In the absence of a native JACL interpreter for Android/ iOS I’ve playing around trying to get the Web interface to be useable on small screens. I’ve got something that I think works okay on the iPhone, but I’d be interested to hear from people with other types of phones to see what results they get. Most of the improvements came from using the “viewport” meta tag which seems to be an Apple creation, although it seems to be generally considered a good idea and well supported by other browsers despite not being a W3C standard.
The main problem I’m having at the moment is that when the on-screen keyboard is displayed only part of the web page is displayed so scrolling on screen’s worth of text gets tricky. I’ve hardcoded an amount that seems to work well for the iPhone in portait mode but I’d love to find a way to determine the exact number of pixels dynamically…
I tried The Unholy Grail on my Android phone (HTC Desire Z, to be specific). It looks good, but long chunks of text just aren’t readable. I can’t find any way of scrolling through the on-screen text other than selecting the command prompt and then typing something. But that immediately jumps to the end of the on-screen text, skipping the middle of long sections. Scrolling up and down by swiping doesn’t seem to work, so there’s no way of retrieving the missed text. (I don’t know if scrolling is supposed to be possible - it could be some problem specific to the Android browser.)
On the positive side, the design is clean and easy to read and the interpreter is quite responsive. Over wifi there’s only slight lag between entering a command and receiving a response, which is good to see in a web interpreter.
Thanks for the feedback Emily. The scrolling does work on the iPhone so I’ll have to find out what is going on under Android. I added some Javascript to scroll the text to the bottom when the player starts typing, but that only happens for the first character, from the second character onwards the player can scroll back up and keep typing without jumping back down. This is good if the player wants to check the name or spell for an object from high up in the description for example.
Anyway, I’ll see what I can do to get scrolling working on both platforms.
So I’ve done a bit of reading an a bit of experimenting and noticed a couple of things. The first is that if I have content wider than the textarea output by the game (as happens in Dragon when you view the script), you can no longer scroll with one finger and must use a two-finger scroll to view the text. What actually happens is a one-finger scroll moves the whole web page up and down while a two-finger scroll advances the text area.
From what I’m reading later version of Android also support this two-finger scrolling of a text area. Are you able to tell me if this works for you?