Rethinking the iPad Browsing Experience | Hacker News Reader

Rethinking the iPad Browsing Experience

blog.arc90.com

81 pointsab932 comments

Reading the conclusion, they say discoverability of the sidebar is a factor. Well, I've seen some iphone/ipad apps that by default, show all the toolbars and buttons for a few seconds before hiding them (like showing and hiding the dock in OS X); and some even give a little automated "nudge" imitating an aborted swipe motion to show that there are other screens you can swipe to).

Ahhhh, downvoted you on accident, mate. Good observation.

Could also make this a settings based feature...

That’s seems to me to be the lazy way out. (Also something Apple would probably never ever do. I can’t think of any setting in any Apple application that radically changes the UI. There are modes, like Aperture’s fullscreen mode but no settings. Their iOS apps have even less settings, if you strip away all the configuration there are probably a few dozen real settings in their Settings app.)

I love how the common user suggestion to "just make it a setting" is immediately downvoted. Hacker News FTW.

I can't tell if that's sarcasm or not. I hope it it is. I thought downvoting was reserved for the most egregious of comments. For me, that one by mikeryan doesn't count.

Or just put the toolbar at the bottom nearer where your hand and the input pops up anyway.

If you do that with an always visible toolbar, you lose precious screen real estate: the top bar can just disappear away as you scroll down (with the always available status bar serving as a direct link to it), a bottom toolbar can not do that (note: I don't know if the toolbar hides on the iPad, it does on the iPhones).

> (note: I don't know if the toolbar hides on the iPad, it does on the iPhones).

It doesn't.

I like physically reading a page on the iPad - being able to use touch to control the page is wonderful. But I hate just about everything else about it. This is probably because I have very non-linear browsing habits and a typical session involves opening 10 - 15 pages as I branch off into links on the page or google for more information about terms in the page. For this purpose mobile safari is simply horrible. It is a good reading device but it is not a good browsing device.

This is a good article and I love Arc90, but I find the act that I can't watch the demo video of their iPad usability solution on my iPad humorous.

http://vimeo.com/13682463

Interesting concept, but I don't think toolbar real estate is much of a concern on the iPad; if it was they could just automatically hide the toolbar altogether like on the iPhone.

And I like having the name and URL visible at all times, as well as my bookmarks. I don't think I've ever complained about having to reach all the way to the top of the screen to tap my Google Reader bookmark.

Address bar attached to keyboard is an nice idea, and something I've thought about myself. I find myself wishing there was an input mode that simply attached an textview onto the keyboard, especially in Safari.

I also wish the iPad keyboard had select all/cut/copy/paste keys, arrow keys, next/previous word, start/end of line, forward delete, delete word, etc. I love actually typing on the screen, but positioning the cursor and revising text can be a pain.

One area of text input that really could do with improvement in Safari is input labels. Especially on the small factor iOS devices, the zoom level after activating a text box is necessarily so high that the input label often goes offscreen, particularly if the labels are (far) to the left of the input. When filling in a series of inputs you end up swiping back and forth between input and label.

Since labels are often tied to input via ID or nesting, it should be possible in the majority of cases to show the label onscreen while navigating forms, overlaid near the input element. I would even have thought some simple heuristics could be used when the HTML does not markup the relationship explicitly.

Why don't they just code such a chrome and publish it in the AppStore..?

That would take actual work. Feel free to do it yourself, though.

I would but I'm not that good of a programmer (yet)

The webOS dock-ribbon you can pull up from the gesture area in any card app would be another interface paradigm Apple or a third party could implement. I'm sure HP will blow the iPad experience out of the water with their tablet... #sda

The browsing experience on the iPad is fantastic. That said, I too have noticed some small hiccups, though the author's problem with the address bar at the top hasn't bothered me. The two things I don't like are:

1) I don't really know what a link points to without clicking it. I would love to just, say, draw a circle with my finger around the link and have it display the URL. Maybe there's some way to hover over links on the iPad that I don't know about?

2) No immediate close button. I have to hit the two overlapping rectangles to bring up the "tabs" and then close from there.

1) Tap and hold on the link and a menu will come up showing among other things the target URL of the link.

2) Agreed. That makes browsing feel slower and less fluid for a many-tab user. I don't really have a proposal on how to do it better than it's done currently, though... a close button being always available would be too easy to accidentally tap. Maybe if there wasn't that brief pause when you tap the "tabs" button...

2) Atomic web browser from the App Store gives classic tabs with a close button, and configurable gestures such as two finger swipe down to close a tab, and a three finger tap hides the toolbars for a fullscreen view.

Gestures surely cry out for convention over configuration.

1) Ah! I somehow didn't know that, thanks.

Regarding #1, if you click and hold on a link, a little pop up comes up displaying the URL and options to open, open in a new tab, and to copy the URL.

I have concerns with moving the address bar all the way down to the top of the keyboard: depending on the viewing angle, your fingers might cover your line of sight to the address bar, and you might accidentally touch the address bar while typing, causing you to change the cursor point or select text and overwrite the current text. How about we split the difference down the middle...and move the address bar to the middle?

I too wouldn't move the text area towards the keyboard, but the other way around: position the keyboard just underneath the text area.

I suspect moving the keyboard would cause muscle strain and the unpredictability of its location (system wide) would be frustrating.

If you get rid of the browser chrome at the top, how do I know what URL I am visiting?

I think there's an assumption in most mobile browsers that knowledge of the url isn't too important.

That being said in the example the address bar gets moved to the top of the keyboard which you can launch from the side menu.

I couldn't watch the video on my iPad. They should rethink that.

This is the way you access the URL bar in the Palm Pré browser (swipe at the top). and navigation is done with floating buttons at the bottom. Much better, IMO.

Sidebar experience similar to Dolphin HD for Android?

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