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Comment by sgdesign | Hacker News Reader

I have to say that I'm a little bit baffled by things like this or recent updates to Flipboard that introduce "features" that I can't imagine anybody asking for.

Why show articles in a grid instead of a list? A list makes the hierarchy clear, and is easy to parse.

Why have articles text on multiple columns instead of one? Multiple columns are a left-over from print newspaper who had to use them for practical reasons. I personally find them less readable than a single column (except maybe for very short articles).

Why prevent me from zooming in or out to adjust the font size? This is actually one of the coolest thing about browsing the web on the iPad, and you break it.

I think it's a shame, because I really like some of the other features, like the preloading of the content, and stripping away the ads and distractions.

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I like thin reading columns myself - as I understood there were not created for practical reasons, but to make things easier to read. And I think they do just that - it's far easy to skip to the next line and know which line you're on when the reading column is thinner.

The width of the column and the number of columns are two completely independent things.

You can have a single, thin (the ideal size is about 10-12 words) column sitting in the center of the page. You don't need to stick another column next to it just to fill the space (which, unlike a print newspaper, we have plenty of).

You're right, putting columns next to each other is unnecessary.

Hey, so this was just one of many layouts and it seemed to be the "cleanest". There's a straight up list layout that we have that would have worked as well, which I almost went with.

We've thought about font resizing, but do you think that's needed when everything is "in focus". ie- no need to zoom in away from ads or to see the rest of the article.

Yes, it's needed. People with less than perfect vision appreciate being able to zoom in on small text to make it more readable.

A few other things that are needed (and work in the non-Onswipe version of pages):

1. Rotating the iPad to landscapes houldn't trigger a choppy relayout that takes five seconds. It should show the exact same content as in portrait mode, zoomed to fill the width of the screen. Users can then decide whether to zoom out and show more content, or stay zoomed in to take advantage of the increased horizontal resolution.

2. The back button should work. Pro tip: If I tap the back button 20 times, and nothing happens until the 20th time, the back button is broken.

Zoom is absolutely needed.

I'm glad that OnSwipe is experimenting with different ways to view articles on the iPad, but when I find anything that disables pinch to zoom–one of my favorite features on the iPad–I get frustrated and leave.

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