Hi, I am super excited to have the Android mobile app and have been trying to find ways to expand my Coda usage while I’m on the go.
So far I don’t see much difference between using the app and just using Coda in my browser. I do see, however, a few main things that I think would improve the mobile experience:
Offline Access - I have had multiple moments (especially while traveling) where I wanted to access my Coda doc without having to worry if I was going to have or use mobile data to do it. It would be really nice to be able to use the app offline.
Shortcuts to specific docs on the home screen - I love that Coda makes my documents feel like apps on my phone, but I dislike that I have to open up the Coda app to get to my individual document “apps.” So as a workaround, I save Chrome shortcuts to the browser version of each document that I want quick access to. The app definitely feels redundant in this case and could benefit from built-in shortcut creation.
Calendar viewing - I was surprised to recently find that the calendar view just shows up as a list like any other table when viewing on a mobile device. Will mobile calendar viewing be added in the future?
Thanks for all your hard work! You are doing a great job and I love the frequent updates and improvements! Keep it up!
Ha-ha, I have a draft for topic with name “Mobile View Suggestions”, and was going to publish it in a few days ) Ok, I’ll add my list here:
1. Ability to select which columns I want to see in mobile view. Auto prediction about what data is most important sometimes do its job well, but sometimes dont.
2. Select visual style of each column or left it as it is on the desktop. Now main column transforms to large bold font, it is not so convenient, not pretty at all, and I completely lose my own bold conditional format. (Maybe this effect exists only on non-latin letters, so use full unicode font).
Thank you @Skyler_Tolman and @Denis_Peshekhonov for the excellent detailed feedback! It’s great to hear that you value the mobile experience and understand specifically where you’d most value further improvements.
We are aware of these requests and would love them as well. Hearing from you helps us prioritize where we should focus next.
Just wanted to bump this post. It would be wonderful to see improvements done to the mobile app. As of now the mobile functionality is lacking—at least for my uses. I’ve resorted to creating specific “mobile friendly” versions in separate pages. Even then, it takes a while to navigate to these pages upon opening the app. Having shortcuts that I could add to my phone’s home screen would be helpful.
I recall reading somewhere on the site that the mobile app is more for easy viewing. Would love to know if Coda intends to expand on mobile app functionality.
The new embed features open some roads to easier mobile use: i have created a new doc with (only) embedded pages relevant for mobile users. It looks like a mini version of my main doc, with all the functionalities as expected and without the pages that I don’t need while on the road (setup tables, reports, etc.).
There are a few things to be desired (see another post from me earlier today), but it is a nice start to a simple, mobile only, version of your main doc (and it is not limited to mobile).
At this point there are no security advantages to using embeds. But it allows you to make complex docs with many pages and/or many areas of interest into a number of smaller docs with perhaps only one area of interest and it also allows you to not include all the support pages with setup/base tables, documentation, archives, etc. Again, not to secure anything, but to make sure your users don’t get lost in an overload of pages and tables.
My approach is to embed only the pages that my users need for storing or retrieving information. The main doc might have hundreds of pages, but a customer support agent needs only a subset of these pages, and so does a sales rep, accounting, etc. But they all need current name/address information, which is no problem, because somewhere deep down they are all working in the same document, without the hassle of having to rely on crossdoc, one or two way sync and other tricks.
