January 2007. Steve Jobs introduces the iPhone web browser. “And to zoom in on any page, you just drag with two fingers… like this.” The crowd goes wild. Nobody has ever seen multitouch gestures before.
Still works!
Still works!
fact is NH on mobile web is not optimized for unknown reasons. its not a big challenge to do it either. I have a userscript that makes everything bigger and removes junk out.
Sent from my iphone
in other words, lots of changes to make the experience easier (to me)
HN is well optimized on mobile. It's great as is. Lot of people just bullying their opinions.
well that's a turn of phrase I have yet to hear until this point.
Spotify recently (well over a year ago now) merged its two clients with the mobile UI being the winner. Its interesting how as a desktop user you notice all these imperfections where you are now the loser. The search is top(ish) left instead of top right and various UI elements work now _so_ much better when you are able to swipe right (to easily navigate albums in a scrollable carousel) or swiftly swipe downwards (where on desktop one must find and drag a scrollbar).
I imagine we've all experienced some of the more irksome manifestations that have already transpired due to this schism such as: websites that tell you to download an application, a support call for a broken web function that results in "use the mobile app, it works there" and isn't fixed for weeks or months, or the horrific pop-ups that encourage the use of one or the other application as dev teams hint at their disinclination to continue minority support.
that promise was a myth. The closest we got to it was responsive design and flex boxes, which are less there because there's "one size fits all" and more because it's trying to make it less painful to tweak your page for desktop vs. mobile. Many companies fall towards the latter, so a ood 95% of the time there will be a "base design", with other platforms simply being "ports".
At the end of the day, they are two different problems, so they will have two different solutions (you know, unless we enter some Cyberpunk rennassaince where humans can grow precise stylus-like appendages). The above solutions were made because it wasn't cost effective to run two different websites perfectly optimized for their respective medium.
It’s literally the only site I use zoomed-in on desktop as well, 150%.
@media (pointer: coarse) {
/* UI for fingers */
}
Ironically (re. the title), I believe he even referred to the preceding standard of mobile browsing as the “baby web”.
But now “responsive design” has taken over instead. Still no multitouch.
Tangent aside, HN is a site purely focused on text with no dynamic content. It really doesn't benefit from needing to zoom in and out on your phone. It's just unnecessary friction.
PS: you lost me at "Steve Jobs".