Incidentally, Scribd and Slideshare have given me a newfound appreciation for Adobe Acrobat. A couple of years ago nobody would have said "I just want a good old PDF."
I used to feel that way until Acrobat 8 because Acrobat was always so slow. However, versions 8 and 9 open PDF files much faster and are more reliable than previous versions, so I don't see the point of the alternative PDF viewers any more.
Yes, and it works marvellously for most fonts, but I think it doesn't do anti aliasing for bitmapped fonts, and xpdf does. I could send you a screenshot of how badly jstor pdfs get in my laptop, if you're interested.
While I haven't used them in direct comparison, it is worth noting that Evince is shipped with GNOME in nearly all GNOME-based Linux distributions, and xpdf has the added bonus of not relying on a specific toolkit. Mind, you can certainly use Evince outside of GNOME, but people have their own reasons for avoiding such things.
The bottom line is that both work acceptably well, and do so much better than Adobe's own offerings in my experience.
Evince chokes up on large PDFs but xpdf does not. I started using xpdf to read PDFs in OLPC, due to necessity. I liked it so much that I'm using it in my dev laptop as well. It is faster too.
Odd, I've been using Evince all today to read a 772 page PDF of 'Solaris 10: The Complete Reference' (yes, I read textbooks, yes I'm also aware of how piss poor Solaris is).
It handles the document fine, including generating thumbnails for all the pages on the fly as I scroll down.
Does anyone know of alternative PDF viewers which deal well with large images? Because I know Acrobat, Foxit, and Evince all aren't great and slightly choke up.
For me, my opinion shifted once I had a Mac, and Preview.app. Before then, I loved Scribd (though Slideshare is just horrible). Now, it seems inefficient by comparison.
My biggest gripe with the iPhone is that the optimal zoom for viewing a web page is slightly larger than the width of the phone. To read a page, I have to constantly swipe left and right a bit. I wish they had a text-only zoom mode that would fit pages to the width of the phone at a comfortable text size.
Surprisingly, article matches it's title. They actually did put camera and recorded how different users used iphone given specific tasks. This looks like good data to me, i'll go finish the slide deck.
Wow--it really surprised me how much I take for granted in interacting with a UI. The big piece of information for me was the placement of the buttons in Safari. Extremely interesting.
The carrier in the images is T-Mobile; jailbroken iPhone?
The things that interested me were the comments that people made: the more specific pieces of information. Not having enough dexterity to manipulate the phone, for instance. I never would have thought about that.
I also found the comment about not knowing album art slightly sad, even though I've had the same feeling before. It feels very slightly like the end to yet another music era.
Yeah. For a slide show investigating design, readability, and ease of use, the second slide seems a bit out of place. Luckily, the rest of it is easy to understand, and very useful and interesting.
I'd love to see more details of this or follow on research. They did an excellent job. None of the suggestions here would be surprising to a UX expert but having them in context is really helpful.
One thing that seems to get people is 2 finger to scroll divs/iframes in safari. Pretty intuitive when you think about it, but some don't. Especially when the scrollbars aren't obvious.
OK, what other method could you have to scroll a div/iframe?
It was the first one that I thought might work, so I tried it. Unless I'm mistaken that made it intuitive for me.
I do get your point though - for some people it's not obvious...
I would expect the standard scrolling gesture to scroll the iframe -- unless the iframe is already scrolled all the way in that direction, in which case it applies the scroll to the iframe's container.
This behavior is intuitive, if slightly inconvenient in some cases, which is exactly the trade-off I'd have expected Apple to make. Requiring an unfamiliar multitouch gesture for a common operation strikes me as the kind of "let's do something cool because we can" geekery that got us middle-click-to-paste in X Windows.
I'm curious: what does the iPhone use to scroll an iframe in an iframe? Three fingers?
I think the whole gestures thing is NOT intuitive. There is nothing that invites the user to do that stuff. I think scrolling is OK because we have all seen it in the iPhone advertisements. But do stuff with 2,3 or even 4 fingers? Why would I ever even try it? It's like pressing CTRL+@+ALT+AppleKey+xyz.
This just goes to show you that nothing beats good old fashioned usability tests with actual users. They'll unearth the most obvious problems with interfaces that you're blind to.
One guy I heard from recently recommended pricing cheap until you get on a top-100 list, then jacking up the price. Of course, he was trying to market a game, which probably has different market dynamics than an application.
I thought I was the only one who found "the most intuitive phone in the world" a bit confusing. I also hate touching the screen because I sometimes accidentally click something I didn't mean to.
Incidentally, Scribd and Slideshare have given me a newfound appreciation for Adobe Acrobat. A couple of years ago nobody would have said "I just want a good old PDF."