Mobile Playbook by Google
themobileplaybook.com
themobileplaybook.com
The animations are choppy to a distracting level on Chrome 22 running on a reasonably beefy desktop machine.
The font size is unreadably small, and due to the three column layout it doesn't degrade well when zoomed. It'd be merely crappy if zooming required vertical scrolling. It's disabling all methods of vertical scrolling entirely that really make this design special.
It replaces normal page navigation with a custom version, which is already bad. They then compound that error by mapping that custom navigation to the wrong keys. An example: maybe you'd like to check one of the footnotes they have. In a sensible design those would be hyperlinks, but for whatever reason that wasn't done. Ok, so I guess you need to go to the end of the document to see the footnotes. Wouldn't still be too bad, but they forgot to map the "End" key. So the only way to get to the end of the document is with the slider. And after doing that, how do you return to the original position? Well, I'd expect to be able to do Alt-Left for that. Except that this keybinding has been overridden too, and you need to instead click on the back button.
Doing this kind of stuff might be just about acceptable in a web app. But this isn't an app. It's a document. And they've managed to break the only two things that matter for a document. I need to be able to read it, and I need to be able to navigate it.
There are some other big problems, though. They've obviously never heard of Unobtrusive Javascript[1]. Try opening the site without Javascript. And the HTML/CSS is garbage. What a joke.
Just to be clear, I don't think the problem is the tiny font size as such. It's the tiny size combined with gratuitously unscrollable and unscalable layout. It's a similar problem to many default themes for blogs disabling zooming on mobile browsers for no good reason. This got so bad that the Android browser sprouted an accessibility option to force zooming to always be enabled.
People who use "embrace" for more than 2 times in the first 4-5 slides should be sent to shoveling coal. The same goes for "value proposition".
In our experience at ConversionVoodoo.com over the past couple of years a properly mobile optimized site for a direct-response style business is a difference of 2x, for traditional ecommerce it's 1.5x, for content it's as much as 3x!
In other words make absolutely, positively sure that mobile optimization becomes an organizational priority if you're seeing more than 15% mobile traffic.
On some browsers was it messy? That's web dev y'all. We always assume everything large companies publish will be perfect and cross-everything optimized, but being big doesn't mean the process for creating creative work is any different.
Fine with the bitching, good to see the issues people have (best kind of education) but can't we all at least be happy with having all these great statistics in one highly credible place?
How I wish that tablets provides a way to do the same thing that page up/page down does with just a tap. I found swiping up/down for jumping to the next/previous page distracting for exactly the reason I stated above that I put a bookmarklet on my tablet browser to do the page up/page down when I single tap on a non-html-linkified entity.
If I load the page on my Android phone with the stock gingerbread browser in portrait, I get what I can only guess is the desktop page. If I load it in landscape, I get the tablet page asking me to rotate to landscape. If you then rotate back to portrait and refresh, you may be lucky enough to get the mobile phone page. It may also be completely random.
Ironic how difficult it is to load this content on a mobile device.
http://html5test.com/compare/browser/bb10/chromecanary/safar...
Safari is good, but it could be a lot better. But I'd expect Google to be leading this charge, not Apple. But Android has basically zero integration options for webapps.
Checking the USPTO web site, it shows the "Blackberry Playbook" and "Playbook" applications as being "status: suspended". Did they even manage to get the US trademark on that?
Now on an ipad3 it's slightly laggy. Transitions are slightly slow, and every interface element feels a bit "almost there" in term of responsivness.
Then, downloading the pdf and viewing the same content in a native viewer is liberatingly smooth, fast, responsive, albeit without the animations and custom controls.
This demo seems very apropriate to experience the gap between "html5 and JS everything" and "single purposed and optimised" presentation formats.
if (isNexus7 == true) { istablet = false; }
>Greetings, Mobile Champion!
>We noticed that you're using an unsupported browser. But have no fear, you can view themobileplaybook.com from the latest versions of Chrome, Internet Explorer, Firefox, or Safari. Please update your browser and come back to visit us.
>Alternatively, we suggest checking out the site from your tablet if you have one or from your smartphone device.
What galls me about these messages is the insinuation to the Opera users that their browser is somehow outdated and that we need to update or upgrade it. If you can't be assed to test on Opera at least change the message to asking to use a different browser, not to "upgrade" to one.
But developers reasonably make decisions about which browsers to optimize for and which ones NOT to optimize for. They're not insulting you for your browser choice: they're just being reasonable about how they spend their time.
We should always be open to new things so I won't sit here and say "you should just use Chrome because it's awesome and incredibly fast", and if they're differentiated enough they'll become standards everyone supports. Opera is not. And you're not a martyr.
Second, you seem to have not completely read my post. It was more about the "update" and "upgrade" language. How would people on Linux feel if they tried to download a program and and it told them to "upgrade" to Windows to get it working?
>"We should always be open to new things so I won't sit here and say "you should just use Chrome because it's awesome and incredibly fast"
You should try Opera, it is awesome and incredibly fast :)
>and if they're differentiated enough they'll become standards everyone supports. Opera is not.
What is not differentiated enough and Opera is not what?
Opera is pretty good at following standards, it's no IE for sure.
Again, it's okay if web developers don't have the time to test and support Opera, just don't tell its users to update or upgrade to other browsers. Even "Best viewed in Internet Explorer" is less condescending We didn't get rid of that and Flash to end up back again in this browser sniffing mess.
But yeah "best viewed on Internet Explorer" is always a treat isn't it! The word "update" was probably a little weak.
This is a cheap and easy way to score points.
http://www.quirksmode.org/blog/archives/2012/07/q1_and_2_201...
On a personal note, I do want to mention that your comment leans a bit too much towards dogma. I dont want to start a flamewar (and go offtopic), but please have a downvote cookie.
Returning to on-topic, I am able to use the site fine with Opera Mobile on Gingerbread.
(edit)I have a feeling quite a few people probably use Opera browser on their handsets...
Additionally, this new trend of testing for browser strings deserves our scrutiny.
edit. After additional reading, I see the larger issue... Opera users are more like behind-the-scenes admins - we aren't really in the consumer/end-user category, and for this we just need to deal with some hardships like not being included in browser compatibility lists for all sites... that's a fact I'm OK with now. Cheers!
I'm not too surprised that it doesn't support this gimmicky site, nor that it slipped through the feature/agent sniffing.