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Comment by cdubzzz | Hacker News Reader

Eh. It’s pretty terrible on mobile, though. I can’t read or click anything without zooming and a page load for each directory resets the zoom. I would say the content isn’t really relevant for mobile users but the images themselves actually work pretty well on my device. Far better than the site itself.

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It's actually pretty decent on mobile IMO. Pinch and zoom is easy to do, atleast on the iPhone. Then you just scroll naturally. The entire page doesn't move on you.

I agree with you in general, its not great on mobile, but it's not terrible. Far better than hamburger menu'ed UI that I see in the wild that seems to show 1 card at a time and hijacks the scroll mechanism.

A lot of "Not designed for mobile" fear stems from early days of smartphones in 2010-era which still lingers today. Things have changed. Screens have gotten much better in resolution, responsiveness has improved and touch experience on modern phones is exceptional.

I don't know why people are terrified of zooming. Frankly, zooming to use a desktop site is better UX than 90% of mobile sites. All you have to do is ensure your text lines aren't too long, which is good practice anyway.

Maybe it's because iOS don't have a one finger zoom gesture like Android? I wonder why Apple never added that one?

AA sibling comment mentions double tap to zoom in on a paragraph, but there's also a single finger zoom (tap and hold, then move the held finger vertically) for Maps (and by default in MapBoxGL last I checked).

Yeah, in Android that's been available for a long time in almost all apps that support zooming, not just Maps. Most critically, Chrome.

On iOS you can double tap a paragraph to zoom in on it. That’s been around as long as I can remember.

Yeah it was in the first iPhone but you can't control the amount of zoom and it often guesses wrong or just doesn't work. I pretty much gave up on using it. On Android in most apps you can double tap, hold the second tap, then swipe up and down to zoom. It's a lot more natural than it sounds and it gives you precise control over both the zoom location and zoom amount.

On iOS you can try the gesture in Maps, and then wonder why they never added it to Safari.

I think it's fine.

The time it took me to double-tap zoom was less than the time it would have taken for an SPA to load over my weak ass T-Mobile connection

The whole website is probably smaller than a minimal React app...

That's so easy to solve with css. See something like https://github.com/Vestride/fancy-index

Specifically: https://github.com/Vestride/fancy-index/raw/main/after_mobil...

I actually find this [1] more readable than this [2].

[1] https://github.com/Vestride/fancy-index/blob/main/before.png

[2] https://github.com/Vestride/fancy-index/blob/main/after.png

It's also not the same directory they're comparing. IMO why add padding? Why change #000000 to some grey text?

Just add icons to [1] and you're good to go. May be use Sans-serif fonts if you wanna feel bit ~fancy~.

If you look at the mobile before and after it becomes more clear why this is useful.

all they really need is a viewport tag to fix that. Weird that no one has bothered to do that yet, seems like it would be a one line pull request

Thanks. TIL: > "This virtual viewport is a way to make non-mobile-optimized sites in general look better on narrow screen devices."

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Viewport_m...

At least for iOS: Double-tap in the white space between the directory links and the dates, it’ll fit to the screen nicely.

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