LinkedIn IPhone App's Infinite, Swipe-Able View Implementation | Hacker News Reader

LinkedIn IPhone App's Infinite, Swipe-Able View Implementation

engineering.linkedin.com

72 pointspathdependent16 comments

I don't get the hype. Nearly every interaction with the LinkedIn iPad app feels very clunky, not to mention completely non-native. The momentum and "bounciness" of scrolling is as blatantly non-native as can be. They've done a bunch of great work to get things as close as possible, but it's still a clunky non-native experience.

I wonder the same about mobile web apps. Why try so hard to make the visual design and user experience so similar to a native app...when you're not a native app?

I'm sure LinkedIn spent an inordinate amount of time tweaking javascript to approximate native scrolling behavior, but as you note, it's just nowhere near the mark.

I commend LinkedIn for open-sourcing[0] pieces of their app, but when user experience is a paramount concern, there is no substitute for native. Ditto for Facebook's iPhone app. Most users may not be able to articulate why things don't feel quite right, but you can bet they'll notice it.

[0] https://github.com/linkedin/LIExposeController

yes. that might be correct. But I like a big dude like LinkedIn working behind the HTML app arena. So I feel I'm not alone :)

>Why try so hard to make the visual design and user experience so similar to a native app...when you're not a native app?

For iOS, it's because the native apps feel good is why they're shooting for that target. Things that sorta look like them, but behave worse feel bad.

The hype is to spin the shortcomings into a positive. The app feels and looks like a typical web app clunker. This might be a developer win, but it is a user loss.

One of the reasons is to allow for updates and quick iterations. The familiarity of the development team with web languages is another reason. It allows them to use their skills to create a mobile app, rather than hiring new developers.

What's the deal about the infinte scroll? Everytime I have to use it, it feels very unpleasant. The problem is the scrollbar which suddenly does not accurately hint the position of the document I'm in.

A solution might be to change the scrollbar hinting from absolute to relative. A simple ∞ added below the "scroll down button" on the scrollbar might just fix this.

What I'd like is a scrollbar absolute to the entire dataset, and some hint on how much of it is loaded.

That's where inifinite scroll is a good idea. Infinite scroll is usually correctly applied to datasets where it is unknown how many items the dataset consists of. E.g. google images, tweets, et cetera.

We already have what you want, it's called a scrollbar ;).

Where the dataset size is known, but just very large, a scroll bar and lazy loading of items is what I want.

For datasets with unknown size, just make sure scrolling is only ever needed for looking at previous pages.

This attention to detail and desire to get an excellent experience is what makes an app go from good to great. I really like the LinkedIn app and since LinkedIn curate an excellent news feed I use the app for reading news and I love it.

Looking forward to reading the other articles in the series.

I liked the article for technical reasons, but it also got me thinking: given the relatively large percentage of views coming from IPads, at what point does it become a requirement for a developer to own one?

I assume you'd only own one if you had to work on one. Even then, it would be up to the employer to purchase it.

Great writeup. I am currently writing an "infinite scroll" (all directions) web app and it is good to know that someone has documented these issues.

Thanks linkedin team

Anybody knows if there's a jquery plugin or similar that implements the concepts from this article? I'm in the same situation and would rather not reimplement the wheel.

Is there a way to find out how much memory an app like this is using? How does it compare to Safari's memory usage?

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