New mobile experience and iOS app

[nathan]

Together with today’s launch of Coda 1.0, we’re introducing a refreshed mobile web experience and an iOS app now available in the App Store.

May 2 Update: Coda for Android is now available as well! Install it here

We’d love for all of you to help share the news and support us on Product Hunt today. A special thanks to all of you who’ve helped test and provide feedback as we’ve prepared for this release!

Several months ago, we set for ourselves an ambitious goal: what would your doc look like if a someone purpose-built a native mobile app for it? And could we make that happen automatically, without you having to think about how?

Watch your doc become an app.

Here’s how your doc transforms on mobile:

1. Your sections become tabs

Sections are the navigation of your doc, and map to the most common and efficient way to navigate mobile apps: a tab bar. By default, you’ll have quick access to the first four sections of your doc, but user of doc can choose and arrange whatever sections they want to promote to tabs and make the ‘app’ their own.

2. Tables and buttons adjust to fit your screen

If you look at your Coda doc on desktop, you’re likely to find a few tables of structured data. If you look at apps on your phone you’ll find plenty of structured data, but rarely shown as a table. Instead, you’ll often see structured data represented as cards that fit well on the screen and scroll in a single direction.

We follow this common pattern to help you quickly find and scan information from your tables. Tables show with different card layouts based on their structure, all without you needing to do anything.

For now, there’s just a couple exceptions: if you have several numeric columns, you’ll see a table so you can read the column headers and know what each value represents; and if the display column is hidden, you’ll see a table as there’s not a clear choice for a card title. In all cases, just click the table icon if you want to see it in the full table layout.

Additionally, mobile cards commonly support swiping as a gesture to perform actions. Button columns in your tables transform in to swipe gestures on cards, enabling efficient access to quickly perform any task you choose.

3. Notifications you set up in your doc push to your phone

Notifications on your phone allow you stay on top of your work and move faster. Of course, you’ll know when someone shares a doc with you or mentions you in a comment. But Coda’s building blocks enable more - with people columns that can notify when someone’s added, buttons that can send notifications when clicked, and automations that can send notifications on any rule, you can create the perfect logic to send a notification exactly when you need. Everyone you choose will get an email, and those with the iPhone app will receive a push right away.

Mobile Web and More

We know that you work in a team, and want your Coda docs to be accessible to anyone you work with any time you send them a link, no install required. Our revamped mobile web experience enables anyone to fully participate in a doc, from any device, with an app-like experience.

We also know many Coda users value the quick access and convenience of a dedicated app, and we’re starting today with an iPhone app.

Android & iPad users, stay tuned! Many of us are Android users here and our experience on Android is quite good (sans app) since it’s very easy to pin Coda docs to your home screen so they feel “just like apps”. The main thing iOS users get is that Coda notifications show up as system notifications. We’re working on an Android app, but think you may love the experience you can get already.

Getting Started

We’ve heard from many of you that it’s most important to view and edit the content of Coda docs from your phone, more so than creating or expanding the structure of a doc. We’ve focused first on enabling full editing of any part of a doc that you’ve created using Coda’s building blocks on desktop.

We’ve also introduced a new set of starter templates on mobile that help you get started with many common scenarios straight from your phone, without needing to worry about setting up the tables or views first. So you can get started with a new project plan, to do list, or contact log straight from your phone.

New Scenarios

Our hope is that the Coda mobile experience can do more than just transform your existing docs into convenient apps, and also open up new scenarios. What custom app will you build for your team, just by making a simple doc?

We’ve had fun creating new docs that leverage mobile push notifications, like the My Reminders and Time Tracker templates. Some of you have inspired us already, like @benblee whose Inventory Manager feels just like an app on the phone. One of our Coda employees @gilgoldshlager41 just created a Flashcard App that’s a great study aid from your phone.

What will you create? We’re excited to find out.

[Gavin_Goncalves]

Very Nice Improvments.

What Is missing is a Input Field in Mobile Format that I can use for making small calculatores.

Here is an example of what I am trying to do:

To make the 3 Inputs Editable in Mobile View I have to use a Table.

Best Regards

[jerols]

Oh yeah, totally agree! We need an input field control. It is something we’ve talked about for a while and just haven’t gotten around to it yet. But definitely something we will be thinking about in our next round of prioritization.

[nathan]

For those of you who use iPads, we wanted to let you know that we just updated the Coda app in the App Store with iPad support - take a look!

‎Coda

[zoglow]

Yay!! I have an android phone, but I have an iPad! So excited to use Coda on it!

[Andreea_Cri]

I’ve been testing my docs on Android and I find a few things annoying:

1. Columns seem to reorder in a way that I do not want and I don’t think there’s a way I can change that. I wish for the mobile version to retain my column order or for me to be able to edit how the mobile version displays my table views.
   Even when I tap to view a detailed view of my table my first column is not the first. My plan is to use my doc as an app and this reduces it’s functionality on mobile (Android).

2. When I go from section to section I never seem to be at the top of the page. I wish it always took me to the beginning of each section.

[nathan]

Hi @Andreea_Cri, thanks for the feedback!

On (1), are you able to share screenshots of specific tables that don’t show the way you’d like, and how you’d like them to be different? That kind of detail is very helpful for us.

When you click in to the full-screen row detail view, the order should be the same as the order of the table columns, unless you’ve created a custom layout. It would also help if you can show an example of this.

On (2), when you switch sections it resumes to the same part of that section you were last viewing – so if you’re in the middle of reading, and switch to another section to look something up, you resume to the same position when you come back.

Have you ever found that behavior useful? Are there times when you’d want this vs. would want to go to the top?

Thanks,
Nathan

[Andreea_Cri]

Hi Nathan. Thanks for your reply.

(1)
Here are is an example of a section I made to search for items.

• This shows how the tables display on the section on my Android phone:

I don’t like that the cell widths of the purple table aren’t responsive and the second column is cropped out while the first column doesn’t need that much empty space. Also, a third column that doesn’t show would fit in there too.
As for the Equipment by Category table, it would be good to have the ability to customise where columns like brand names (AOC, Apple, LG), status (Working) and availability appear and which one is more important.

• This shows how each table displays when I try to interact with it by tapping on a row:

It would be nice if I could interact with this table from section view and not have to open it in Expand row view.

I find it extremely annoying that the keyboard pops up and everything suddenly moves on my screen when I try to select something. I think the keyboard should only pop up for new data input columns, not for lookup or select. Also the drop down menu displays only 3 options and there is no scroll bar to indicate there are more options to select from.

The whole purpose of this section is to enable me to search for items and tick them. I can’t do that easily on my phone. If I tap on an item it opens detailed view, where the checkbox is hidden. I have to open the table instead. For mobile, I wish I could set columns like checkbox and button to be interactive from section view. So I guess I’d like to have table views made especially for mobile and dependent on section. Or when you create a table view on desktop, also create a linked mobile view and have the option to set certain columns as interactive from section view.

• This shows the options I get when I slide on a row:

I find it useful that the reset button I created in a column shows up as a button here.

Here it would be useful to have the checkbox column I created. And having the option to disable adding and deleting of rows.

• This shows how the tables display when I tap on the table icon:

I have to be in landscape mode just to see 3 columns.

On my desktop, I set [In Project Cart] as the first column, second [Item Type], third [Brand], fourth [Model]. Item ID is my 7th column. I’m guessing it’s pushed to first because it’s the display column, but I don’t want that in this view of my table.

• This is how the same section shows up on my desktop:

Here I can select things in the purple table without having to change views and I can tick items to add them to the cart also without any extra steps. On mobile, I have to go from section view to table view or expand row to be able to interact the same way (which is an extra step).

(2)
I think the behaviour of whether or not a section remembers my last viewing position should be a an optional setting accessible from the navigation bar on the left in desktop view and from the same menu where you can rename, delete etc a section.
I can think of the difference between building a doc and interacting with it as a user. When I build a doc I switch between sections in a haphazard way. If I’m switching back and forth between a few sections, then it’s useful to remember where I left off. But if I go to sections I haven’t viewed in a while, especially if they have a lot of content, I’d like to be at the start.
Then as a user, depending on the function of the doc or section, sometimes it’s better to always start at the top.
Maybe the viewing behaviour of sections was buggy at some stage, because I remember a while ago it didn’t seem to remember where I left and it would take me back to a random spot.
Now I notice it remembers where I left on mobile separately than desktop. Maybe have the option to reset viewing position for device when signing out.

[nathan]

Hi @Andreea_Cri, thanks for the extensive detail, this is very helpful!

There are a few bugs in here that I’ll follow up on, as well as some adjustments we’d like to make to improve things. It’s very helpful for us to evaluates changes against specific scenarios in real docs.

I know it’s not ideal, but for now you can add buttons to tables with checkboxes and set them to check the box, so you can can swipe the row to check it off on mobile.

[Andreea_Cri]

Hi Nathan,

Thanks for your reply. I’m glad you found my feedback useful.

I will try your suggestion to use a button.

I found another bug, although I feel it might be purposefully made that way. I have a select control and a doc comment “attached” to it. If I try to tap the select control to change the selection when viewing of comments is enabled in mobile view, I can’t. The comment keeps popping up. I can only change the selection if I disable comments view. I guess this kind of comments is more for doc “developers” than users. (I recently discovered doc comments and I found them very useful while developing a doc, btw

[Andreea_Cri]

Hello again.

About sections resuming where I was last viewing… Has this behaviour changed in desktop view? It doesn’t seem to be working for me in this doc where I have two sections, each with a table. I keep switching between these two sections, and Coda doesn’t remember where I left off, not even if I select a cell or a row. I keep getting taken to the second row of the table whenever I go back to one of these two sections.

This is a scenario where section resume would be really useful.

[nathan]

For comments on buttons, we’re aware of this. It’s a tricky case since you may want to do one of 2 things when tapping a control - change the control, or view the comment.

We favor showing the comment, since comments on controls are rare, and you can always interact with the control if you first hide comments (click the … in the top-right corner)

On desktop, resuming the scroll position when switching sections works if your selection is outside a table, but not yet if the selection is inside a table. We’d like to enable that as well, but there’s some additional complexity required for that.

[Andreea_Cri]

That is good to know
I installed the Coda extension thinking it would enable me to open a doc in multiple tabs, but I get the message that is still under development. This would be a good workaround. I’m assuming whenever I load a section the web page refreshes, while having two tabs open at the same time wouldn’t refresh the page when I switch in-between.

[nathan]

Hi all,
Wanted to circle back with some good news for Android users - the Coda Android app is now available! Install it here

And we’d be ever so grateful if you upvoted it on Product Hunt!

-Nathan

[Juan_Luis_Chulilla]

Is mobile version going to be full-fledged?

It is going to be possible to create sections or to alter tables with an iPad?

Thanks in advance for your answers

[BenLee]

Adding more editing capabilities and improving performance on mobile is definitely on the roadmap. I don’t have timeframes for this, but mobile is in the plans.

[Peter_Button]

I’d really like to move to Coda for everything, but the weakness of the iOS app is a major issue. It seems that very little has changed in three years.

Should I expect a significant improvement in the iOS app any time soon?

Thanks

[BenLee]

The mobile app has been getting a good bit of attention and will continue to get updates.

There are quite a few things we’re looking at, things just take a little time.

[Peter_Button]

Thanks for your reply @BenLee - I have now started to use Craft.do primarily because their iOS app is instant and full featured. I’ve cancelled my Coda subscription for now and will watch from a distance.

[Katy_Turner]

Hi Peter, thanks for the candid feedback and for staying engaged. As Ben mentioned, we’re actively working on our app – I expect to be able to share some good news with you soon