Google introduces "Fast Flip" | Hacker News Reader

Google introduces "Fast Flip"

flipper.googlelabs.com

139 pointshenning66 comments

I was hoping it was an API for selling your startup to Google.

That was supposed to be App Engine.

I'd love to learn more about this. Is your company more likely to be acquired by Google if it uses the app engine?

Edit: what's with the downmodding without explanation? Is this reddit now?

When App Engine was released, many people speculated that apps built on it could easily be acquired by Google since they would already be designed for and running on Google infrastructure.

I think the parent post was sarcasm.

Aaargh. This uses one of the principle UI ideas we're integrating into our wanna-be YCW10 app.

EDIT: Hah. Plus "like" and the mobile UI -- that pretty much is 80% of our client interface.

Try to stay positive - this demonstrates that you're onto a good thing.

Yeah, we've still got some tricks up our sleeve. OTOH, we were really counting on surprising a lot of people with the UI, and that's out the window at this point.

...And, this isn't just an idea on paper -- we've written a huge chunk of both the server-side and mobile client code already.

Don't worry about there being similar concepts. You never know if something like this will pursued beyond a Labs project. The main thing to realize is that if you consistently work on your idea, it does not matter if someone else has a similar product. Being a smaller, more agile developer, you can continue to innovate much faster.

This applies to your ideas being stolen too. Sure, anybody can copy what you have made. But remember, nobody can copy what you haven't even thought of yet. So just keep thinking of cool new things your users can benefit from and make them so you stay ahead of the curve.

Yikes! If your UI is what's surprising people, then I would generally consider that a bad thing. By their definition, a surprising UI is bad. (Obviously there are exceptions but they're very very rare.)

It depends. There's surprising as in what is this software doing!? and there surprising as in the wow, this is so much better.

The pinch zoom is a perfect example of a surprising UI that most people love. When someone sees a two fingered pinch zoom for the first time they go wow, that's awesome. Surprising isn't always bad.

I wouldn't necessarily call "pinch zoom" surprising, though, b/c the first thing I thought after seeing it was, _this is so intuitive -- i.e. unsurprising -- you never have to show anyone twice_. The wow-factor is less surprise, and more delight.

Well, like I said, we've got other tricks yet, and it's still a fledgling system.

We just thought that we had a better UI for browsing content than anyone else had yet, and then Google debuted something that was uncomfortably close.

But, I'm hoping that the really surprising thing will be the ... naaaah. :-)

Welcome to the club! I think this is a UI design pattern we're going to see used a lot in the future.

What I find interesting is that you and I are both working on a journalism/publishing startup and found reason to use similar UI ideas.

We must be onto something!

Hey! I didn't know who else around here might be working on something in the same market, but I'm not at all surprised that someone is.

I wouldn't mind "competing" with someone in the YC or HN crowd, it would be fun -- and it's a big enough market, there's room for a couple of people to steal some lunches.

Hope to hear more from you and what you're working on. We might start releasing some teasers around the end of October; I haven't figured out yet if that would ultimately help us or hurt us, but it might be fun either way.

I actually think this is pretty cool. I know I tend to jump from cnn.com to bbc.co.uk to espn.com to velonews.com so it would be cool to have a quick way to do this.

On a related note, what are recommended techniques of taking a screenshot of a web page from the server?

They probably use WebKit to render the HTML to a buffer and then compress it, save to disk.

If you were asking more generally, see this discussion[1] on the WebKit mailing list, and these Qt links[2, 3] that I found in that thread.

[1] http://www.nabble.com/Webkit-capture-web-page-content-API-td...

[2] http://labs.trolltech.com/blogs/2008/11/03/thumbnail-preview...

[3] http://labs.trolltech.com/blogs/2009/01/15/capturing-web-pag...

How is this useful (honest question)?

It's much much faster than loading and rendering the html, images, and ads on the actual sites.

I can zoom through articles pressing the left/right arrows with no perceptible latency.

Unless I am totally missing something you can't actually read the content without clicking on it. Is there much value in seeing an unreadably small thumbnail of a site before you choose to click on it? I suppose on mobile devices it might work. Loading a small blurry thumbnail could save you the time it takes to load the full page. If it indexed all of Google's searches it would be pretty neat. Previewing thumbnails could save a lot of time wasted on obviously bad results. Maybe that's where this is heading in the future. If not it's really pointless on anything other than a mobile device IMO.

A lot of people seem to be missing this: clicking on a thumbnail gets you a full-size image of the article in Fast Flip, it does not send you to the original site. You're not expected to read the content from the thumbnails, you select your first article from the list of thumbnails and then fast flip between the full screen versions.

That makes a lot more sense but it unfortunately is not working on my browser. Clicking on a thumbnail does nothing. Probably a bug with WebKit nightlies I guess.

This is especially true for mobile devices with limited bandwidth.- http://fastflip.googlelabs.com/mobile

Grr at lack of Blackberry support. I feel like I own a neglected step-phone.

I can't even read the headlines on many of the thumbnails...

Why use this instead of google reader?

10,000 unread articles.

Who tell you to read all 10,000 unread items ?

Google Reader is slow and not very efficient when you have a lot of subscriptions but unread articles is not its problem. IMO Google Reader's home page can be improved more than just displaying new articles. It could display most read, most recommended articles etc ... from your feeds.

You mean, it could combine search with rapid preview?

Oh, wait.

> 1000+ unread articles

FTFY.

Never thought we were going to see prerendering of webpages :)

I second that question. I browsed through some of the articles but fail to see the appeal. Technically it's a nice little trick but usability-wise I can't see myself using this.

What was your last magazine purchasing experience like? You might just not be part of the target demographic if you aren't one to flip through a magazine or a newspaper.

That's an apples and oranges comparison.

Following your logic we should have TFT-displays with bendable corners, so we can make "real" bookmarks...

Agree with you. I see no use for it at all. I'd rather view the headline/snippet approach of Google News, Techmeme, and other sites.

You and others agreeing with you are making the (self-centered) mistake of assuming that you are the market.

You are not.

As they indicate in the about page Google intends the target to be people who flip through magazines and when they see a title that interests them or a picture of someone they recognize they then read the article.

Whether that market exists or will be the actual market (if any) of this "product" remains to be seen.

I'm a Google News user, and think yes, I am the market. I also read and skim magazines (your definition of the market). In general, for all content, all people skim to choose what to read. It's what printed layout, and even web layout, is based upon (with possible exception of scientific/research journals - those always give me a text overload headache).

In my opinion, I could see something like this working if it was presenting me with printed content (say the actual print newspaper or magazine, which in some instances you can get in pdf viewer format that is similar to this). But for web content, the existing method is better. The new format is actually harder to read/scan (and I'm using a 22inch display). So I expand the many articles to one per page, and use the arrow navigation to go article to article. The result is more time spent trying to catch up on news, and more clicks since I have to bypass the articles I have no interest in reading. My choice would be to go elsewhere if this was all Google News provided.

Wow. They're shamelessly wrapping ads around other people's content.

AFAIK with the consent of the content producers, and giving them a cut.

Ah, I do believe you're right:

http://fastflip.googlelabs.com/sources

Surprising they did it here b/f News and Reader.

Because attention spans aren't short enough.

I don't get it. What's the advantage on reading a image rather than normal rich text?

edit: nevermind. Now I see the left scroll pane.

In summary: I can barely read even the important text (titles, headlines), therefore this is of little use to me. I agree with others: I'd get a lot more out of being presented just clickable titles and headlines in a legible font size; and we already have that in several forms. Showing thumbnails of full-page screenshots is just a waste of screen real estate.

Pre-rendering websites in the cloud, and sending them as images is an interesting concept.

If there was some way to keep them interactive, it'd be even more interesting.

That used to be the concept behind searchme.com

Crashes with accented chars. http://fastflip.googlelabs.com/search?q=á

A few years ago I was playing with Web page screenshots and thinking it'd be a big deal. Some sites like DZone even got in on the action pretty quick and.. after all that time, I just can't see it having added value. It looks good but in terms of usability, I've found it adds little for me over time. Any studies been done into this usability wise?

Can't they render the page images on a decent system like a Mac, with anti-aliased fonts and decent kerning? Horridly ugly images.

same feeling, esp. after get used to Apple's font rendering engine ...

As a Mac user, I can’t help but feel a bit thrown-off by the aliased text, even if it’s the right decision on their end :/

it's almost as if google is waiting to launch stuff until _right after_ a new feature comes out on bing

Hey, that's cuil!

Looks like Google's reply to Bing's Visual Search (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=822206)

Mobile version also available! Same site.

"Swipe left and right to move between articles. Stretch & pinch or rotate the phone to zoom in and out."

RSS skimming is better for me, but I can see the appeal.

I don't think this is a product intended for hackers who are connected via RSS and the such, but it's a fun product nonetheless.

This is not impressive at all. From the way Marissa Mayer introduced this at TC50, you'd expect much more.

It has potential... I'm having trouble with readability of headlines though :|

Isn't Google "Flip" enough? Why would they add "Fast" to the name?

When I can import OPML, do I need Google Reader?

Why does it say "Google confidential"?

I think the logo doesn't go well with the concept. Their other logos are pretty good in my opinion

http://www.google.com/intl/en/options/

Not to nitpick, but I think you're talking about their icons.

yes, and I have a design background I should know. I just saw MG Siegler too writes "the smiley face is built into the logo." http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/09/14/a-new-way-to-visually-s...

Safari 4, ctl-t. No ads.

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