Reddit mobile, we went with a lightweight, custom coded solution, that has many advantages over traditional menus. I will be writing a tutorial on how to make the menus.

We use dropdowns in a number of places, most notably for Options on each post and comment. The options menu contains the links you would normally find at the bottom of a comment. This includes permalinks, edit links, and report.

Ajax infinite scroll

And now the best feature yet. Infinite scroll. While you may not recognize the nomenclature, you will recognize the feature. Infinite scroll is a feature that allows you to never have to click a Next button, never have to wait for the page to reload. While often seen as an extra feature on full websites, something to be added for cool effect, but not depended on, on mobile it can completely change the game.

On reddit it works beautifully. I find myself continuing to scroll down and keep seeing new links. Sometimes ill look at the number on the side, and it will be at 500 or so. Its that convenient. Since it is for mobile use, we are implementing this scroll with a large trigger buffer. Whenever you get to a yet-to-be-decided number pixels close to the bottom of the page, the page will begin requesting more. We are going to base this number on some tests, using my Droid and KeyserSosa’s iPhone, so it should preform quite well in real-world situations.

For those of you who want more, here is a video. Sorry about the flash, HTML5 is coming later.

Whats to come

We still have a lot to do to make RM ready for mainstream, but the core of the site is 100% complete. But we still have to do a preference pane, searches, logins, submit forms, and anything else we may think of on the way. So bear with us, and follow #redditmobile on twitter for instant updates. I know some grumble about twitter, but its good for exactly this type of information.

Also, if you have any questions, feel free to ask in #reddit on freenode irc. I’m Paradox, and i usually idle there.

And now for the obligatory upvote-mongering


Yes it looks terrible here. Yes I tried the custom button. Yes that worked worse.