Viewing 2p2 from iphone/Android: Tapatalk
07-07-2011
, 11:35 AM
07-07-2011
, 03:00 PM
07-07-2011
, 04:14 PM
poatung from iphone right now, really cool. only thing I miss is that new posts are somewhat marked... It's not really important, but would be nice to see what I allready read. maybe I just can't see it tho 
07-07-2011
, 04:16 PM
Here's an excerpt from the guide, covering, among other things, quickly viewing spoilers. This is for the iPhone version of the app; I don't know how things differ on the Android version. Unfortunately I can't post any more of it until later today.
______________________________________
Next, let's look at reading and posting to threads using the app.
Go to Forum on the bottom menu bar. With the left folder, By Category, selected at the top you'll see the hierarchical arrangement that appears on the left when you are using a normal browser. (The right folder, By Name, is what it sounds like and is probably less useful for most forum users.) You can scroll down with the familiar finger drag that's common to most iPhone apps.
Tap on any forum name to go to the sub forums — for this example I've chosen Sports and Games. As you can see, the sub-forums are listed, again just like they are when you expand a forum in the left-hand bar in a browser.
Again, tap any of the forums listed — I've chosen sporting events — to see a couple things you haven't seen before, at least not displayed in the same way:
The first thing you should notice here is that along the top there are three folder selections: Topics, Sticky, and Announcements. In the app, "stickied" threads (those containing the rules for individual forums, for example) and forum-wide announcements don't take up space along with regular threads, but they're always available by selecting the appropriate tab.
Below that are thread listings, although in this forum there are a couple of sub-sub forums listed first. Threads are listed in the familiar way, with the thread title, First poster, and number of replies shown. As before, a solid background for the replies number means there are unread posts in the thread. Notice that the date and time of the most recent post is also listed.
Finally, there's something hidden here, something important. Place your finger on the screen and drag it down about an inch without releasing, and you'll see a new message appear at the top of the screen:
In a couple places in the app, you can refresh the listing of whatever is displayed simply by "pulling" the screen down like this. It is spring loaded, so when you release your finger it will pop back to where it was... but with the topic, or private message, list (depending on which screen you were on) freshly updated.
Let's select the NHL 2011 Offseason Thread, by tapping anywhere on that line:
There's plenty to see here. The numbers near the top are the page number, using the posts per page that you've selected in the settings, discussed above (or the forum default of 20, of you haven't changed that setting). Notice that when I opened the thread I wasn't taken to the first page, but rather the first one with new replies; that's because my app is set to take me to the first unread reply (again, the default setting, but one that can be changed).
Each post is shown with the poster's name and avatar picture, and the time and date of the post.
You can also see a small advertisement at the bottom of the screen. The thread screen is the only screen in which ads appear.
You can switch pages by tapping on the appropriate page number near the top of the screen; you can also scroll up and down with the familiar finger drag. But there's another thing you can do using a finger drag. If you scroll to the bottom, you'll see the Previous Page and Next Page buttons:
I haven't read this thread for a while, so my "last unread" was pretty far back in it. (The system maximum is two weeks — if it's been even longer than that, the system considers you to have read anything that is more than two weeks old.)
For our example, let's go to the end of the thread, using the page numbers at the top. (The numbers are somewhat awkward to use for large threads; later we'll discuss a way to speed up the process of getting to the end of very lengthy ones.)
Here on the last page, we see a couple of very important features of the app:
For one thing, you can see that if you turn your iPhone horizontally, the app turns to a horizontal viewing mode. For some threads this may work better for you.
But look back at the first, vertical screen, at what the green arrow is indicating. As you can see, the app automatically hides all spoiler text, replacing it with a "Spoiler Removed" message. To see it you'll have to view the thread using a regular browser engine (because the Tapatalk engine does not support spoilers at all, except to hide them for twoplustwo.com users). But hold on a second — it turns out this is very simple to do.
Now look at the red arrow. It's pointing to some lighter gray text that's also delineated by a vertical gray line on the left. That gray text is a post that has been quoted. Everything that shows (in the app) shows in the quoted post as well (unless you selected the option not to show quoted images, in your settings). But you can't see the name of the original poster — again, that's a function that the Tapatalk engine doesn't support.
You may think it's inconvenient, not being able to see spoilers or the names of people being quoted, but it's really not — if you know the next trick. First, touch anywhere inside one of the posts in question, to highlight it (notice that it's shown in yellow):
Tap More to see a few options:
Selecting Open in Safari seems to do just that, bringing up a new Safari-like window with the post in question right at the top. With the mobile Safari engine you can do just about everything you can do on a regular browser — in this case seeing who made the quoted post (circled in red here), but also viewing spoilers and getting around some other limitations of the Tapatalk-based browser. In other words, for convenience you have the twoplustwo app, while for power you'll do as we just did, opening pages in mobile Safari.
But it's inconvenient, because now you have to exit Safari to get back where you were, right? Actually, not at all. Just click the arrow in the upper left, and you'll pop right back to where you were. You see, we never actually left the twoplustwo app, we just used the Safari engine within it. (You can change this behavior in the settings, but there's really no reason to).
What if you wanted actually to switch to mobile Safari itself? That's easy too. Tap the button in the lower left (green highlighting), then select the only option, Open in Safari. This time the window that pops up really is mobile Safari.
Again, there's not much reason to do this because you can do everything using the Safari engine without leaving the app, but what if you did go to Safari? (This would happen if, while in the Safari engine, you clicked an external link, for example — that would take to a real Safari window.) In iOS 4 (the iPhone system you probably have installed), that's simple too. Just double-click the Home button (the physical button near the bottom of the front screen) to bring up the application dock:
Just click on the Twoplustwo app icon to get back where you were (which, remember, was viewing the page within the app using the Safari engine — to get back to regular app viewing, you then click that arrow in the upper left.
Some users will rarely or never have to view pages using Safari; for others it will be commonplace. The Safari engine is used for:
______________________________________
Next, let's look at reading and posting to threads using the app.
Go to Forum on the bottom menu bar. With the left folder, By Category, selected at the top you'll see the hierarchical arrangement that appears on the left when you are using a normal browser. (The right folder, By Name, is what it sounds like and is probably less useful for most forum users.) You can scroll down with the familiar finger drag that's common to most iPhone apps.
Tap on any forum name to go to the sub forums — for this example I've chosen Sports and Games. As you can see, the sub-forums are listed, again just like they are when you expand a forum in the left-hand bar in a browser.
Again, tap any of the forums listed — I've chosen sporting events — to see a couple things you haven't seen before, at least not displayed in the same way:
The first thing you should notice here is that along the top there are three folder selections: Topics, Sticky, and Announcements. In the app, "stickied" threads (those containing the rules for individual forums, for example) and forum-wide announcements don't take up space along with regular threads, but they're always available by selecting the appropriate tab.
Below that are thread listings, although in this forum there are a couple of sub-sub forums listed first. Threads are listed in the familiar way, with the thread title, First poster, and number of replies shown. As before, a solid background for the replies number means there are unread posts in the thread. Notice that the date and time of the most recent post is also listed.
Finally, there's something hidden here, something important. Place your finger on the screen and drag it down about an inch without releasing, and you'll see a new message appear at the top of the screen:
In a couple places in the app, you can refresh the listing of whatever is displayed simply by "pulling" the screen down like this. It is spring loaded, so when you release your finger it will pop back to where it was... but with the topic, or private message, list (depending on which screen you were on) freshly updated.
Let's select the NHL 2011 Offseason Thread, by tapping anywhere on that line:
There's plenty to see here. The numbers near the top are the page number, using the posts per page that you've selected in the settings, discussed above (or the forum default of 20, of you haven't changed that setting). Notice that when I opened the thread I wasn't taken to the first page, but rather the first one with new replies; that's because my app is set to take me to the first unread reply (again, the default setting, but one that can be changed).
Each post is shown with the poster's name and avatar picture, and the time and date of the post.
You can also see a small advertisement at the bottom of the screen. The thread screen is the only screen in which ads appear.
You can switch pages by tapping on the appropriate page number near the top of the screen; you can also scroll up and down with the familiar finger drag. But there's another thing you can do using a finger drag. If you scroll to the bottom, you'll see the Previous Page and Next Page buttons:
I haven't read this thread for a while, so my "last unread" was pretty far back in it. (The system maximum is two weeks — if it's been even longer than that, the system considers you to have read anything that is more than two weeks old.)
For our example, let's go to the end of the thread, using the page numbers at the top. (The numbers are somewhat awkward to use for large threads; later we'll discuss a way to speed up the process of getting to the end of very lengthy ones.)
Here on the last page, we see a couple of very important features of the app:
For one thing, you can see that if you turn your iPhone horizontally, the app turns to a horizontal viewing mode. For some threads this may work better for you.
But look back at the first, vertical screen, at what the green arrow is indicating. As you can see, the app automatically hides all spoiler text, replacing it with a "Spoiler Removed" message. To see it you'll have to view the thread using a regular browser engine (because the Tapatalk engine does not support spoilers at all, except to hide them for twoplustwo.com users). But hold on a second — it turns out this is very simple to do.
Now look at the red arrow. It's pointing to some lighter gray text that's also delineated by a vertical gray line on the left. That gray text is a post that has been quoted. Everything that shows (in the app) shows in the quoted post as well (unless you selected the option not to show quoted images, in your settings). But you can't see the name of the original poster — again, that's a function that the Tapatalk engine doesn't support.
You may think it's inconvenient, not being able to see spoilers or the names of people being quoted, but it's really not — if you know the next trick. First, touch anywhere inside one of the posts in question, to highlight it (notice that it's shown in yellow):
Tap More to see a few options:
Selecting Open in Safari seems to do just that, bringing up a new Safari-like window with the post in question right at the top. With the mobile Safari engine you can do just about everything you can do on a regular browser — in this case seeing who made the quoted post (circled in red here), but also viewing spoilers and getting around some other limitations of the Tapatalk-based browser. In other words, for convenience you have the twoplustwo app, while for power you'll do as we just did, opening pages in mobile Safari.
But it's inconvenient, because now you have to exit Safari to get back where you were, right? Actually, not at all. Just click the arrow in the upper left, and you'll pop right back to where you were. You see, we never actually left the twoplustwo app, we just used the Safari engine within it. (You can change this behavior in the settings, but there's really no reason to).
What if you wanted actually to switch to mobile Safari itself? That's easy too. Tap the button in the lower left (green highlighting), then select the only option, Open in Safari. This time the window that pops up really is mobile Safari.
Again, there's not much reason to do this because you can do everything using the Safari engine without leaving the app, but what if you did go to Safari? (This would happen if, while in the Safari engine, you clicked an external link, for example — that would take to a real Safari window.) In iOS 4 (the iPhone system you probably have installed), that's simple too. Just double-click the Home button (the physical button near the bottom of the front screen) to bring up the application dock:
Just click on the Twoplustwo app icon to get back where you were (which, remember, was viewing the page within the app using the Safari engine — to get back to regular app viewing, you then click that arrow in the upper left.
Some users will rarely or never have to view pages using Safari; for others it will be commonplace. The Safari engine is used for:
- Seeing who made a post that's been quoted.
- Viewing spoilers and polls.
- Seeing "edited by" text, which doesn't show in the app.
- Viewing posts which include tags (formatting codes) that aren't supported by the app, including:
- underline and highlight,
- tables and [code]
- superscripts and subscripts
- lists like this one.
- Viewing private messages in user-created folders — anything but your inbox and sent items.
Last edited by atakdog; 07-07-2011 at 04:39 PM.
07-07-2011
, 04:18 PM
— it starts right after the only horizontal screen shot.
