We haven’t announced this publicly but today we just turned on a new mobile experience for Coda so that we can start collecting feedback before we officially launch it.
The overall goal was to make it feel like by building a document, you just also built an app for your phone without any extra work. To do that we made some perhaps counterintuitive choices:
We make an attempt at laying out your tabular data in a card that is optimized to maximize the use of the small screen. Please send us feedback on when this is or isn’t working for you. It is a pretty radical approach but the idea is that if you were designing a mobile app from scratch, you generally wouldn’t design the data to be displayed as a table. You would create some kind of card view.
Your sections are now tabs. Tabs are great for easy access. We also let you customize which sections show up in the tab bar. Pro tip: we are working on providing a less hacky way to do this but right now if you include an emoji in a section title, the app will often display an icon that looks kind of like that emoji as the tab for that section (we have mapped a bunch of the most popular ones to icons).
Swipe for buttons. Although we don’t support full editing yet, try swiping a row that has buttons on it. Yep, buttons do work! I’ve personally found this opens up so many possibilities for on-the-go use cases.
A few things noticeably missing (don’t worry, they’re coming!):
An actual native app
Editing
Comments
Search
A bunch of little things, including polishing a bunch of areas
We decided to go ahead and push what we had since our previous mobile experience was hideous and we wanted to start getting feedback on the work we’ve done so far.
So, please: go to coda.io on your mobile phone and check out your favorite doc. With any luck, you will be surprised at how you accidentally created a mobile app. All feedback, good and bad, is welcomed and wanted as we continue to iterate toward the final version.
P.S. Would love to see screenshots of how your docs look on mobile so feel free to post here or send me a private message.
Wow, I can’t believe that it is finally here! I attended your virtual block party but didn’t expect to see these features rolled out so quickly. I often plan my schedule for conferences and events in Coda but always had to transfer it to another app to have the “schedule” table available while I’m actually there - now I can keep it in Coda. As I tried the mobile version just now, I was really, really amazed and excited and have become an even bigger Coda fan!
Google Maps Integration via embed formula isn’t loading (it should appear directly under the first heading in the third screenshot) but I didn’t expect that anyway for such a new mobile version of Coda.
This is a great announcement. I have used it before on mobil. Now it looks great. Find a Screenshot attached.
What I found out is that my keyboard doesn’t start in Test fields. On all other columns the keyboard pops up but on text formated rows the keyboard did not start.
I love how it works so far. It’s pleasing and I can feel the huge potential of it.
I can’t wait for editing as I want to use Coda for so much use cases! What I plan to do with Coda. Mobile :
Use it as an Evernote app : focuses on note taking with bridges in other documents. It would be my second brain.
Use it like a planner for learning
To do list
Manage my projects : especially note taking on canvas for our daily stand-ups but I could use tables as well
Use it as a knowledge database to enter : useful links, every books, videos etc I read seen etc.
I have a few feedbacks:
Like cards on the Web Coda, text is cropped. This is the first polish issue I want to be fixed. I have been asking for this on cards for half a year. There could be some layout option like show all text from specific field and auto width of cards.
User() doesn’t work for me on mobile, even though I’m logged under the right account. And since many of my tables are filtered by User, I can’t really use them well.
Not being able to edit stuff, even a plain text is a bummer But thanks for early access to the view anyway.
When the connection is not so good, it takes quite a long time to load. But I believe this is completely normal ^^
As you said, we can’t edit. Actually I can’t write anything both in text fields of cards as well as on canvas.
Really need layouts options, to show what is needed, and I’m absolutely sure that you are working on this, but it cost nothing to tell my wishes and send you some love
Do you plan another action for left swiping?
Pros :
My filters works like a charm!
Stats and Gantt are good looking!
Buttons are fantastic!!!
I love how the groups are shown. Layouts options will be killers on this feature as well (to create specific use cases views).
Content looks great like images on canvas as well as gif links in tables.
I have some tables that are shown as tables, and I reaaaaaaally like that it can be decided by the user. Actually, this is perhaps a bug on your side, but I like this feature
Table instead of cards
Look how it looks good (even if pimento is cropped) :
@Saskia_Bader This is great! We built a similar type of template for our live block party. Would you be open to sharing your template and perhaps we can feature it in the template gallery? I’d love to see how you’ve used the same template for the various conferences you attend. You can share your template with support@coda.io.
For the Google Maps embed, does it show up properly on desktop?
It is looking promising and I am super excited this is moving forward. Without the ability to edit there is not a lot to test though. Editing has been my biggest problem on my mobile phone. Even in desktop mode editing did not work well.
Thanks @Saskia_Bader! Great to see the screenshots of how your docs look - please send more if you have any specific feedback (feel free to post here or send to support@coda.io with “Coda mobile” in the subject).
Thanks for the note on embeds - we still have some work outstanding to ensure those show properly.
Thanks @tomavatars! Really helpful to see your screenshots - we need these to help find bugs.
We’ll look into the cropping issues. We’re updating calendars soon - as a start they’ll use cards as well, but show the key information you’d expect for calendar data.
We want to ensure we do the best possible job choosing a card based on the underlying table, so we’re focusing our efforts first on the automatic card creation logic before adding user customization. - we’d love more examples and screenshots to help tune that. Feel free to post more examples here or send to support@coda.io with “Coda mobile” in the subject.
We started with right-swiping since left-swiping can switch top groups in some cases, but are considering switching this - would love feedback. We’ll also be adding swipe commands for editing actions like insert, delete & comment - looking at options to add these in the same swipe directions or separate system commands from user buttons in different swipe directions. Feedback welcome.
We just added in links from any card view to open as a table so you can always access that layout. For some tables we always pick a table when it seems the best for the layout - currently when the display column is hidden, or when the table has a lot of numerical data. Would love feedback on the logic for when we show cards vs tables
But thanks for early access to the view anyway.
and send you some love 
.
