Wednesday, June 23, 2010

Looking for secret beta strike team

We've got a project that we're working on that we need some help beta-testing. If you're interested in helping us test it, go to the Beta Team reddit and hit "+frontpage" in the right-hand sidebar. It isn't a lot of work but we really need some small nuggets of feedback.

After we have enough subscribers we'll mark it private and post instructions there.

Thursday, June 17, 2010

We've open sourced iReddit

Like we promised, we've open sourced our iPhone app. Get the code!

We're deprecating the advertising-supported free version in favour of making the next version that you help create free with no advertising. However none of us are iPhone developers, so for this to happen we're depending on the help of those that are. This is in the community's hands now! We're not able to refund you if you paid for the non-free version, but just think of all of the servers your $1.99 bought us ;) (For the pedantic, according to Amazon's pricing model you bought us 2.4 hours of one app server).

If you're an iPhone developer that wants to donate your time, join our discussion!

Thursday, June 10, 2010

Yeah, we had our gmail account broken into

We've updated outgoing email to come from reddit@reddit.com rather than reddit@gmail.com, so please don't accept any emails from the latter any more.

We're in contact with both google's and twitter's security team, and the site has not been broken into. All he's done at this point is ruined everyone's night. We don't recycle passwords, and we don't store passwords in the reddit email.

No one's account has been compromised. We don't store any confidential information in that account; it is just for feedback email.

Wednesday, June 09, 2010

A better mobile reddit for all

It's been a long time in the making, but we're proud to announce the release of our new mobile interface. Classic reddit looks great on modern phones, but the UI is definitely designed around a mouse-and-browser combo and not (my) fat fingers and an ARM chip. We'd like to extend some very special thanks to the CSS 3 ninja skills of paradox460 in his design and development work on this app (the blow-by-blow can be found on his blog). Not having an on-staff designer (insert jokes about the look and feel of reddit), it's a pleasure to work with someone who enjoys properly laying a site out.

So without futher ado, here's the new interface. From now on, the first time you visit our former static mobile site with a smart phone, we'll present a choice to use the new interface (which will optionally set a cookie to tell us to leave your cheese damn well where you left it). Beware if you click on those links outside of chrome or safari (or basically look at it in anything not based on webkit); most mobile browsers are built around webkit, and we optimized the css for those browsers. We apologize in advance to anyone using mobile IE. (Oh wait. No we don't. You have no one to blame but yourself or, more likely, your employer.)

Features include:
  • Unlike the iphone app or old mobile, it's designed to work on anything that has a touch screen (android, iPad, that thing you put together in your basment).
  • On listing pages, we've added infinite scrolling to save on page refreshes.
  • On comment pages, we've cut the thread depth to five for now. The small screen makes longer threads hard to follow.
  • The button bar on each post has been moved into a pop-over toolbar to save screen real estate
  • The arrows are 50% larger, meaning that properly clicking them will no longer rely on instantaneous Brownian motion of you and your device
We're not going to pretend this is a 100% working app, and slapping a label like "beta" is so 2005, but we will say that all of the most common tasks have been tested and are working (commenting, messaging, submission -- we even have a mobile bookmarklet worked out for the iphone with an android one in the works), but you'll notice some major omissions (/prefs anybody?).

As such, we're open to and encouraging suggestions, improvements, and constructive criticisms (though I'm confident we'd never, ever have to ask. Well, maybe for the "constructive" part.). The code backing this is going to be available in our next open-source code push, so everyone working on their own version of reddit will get their own mobile site too.

And before we forget, besides the awesome design work by paradox460, we'd also like to thank fwr for volunteering to help with some really awesome alpha QA. Some of those bugs were not pretty.

We're open-sourcing the existing iReddit app

We've decided we are going to open source the existing iReddit app for those who still like to use it, but our development for the future is going to be limited to making our mobile app better. Oh, and since this is a blog post about a mobile interface, and, well, the WWDC was this week, this post wouldn't be complete without:

The iPhone diatribe

There's been a lot of discussion about our lack of updates on our iPhone app, and we have a secret to tell you: we really, really hate having to deal with the App store. It's not just that building a mobile app for the iphone requires using tools that are outside of our normal repertoire, or that we had to sign a EULA to use them (that incidentally says we can't criticize them publicly -- oh well), or that by putting energy to support an iphone app we are neglecting android, blackberry, and even palm users (they still exist!) let alone an ipad version.

Mostly, dealing with the app store is a royal pain in the ass. Reddit is a creature of the web and not designed as a desktop app (though they aren't called desktops on smart phones, that's really all that apps are). As such, our development is based around the radical notion that we can deploy bugfixes to site problems in less than a fortnight. This is not the case with the app store (quite the contrary actually). We've had too many legitimate bugfixes rejected from the store because the reviewer of the patch happened to check on a day when someone made a poop joke or our thumbnailer did a particularly good job detecting the raciest image on the page. Nevermind pointing out that the content for the app comes from the web and that we didn't put the poop joke in there just for them, but all this has been said before and will be said again.

On a related rant, while trying to make our new web interface into a web app by following the docs, we'd just like to say that, regardless of what you might hear to the contrary <meta name="apple-mobile-web-app-capable" content="yes" /> does not work. No portrait mode and no links without closing the app and popping open safari is one hell of a handicap. I can't believe that I had to seriously considered adding a "click" event to every <a> on the page to set "window.location = this.href" to make it work correctly.

Enough ranting though. After three years, Apple seems unwilling to fix this, and yet another rant by some disgruntled web developers isn't going to compete with their making money hand over fist selling apps.

Edit Here's the correct link to paradox's blog with all of the gory details. Thanks, paradox!

Edit 2 We're currently cleaning up the iReddit (iPhone app) code base and will have a link up soon.