My 5 FriendFeed iPhone Wishes
I had a busy weekend and spent a lot of my time not at home… much FriendFeed’ing on the iPhone ensues. To that end, inspired by Steven Hodson’s list I thought I’d enumerate them. While FriendFeed’s interface is simple enough that it looks decent out the gate on the iPhone, I think a more focus built one would be even better.
1. A bigger font would be nice. Cribbing a little bit of the look of Google Reader wouldn’t be wrong. This would help me move the iPhone away from my eyes. Also if the action buttons (i.e. “Like”, “Comment”) were bigger with more space around them, I could hit them the first time, instead of the fourth. I have skinny fingers, but I find pressing “Like” on the iPhone almost impossible to hit.
2. Less AJAX! I suspect there’s a lot of AJAX on this page, the most noticeable is the “Comment - Like - Hide - More” action buttons. They filter in after the page load. I don’t know what exactly is the culprit but I find the FF page to be very unresponsive on the iPhone scrolling slowly and sometimes confusing it so that it thinks it never finishes loading.
3. Less comments. I know, I know… but if you’ve got the bigger font, the conversations may become too much. The solution to this is already in place - put in a placeholder that says 12 comments (perhaps even with a list of the commentors) and clicking on that AJAX’s them in. This doesn’t conflict with #2 above because it is AJAX apart from page load.
4. There’s some bug, I think, in the links. When I click on a link (which I have set to open in a new tab) that works fine, but most of the time when I go back to the original FF tab that tab also ends up on the page I linked to. So I need to then just reload FF and navigate back to wherever I was.
5. The abillity to privately flag/star an entry. This one’s stolen from Steven’s list, but hey, it’s a good one. I’ve wanted this for awhile, but on the iPhone especially so - right now you can only publicly “Like” an article, which allows you to go back and see everything you’ve liked. But sometimes something’s interesting looking but I don’t have time to check it out - I’d love the ability to easily note that and come back to it. Again, cribbing from Google Reader, it’s the difference between “starring” something and “sharing” it.
Any or all of those would be welcome additions to the service as far as me and my iPhone are concerned. Anyone else out there using this on the phone?
