Let me pre-empty where I know there's going to be some dislike as a lot of the HN crowd just wants the normal non-swipeable web. Most of that frustration comes from a > year old version powering Wordpress.com (which we're upgrading). Would love to hear feedback on this specific version of our platform. Most articles in this version should render well, except those that aren't really news or blog content (ie- direct link to webpages).
Specifics:
1) There were a couple flashes of differently styled content, one on the blog post, then one with a column of text and an image, and then the page.
2) It was slow as hell (several seconds per flash), and I wanted out by the time I saw the first flash of content. Which brings us to the
3) Back button. On an ipad 1, I can't mash the back button fast enough, so I get caught in a redirect hell and have to close out the tab and go back to hacker news some other way.
4) Going to the direct link crashes Safari.
I was going to take a video, but I've got kids screaming for breakfast.
If you guys aren't stress-testing this on a 1st gen iPad with a goodly number of apps resident in the background, I'd really recommend adding this to your test matrix...
Is crashing out after a couple swipes on a first generation iPad accepted and not a problem in your eyes? Because EVERYONE with a first gen iPad is having that exact problem, and you've chosen to completely ignore them.
Crashing is ALWAYS a bad experience, regardless of what preceded it. It's not subjective, or ambiguous, or possibly the users fault. It's 100% the fault of your memory intensive page, something that you refuse to take responsibility for or acknowledge is a problem.
From that, I can only assume this crap is geared towards iPad 2 owners only, giving me a bunch of extra reasons to hate it. Not only are you going to code a convoluted solution to something that isn't a problem for 2% of the web, you're also going to cut that in half to 1% by ignoring original iPads.
So frustrating.
There are lots of creative and attractive themes out there. Unfortunately, OnSwipe replaces that creativity with a renderer that makes every page look the same (i.e. boring).
One of the biggest advantages of the iPad is its full-featured web support on a mobile platform; OnSwipe wipes out this advantage. It removes built-in iPad features (e.g. scrolling, page zoom, etc.) making reading pages awkward and unnatural. And it introduces a cheesy, unnecessary bouncing effect.
For this and other reasons I find OnSwipe to be useless and a bane to my web browsing experience.
Thanks!