Hacker News Reader

Comment by g15jv2dp | Hacker News Reader

> This is not true. Mobile platforms do help with tapping on small elements. E.g. HN isn't mobile friendly "as is", but I have no issues with tapping any of the links. I've also used Exante mobile trading terminal for some time and had no issues with it either.

Good for you, maybe your phone screen is huge. I routinely tap on the wrong element when using HN on mobile. Even on desktop I have to set the zoom level to 125%.

View on HN

This is why I miss resistive screens on phones where you had to actually use your fingernail or stylus and it bloody worked so well. Instead, everyone wanted to get rid of buttons for screen real estate and make phones "sexy" and screens should "swipe it up and down Iphone mega mega smooth swipe pinch swipe, magic gestures, etc". And then that drove an entire industry and it's direction for two decades after that, now we're all complaining because we let the designers drive functionality and usability.

Either way, mobile browsers do allow one to "zoom" in into the UI for smaller elements, it's just we're all lazy and don't want to do that.

> Iphone mega mega smooth swipe pinch swipe, magic gestures, etc"

Ghost of Jobs still haunts ...

I'm not vision impaired (I actually have very good vision), and I also zoom HN way in (150%) on desktop. Just feels uncomfortably small and the lines of text are way too long.

4.7" iphone. They enlarge tap regions for tappable elements since forever, so you can’t miss.

You can miss quite easily if there is another tappable element right next to the one you are trying to click

If you have 3 tap regions already adjacent before enlargement, how does enlarging them help? Like the w, a and s keys on a keyboard. Making the regions larger will just make them overlap.

Idk how apple does that exactly. I’d just voronoi it if they intersect and tap outside-ish, just like I do with hn vote arrows.

Anyway my point is that you can design interfaces denser than three buttons per screen and they will work. Not that a 5mm block with 8 links in it is a good button bar.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com