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bookwyrm-social / bookwyrm

Social reading and reviewing, decentralized with ActivityPub
http://joinbookwyrm.com/
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Make adding new books easier [on mobile or via multistep process] #1146

Open hartsick opened 3 years ago

hartsick commented 3 years ago

Okay, so this is a bit complicated. I'm going to describe my use case and current pain points, but I'm not sure of a great solution.

Context: I usually use BookWyrm from my iPhone, as a Safari bookmark. This makes it appear like a native app. For reasons I don't fully understand (and haven't dug into), every time I navigate away from BookWyrm on my phone it resets to the home page. This doesn't happen for similarly bookmarked apps (like, for example, Friend Camp), where it maintains the page I was on.

I often find myself adding books to BookWyrm, because I read reviews of upcoming releases and they are not yet in any existing data pulled into BookWyrm. I like to have a way of tracking things I'm interested in reading in the future, so automatically catalog anything of interest. Right now it is very hard to add books into BookWyrm on my phone because enough information is required that I have to navigate away from the 'add a book' page to fill in details, which means I can't navigate back. Also, I would prefer to add the book in a source library (like OpenLibrary), but that's even harder from phone if the ultimate goal is to shelve it in BookWyrm.

So, there are two things in this issue:

  1. Is there a user flow that would allow more easily adding books (or notes to add books in future) from mobile, or make it a multistep process (eg add minimal details like just title, allow a user to go back to books they've added so they can fill in the rest of the details later)?
  2. Why is BookWyrm not preserving browsing location on mobile Safari, like it does for other sites?

happy to make workarounds (eg logging books in my notes app, then adding them when I'm on desktop) but wanted to surface here in case they impact others. thank you!

mouse-reeve commented 3 years ago

Huh I have no idea why it isn't preserving browser location, that sounds incredibly annoying!

I think you can add a book with just a title? But yeah, I'd like to make this process smoother for sure!

hartsick commented 3 years ago

I managed to add a book with just a title yesterday, but then it disappeared and I couldn't find it again. Not sure if there was some sort of error and it didn't actually create, if I missed something, or if there's a filter that takes it out of results? I'm tempted to try again but don't want to create bad data

mouse-reeve commented 3 years ago

oh hm. what was the title? It could be an uncaught error

hartsick commented 3 years ago

@mouse-reeve We Are the Land: A History of Native California

hartsick commented 3 years ago

also in case it's confusing, I ended up adding that same book to Open Library and just imported it into BookWyrm a few min ago!

Danie10 commented 3 years ago

May also be worth testing it with another browser to see if it is something Safari specific on the iPhone or a more general issue with the mobile browser.