Mobile site update

There are two ways to access pinballmap.com: through a website browser, and through a mobile app (on either the Android or iOS platforms). And browsers, for the most part, are accessed either by a desktop/laptop computer or a smartphone/tablet. Most of our users who visit the site via a browser are using a desktop/laptop, but some are on their phones! Why would anyone access the website via a browser on their phone when they can just tap into the data via an app? Well, they might have a Windows Phone. We don’t have an app for WP just yet. Or they might just like to access all of the features on the website that may not have been added to the apps yet.

The latest major style update to the website introduced some less-than-mobile-friendly designs. Notably, elements with fixed positions that, when the browser window is teensy (as they often are when viewing from a mobile device), start overlapping one another. This makes things hard to read and click. And that’s not cool.

So we designed a really simple mobile version of the site. Using Rails, we detect if you’re on a mobile device, and if you are, a mobile-specific stylesheet loads that re-skins the site. Functionality is all the same (well, a few things have been removed or simplified), but everything fits a little better on a narrow screen. Elements (buttons and text) have also been made larger, so that your giant fingers and crappy eyes can easily click and read.

The screenshot to the right shows what the mobile site looks like at 320px wide. Your device might be wider than that. The design isn’t perfect, and we’ll do some style tweaking here and there so that it looks totally beautiful. But for now, it’s pretty good (definitely better than when we didn’t have a mobile-specific site!). If you have feedback, please share it!

This image is humongous, and there isn’t anything else to type… But it would be cool if the text on this post was just as long as the image, so more words can be found. Hmm… Stern just released a video preview of their upcoming Star Trek machine. Check it out. The playfield is pretty reminiscent of Star Trek: TNG, don’t you think? That’s probably a good thing.