Hacker News Reader

Comment by ako | Hacker News Reader

Warning on the site when you visit with an ipad:

"Hey there. It looks like you're on a mobile device. Just a quick warning: This project will download a lot of data from the interwebs (no really!), and even then it probably won't look that great.

Your best bet is to bookmark this page, go home, check it out on your desktop, and see it in its full glory."

I am at home, on the couch, with an ipad. That is my favorite computing device at home, I hardly touch my desktop these days... Times are changing... Why would I want to use a truck at home?

View on HN

>I am at home, on the couch, with an ipad. That is my favorite computing device at home, I hardly touch my desktop these days... Times are changing... Why would I want to use a truck at home?

That is the most pretentious load of bullshit I've heard in a long time. The creators took the liberty to warn you that they might eat into your data plan that you may be capped on and you call them out? Not to mention the rendering on this site would bring your little ipad to it's knees. This attitude has got to go.

It would have been ok if they hadn't made so many assumptions, telling me to go home, etc. just saying "this will not work on a phone or tablet" wold have been much better.

Assumptions they made: * you are not at home, (I am sitting on the couch) * you have a desktop at home (I have an aging five year old iMac, which I won't be upgrading any time soon) * a tablet is a mobile device (no, it's mostly used at home, not on the road)

You need to use a "truck" on this site since your "car" isn't yet capable of doing the same work, obviously.

This is a data visualization company's proof of concept, using voronoi tesselation rendered via SVG.

My iPad 5 doesn't do justice to this, since it can't render fast enough. It's very choppy.

Could they make a stripped-down version that works on iPads? No doubt. But that defeats the purpose of their exercise.

Firstly, if this still let you attempt to view it on your device after seeing the warning, then I think this is a brilliant warning. Sure, we all get pissed off when we see "Cannot view website on Firefox" et al, but this is not just about rendering, but also data usage warnings.

Of course, my problem is not that I'm on a mobile device at home. It is that I'm on my "truck" at home, but connected via my phone's 3G connection, which is capped at 1.5GiB a month... However the website is not aware of that. It's like opening a page where HD youtube videos start to stream without my knowledge. Pity there's no way to warn me about lots of data (except that I tend to read HN comments before visiting the page :)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com