RadioMail Mobile-Friendly Forms

Winlink forms were built for a Windows PC, and your iPhone isn't one. Let's see how we can make this better. [whistling music] Take a look at the forms on the iPad. The screen in landscape make them pretty usable. So we're gonna go ahead and search for the Winlink check-in form and take a look at what it looks like. It opens in a full browser, and you can read pretty much all the form as is. But of course, you can also pinch zoom for particular area if you wanna read some of the field and determine what, what they are. Uh, makes it pretty suitable. Of course, the iPad makes it a lot easier to type the information. You have a large on-screen keyboard, or you may have a attached keyboard to the iPad like I have here. Makes it a lot easier to use the form. 2.0 also allows you to select the account you're sending the form from, so if you have tactical call signs, they will be reflected up here on the form, and you can select it as you're filling your information. So let's move to the iPhone and see what the form look like here. We're gonna compose a form, so you press and hold the Compose button to have the menu appear, and you'll have the ability to select Compose with Form as one of the choice. It opens the form directory, so now you can select which form you wanna use. Like the iPad, you can search, and you can also go into Recents. That will show you the form that you recently used. Let's select the Winlink check-in, and now you see the problem. This is a landscape form that's being displayed on a vertical screen, so that means you do a lot of horizontal scrolling. The iPhone has the ability to auto-zoom in, so if you actually focus on a field, it will magnify it for you. Makes it a little bit easier, but it's really not easy to use. So as you can see, it's not ideal, so let's just cancel all of this and see if we can do better. So in Radio Mail 2.0, in Settings, we now have a new feature that we can turn on that will allow you to have a different rendering engine for the form. So go under Forms and then turn on the Mobile Friendly Layout. That will enable you to do that. Now let's go back to Compose a Form and see what has changed. So again, long press the Compose button, Compose with Form, check the Winlink check-in, and now the forms render differently. So you can see now all the fields are laid out vertically. Makes it a lot easier to scroll up and down on a vertical screen. And all the label information is still, uh, retained, but all the field are pretty consistent in size and just a lot easier to navigate, um, overall. So I can enter some information, save my exercise, go into Location, um, fill the mandatory field, um, and just submit my form. Now, if you notice at the top of the screen, there is a little grid icon on the top right. That allows you to actually toggle between the optimize and the, uh, existing layout. So if you have a form and something doesn't look quite right or you think you're missing a field, you can always go back and tap that icon, and it will actually show you the, uh, default layout. And all the information you've entered is retained, so if you select something, you can toggle back and forth and then finish your form. Um, if you find a form that's really problematic, please let me know. I've tried to optimize and test the most, uh, commonly used form, but they change a lot, and new form get created all the time, so it's possible that, uh, I've missed some. But for the most part, you'll find that the Winlink check-in, the, uh, ICS messages, form that are, uh, very common in the workflow, um, are now optimized and tend to render pretty well. Mahalo and 73.