OnSwipe
scripting.com
scripting.com
The irony here being that the iPad is perfect for displaying very nearly everything on the web just as it already is. WordPress blogs look excellent on the iPad without any of this nonsense.
OnSwipe has become a perfect tool for preventing me from viewing content I'd otherwise happily read. This is a latter-day Expert Sexchange.
edit: ...odd, instant karma drop that affected everything I said on this page but this: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2700241
Learn from criticism, folks, don't downvote it because it doesn't agree with your world view. It's how we all grow.
Also see http://blog.onswipe.com/news/the-road-ahead, written by OnSwipe's founder:
"Mary Meeker estimates that 50 billion dollars of traditional media spend needs to shift online. Our belief is that it’s in a holding pattern and can’t. There’s a disconnect between award winning beautiful ads found in print and tasteless spam ads that litter the web. We think touch enabled devices can let this change by providing advertising people actually enjoy with the best of the web layered on- mobile, local, social, and more. The touch enabled web can let us create ads publishers want alongside their content, advertisers get returns for, and most importantly, that users will enjoy."
<Start sarcasm>
Who wouldn't enjoy viewing award-winning print-like beautiful ads while browsing websites on the iPad ?
</End Sarcasm>
If you read the entire blog post above, it is quite obvious that the people behind OnSwipe don't really have a coherent understanding of publishing, advertising or digital, so it shouldn't come as a surprise that their product is an atrocity.
The product itself is little more than a trojan horse that OnSwipe uses to insert itself between stupid publishers and users so that it can extract value from content it didn't create and didn't add value to.
The good news is that this model inevitably fails and has since the late 1990s. There's no lock in for OnSwipe's partners, and once they realize that the ad revenue they were promised never materializes and their users hate the OnSwipe experience, they'll move on to the next company offering them a free bridge.
But onswipe doesn't happen on its own - someone integrates it in to the website. None of those people understand publishing either? It very well may be the case, and I think onswipe's problematic, but I don't think "they don't understand publishing" is necessarily a good charge.
When making a mobile version of content: first, do no harm!
Do the individual WP blog owners actually chose to use it, or is it something WP foists on them?
All I'm saying is this: You have a whole page full of comments here where people are talking about how much they don't like to use your product. Please create a global opt out for such folks, as has been described in a different thread. It really would improve my browsing experience on the iPad. I'm uncomfortable being in a position where I have to plead with someone to de-degrade my browsing experience, but here it is.
That's a really reasonable piece of feedback and it makes enough sense to implement it on the WP.com version. Some people don't like it, a lot do, but that doesn't matter. Even if it's one person, they should have a choice. If you want to drop more in depth feedback, email me: j@onswipe.com
I will say, your comment above was way more effective than rude explicative ridden ones here and on Twitter. I understand you're upset, but keep in mind a lot of people have spent a lot of hard work on the product. I don't say this because it's my company. I'd say it if it was someone elses. We all work hard to make stuff and even if you absolutely hate it, a simple straight forward comment will go a long way and is way more human.
I gotta tell you: this doesn't matter to me even a little bit.
Here's why.
We live in a world of results. Right now, you guys – I'm sorry this isn't positive – are making something that's frustrating, bad to use, unattractive and inescapable. The "view real, non-broken site" button often doesn't work. So somewhere, someone is fucking up my iPad and there's just nothing I can do about it.
You don't get to just come in and screw up the web for me without my having some strong feelings, dude, it's as simple as that. So if you want to shove a layer of non-useful junk into my way, you're going to need to acknowledge that there are user experience implications that require thorough thought.
If you ignore that you will incur the brand penalties associated with making people unhappy. And with a unanimous page of negative comments here, you're well on that road. This is a community that can't agree on anything, so I'd take this feedback very seriously.
If I make shit, I expect people to call me on it so I can make it better. How hard I've worked on it is irrelevant.
Agreed. What bugs me is that OnSwipe requires me to lay another layer over the article I'm attempting to read by filtering it through my Readability bookmarklet.
Frankly, I find it hard to understand how these OnSwipe deals get done.
Can you explain your reasoning on this? It seems like tablet manufactures are really trying to get the tablets to give the same browsing experience as a desktop, and this is working against that.
I commend you for taking this criticism in stride!
(Edited to say that the slate.com site actually looks decent compared to the same site in Chrome on the desktop. Kudos on the clean implementation. It's the clunky, glitchy monstrosity that has infected WordPress sites that needs to be exorcised.)
I'm guessing that this is what's happening with OnSwipe browser crashes: reducing hardware accelerated elements would improve memory usage and reduce power consumption.
Is that a joke? Or did you actually have to redact it?
I don't know if that was a good or bad deal for the OnSwipe team. I know that having my site switched over with no input pissed me off, and even though it was the fault of WP.com and not OnSwipe, I still assign some of the blame to OnSwipe and dislike them more than I rationally should.
At the same time, it was good exposure for them, so for all the people they pissed off, they've probably more than made up for it.
Or, just make a native app for your website. People that want that kind of experience will seek it out. Most people just want the web, not a simplified version of it.
It'd also be great if OnSwipe had a global "opt out" so that your browser would _never_ get the dumbed down version if you set some flag telling them to go away.
This is the only humane option. There should be a way to escape this scourge.
For Wordpress, that might be a great idea of making it a global opt-out. I'm actually going to suggest that to the team there and on ours.
The biggest issue we've come across is limiting the total screen area (in pixels) of elements having "-webkit-transform: translate3d(0,0,0);" (this is the declaration you use to force the browser to use 3d acceleration to animate this element). Once it goes beyond a certain size, there isn't enough memory on the iPad to handle it and you get jerky animation and crashes.
This will help:
http://mir.aculo.us/2011/02/08/visualizing-webkits-hardware-...
I keep on trying it, hoping for the better, and cursing every time I'm forced to deal with the OnSwipe theme.
And on Mike Taylor's blog (http://reprog.wordpress.com/), the scroll used to be broken in OnSwipe (it kept scrolling me back to the top). Not sure if it's still the case, these days I just keep to my feed reader instead of visiting his site because I don't want to deal with OnSwipe.
It still feels like a cheap knockoff of Flipboard, and I don't need a Flipboard knockoff for every blog I read on my iPad. The iPad display is big enough not to need a special layout, and finding a poorly-implemented one like this just frustrates me.
There is such a huge room for improvement:
1. making content more readable. Right now the readability is still about the same as visiting a regular site.
2. Faster - I cant help but feel that everytime I go to an onswipe site, safari-ipad starts becoming immesely slow.
3. Easier to browse content - Onswipe shows like 4 posts on eage page and you have to flip through a bunch of pages if you want to get an overiew of the blog, its frequecy and content covered.
4. variety of look/feel - Every onswipe blog looks and feels the same. I for one hate this. I think its just easier for my brain to classify information if it also has a certain type of look.
Onswipe is the market pioneer and they are gonna make mistakes.
In anycase I think this space should be able to easily support at least 3-4 different companies.
Build a clean and fast site. You'll be fine.
I'm considering auto-resizing (fluid) for simple content like cssgrid.net because some placements will break or look weird. Would this be a problem for mobile browsers?
OnSwipe is definitely not responsive design -- it's changing the behavior of a site for specific a devices which already have wonderful natural web UX interactions.
"...were doing way more than iOS. The criticism on HN is from a small disconnected minority."
Disconnect minority??
http://twitter.com/#!/JasonLBaptiste/statuses/85387519486726...
It does not instill confidence in a product intended to make content beautiful and readable when using onswipe.com itself is an exercise in frustration.
Maybe OnSwipe is a sign that there's room to replace WordPress in the marketplace?
Hopefully someone will create an 'unswipe' bookmarklet that we can use to disable it on sites that don't have an opt-out. Add me to the list of people that would like a global opt-out.
If your site uses OnSwipe and I can't disable it, I'll find content somewhere else.
Watch the infinite redirects ensue. I sure hope the real iPad users aren't seeing that.