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Don't collapse sections on Google Glass
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Description

Obviously this is very low priority given the number of Glass users, but it'd be nice to fix it since Wikipedia is one of the first things people will try on Glass. While Glass gives you limited interactivity with the content of sites you're looking at, expanding sections is painful, and the user experience would be much better if they were expanded by default.

It looks like Glass can be reasonably reliably detected by checking for the combination of "Android" and "Glass" in the user-agent, see http://www.handsetdetection.com/blog/what-os-is-google-glass-running/

This was reported by Jack herrick, so CCing him.


Version: unspecified
Severity: minor

Details

Reference
bz56008

Event Timeline

bzimport raised the priority of this task from to Needs Triage.Nov 22 2014, 2:24 AM
bzimport set Reference to bz56008.

bingle-admin wrote:

Prioritization and scheduling of this bug is tracked on Mingle card https://wikimedia.mingle.thoughtworks.com/projects/mobile/cards/1323

Somebody needs to send us a test unit. :)

If I get a test unit I will personally fix that ;-) but until then there is nothing I can really do to this. I'd rather not do a fix based on guess work.

Maybe there is a more innovative solution here then simply keeping them open?

Thanks to Jack from WikiHow, Brion's got a Glass unit coming his way soon. :)

Unit arrived quicker than I expected, am fiddling with it. Jon, you'll enjoy playing with this too!

I can confirm that opening sections is a little nonintuitive -- it actually isn't _too_ awful since it works the same as opening a link, but that's pretty awful to begin with. ;)

Sequence is roughly:

  • scroll down until you see section headings
  • double-finger-tap-and-hold to switch on the little circle cursor thing, and pan your head around as necessary to get the cursor over the heading you want to expand (no, seriously)
  • single-finger-tap to open the menu
  • single-finger tap to activate "Select link"

A more "native" Glass-y card-based view would be far easier to use (but would be a pretty separate project)... it'll be interesting to see what improvements we can make in the browser view.

User-agent string:

Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; U; Android 4.0.4; en-us; Glass 1 Build/IMM76L; XE11) AppleWebKit/534.30 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0 Mobile Safari/534.30

Combination of 'Android' and 'Glass' should confirm it pretty easy.

Brion so what is your suggestion - simply disabling sections for this user agent? Alternatively we could blacklist it in ResourceLoader so it just gets the content and runs no JavaScript.. (I guess a Glass specific app would be better for Wikipedia anyway?)

I'd prefer to blacklist it as it seems silly having Glass specific code which only helps a small fraction of our visitors...

Getting back to this...

Yes, JS blacklist is probably the way to go as you can't really *use* any of the interactive features like search or file upload with the limited browser.

Me and Yuvi will experiment with a native app soon during research time, which will be far far more flexible...

I'll whip up a patch to add it to the RL blacklist and we'll test that. My test unit's at home today so I'll confirm the fix on a test site later...

(Be warned that there doesn't seem to be a way to just go to an arbitrary URL as you have to *speak* a search term into Google -- but you can Google "test dot wikipedia dot org" and follow links you added on test.wikipedia.org easily. :)

Change 100823 had a related patch set uploaded by Brion VIBBER:
Blacklist Google Glass web browser from JS

https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/100823

Change 100823 merged by jenkins-bot:
Blacklist Google Glass web browser from JS

https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/100823