Hacker News Reader

Comment by benreesman | Hacker News Reader

this is awesome! it's really very close to a native experience (on iphone 4 at least). my hat's off to mr hewitt. for a comparable experience check out gmail in mobile safari, it's also very convincing.

apologizing for my ignorance, does anyone know for sure why these libraries are necessary? it seems like it wouldn't be hard to offer a standard way (or even a meta tag, i appreciate that pinch zooming is a reasonable default) to get smooth accelerated scrolling of fixed and/or overflow:auto containers.

View on HN

Libraries like these should not be necessary, but since Apple has not implemented proper scrolling of elements and iframes, we're left to do it ourselves. Perhaps iOS 5 (just two weeks until wwdc!) will solve the problem and make this project obsolete (I hope so).

Even if they do, libraries like these may still be necessary for more advanced scrolling mechanisms like those that snap to page boundaries or involve scrolling/zooming hybrids (like photo viewers common to many apps).

fantastic work and thanks for the quick reply. i'm eager to show this to some of the guys i work with as they're working on similar stuff. http://www.npr.org/webapp loaded on an ipad 2 is pretty slick, particularly in terms of multi-finger scrolling.

i'm sure i speak for a lot of people when i say thanks for working to advance the prospect of truly first-class web applications on mobile. these are exciting times!

Yeah. That is really smooth and fast on the iPhone 3G. It's a great job.

This is what overflow-scrollable areas on webpages should have been in iOS Safari. At the moment you have to mash two fingers into the screen and slowly drag it around; real clunky.

Fingers crossed (badum-tish) for an update next month.

I must admit I'm impressed. Barring a very slight jerkiness at some random times it actually feels native: fluid, fast, and the "physics" is very, very close. In comparison iScroll 4 is better on general smoothness but feels strangely alien to iOS (notably the inertia bounce at list ends).

With the swarm of crappy alternatives - barely mimicking the native behaviour - I saw before I was giving up on the hope that something like this could even remotely exist.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com