Turn.js 4th Release is out and amazing | Hacker News Reader

Turn.js 4th Release is out and amazing

turnjs.com

33 pointslsdafjklsd22 comments

I am amazed! But probably not in the way the author intended.

The web is not paper, stop screwing it up. We fall on skeuomorphism because design takes time to coalesce on new forms, but good design will emerge. Skeuomorph designs age quickly, as Apple's annual interface overhauls show. Good digital design is starting to emerge[1][2]! Don't give in!

[ 1 | http://www.readability.com/learn-more ] [ 2 | http://demo.jimbarraud.com/manifest ]

I want a browser with readability's interface. So wonderful to use.

Shows how much the book-as-technology is a given in our society. I'd bet two dollars that the first books had pictures of stone tablets with engravings on them.

Why on earth are people trying to hang onto the paper style?

I get that publishers don't want to rehash all their print media just for digital downloads, but why do we have to shoe-horn that into some crappy, unneccessary page transition process?

I believe it is to re-inforce the idea of the book as the product. A book page flipper is not meant for you to consume the content (must be annoying reading and having to see the animation on each page flip!), but for you to consult the material all the time being reminded of the physical object.

What excites me, is that I used to have to do a lot of these types of projects using a flash based solution that you just banged your head against. This is all javascript, so the sky is the limit for customization. And he did a great job with the api, there are a ton of events to hook into, and it goes down to IE7.

I don't disagree with your point about usability, but clients eat it up for some reason and this solution is very elegant and developer friendly.

It's only appropriate for the narrow use case of a print designer showing off their book/magazine print work. Otherwise it will be used inappropriately because it's a cool effect and might impress someone who hasn't seen it before.

Took ages before I figured out how to flip pages O.o

Agreed. It looks nice, but it has poor usability. I tried common things like clicking the edge of the page, scrolling on my trackpad, and using keyboard arrows, but none of them worked to scroll it.

Having to find and move a scrollbar to move the pages was not immediately intuitive.

Interesting. The arrow keys worked for me to flip the pages. Google Chrome + OS X.

Clicking the top corner of the page works for me, as well arrow keys (on Firefox + Linux). It did take me a bit too long to figure out though...

If your target market includes people that prefer physical books, make page turning much easier - or more obvious.

You also don't present any good use cases - why would I want to spend $99 on this? What does it do for me that a plain website cannot?

Consider presenting the benefits of your idea using your idea, like you did with the API docs, to demonstrate a practical use case.

Apart from those things - great idea!

Definitely looks nice, but it wasn't all that easy to use with a mouse. I take it you can only flip pages from touching the corner of the page, if anything this makes it less useable on a browser. And do we really need pretend paper on our browsers and devices?

I looked at the samples in your github project. All the samples there have jpegs as pages. Do you have something similar to the demo on the live site (html instead of image files)? Nice work.

Click on the steve jobs bio - its html5. You can click on the menu and highlight text.

Something funky happens with the font weight as I turn pages in Chrome. I'm unsure why I would want this service - perhaps I am not part of the target demo.

Chrome has some weirdness with it's text-aliasing when enabling 3d transforms. Sometimes it's fixed in the dev channel, sometimes not. I haven't really been able to find a pattern.

Documentation available only in... PDF format?

Are you kidding me?

one question: when do i have to order a license, when can i just use the version i forked via github?

Maybe when you want the features in '4th release'

http://turnjs.com/get

Uh, where is zoom function?

Websites samples not working on Chrome 19. Had to reload 4 - 5 times. When they worked, it was a slideshow on my (relatively) new computer. Yipes-stripes.

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