
Page Flips Are Better Than Infinite Scroll - alexkon
http://designdare.com/-page-flips-are-better-than-infinite-scroll
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jacobolus
By far my favorite way to read content on a screen is using Tofu
<http://amarsagoo.info/tofu/> which presents columns (of user-preferred width,
font, hyphenation & justification, and leading) of text, and then scrolls
column-by-column left and right. It’s especially nice when two or more people
are trying to read from the same screen, because occasional scrolling of a
whole column directly horizontally is much less disruptive than arbitrary
amounts of scrolling down a page. On wide computer displays, it is a
significantly better use of screen real estate than single-column web pages,
which should stick to a measure (width) of not much more than about 60
characters to be readable.

Anything longer than a page or two that I plan to read on a screen gets copied
and pasted into Tofu.

Edit: note that there’s a (quick) slide animation with scrolling in Tofu which
helps maintain the impression of a single continuous surface, but there are no
gratuitous animated flipping page corners.

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omaranto
I certainly see the value in Tofu for a large screen, but on my iPod I'd only
want one column (so Tofu-style reading degenerates to pagination). My question
is whether on an iPad sized screen Tofuness would be convenient. What do you
think?

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jacobolus
I think an iPad screen would be great for 2 columns (in portrait mode) or 3
columns (in landscape mode) of a Tofu-like reader. But I don’t have an iPad so
I can’t tell you for sure. What I can tell you is that on my 12" PowerBook
(1024x768) I used to set Tofu up with 3 columns filling the screen, and on my
13" MBP (1280x800) I set it up with 4 columns filling the screen – of 14px
Myriad as the font – and it works fantastically.

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tjpick
infinite scroll is mystery meat anyway. It breaks the standard affordance of
the scroll bar -- that the length of the scroll bar reflects the total length
of the page. One of those cases where trying to get clever just results in
frustrated users (me) because of unexpectedly changing an interaction that
otherwise would be taken for granted.

~~~
jacobolus
By “infinite scroll” the author is just talking about every normal web page
(e.g. some Wikipedia article), not about the (indeed, potentially confusing)
case where a site loads extra content using Ajax every time the reader
approaches the bottom of the page.

~~~
tjpick
ah right. Never seen "infinite scroll" used to mean normal scrolling [arguably
"finite" not that I'd actually bother calling it that.] That threw me off.

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minalecs
I'm on the side of less eye candy more speed. I see the page flip as nothing
more than eye candy, and would rather do without it.

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armandososa
Alas, I was expecting hard data to support his statement, rather than a mere
opinion. I prefer Stanza over iBooks precisely because I _hate_ page flips.

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abhaga
But with infinite scroll, how does the "flipping between 1 column and 2
columns on the go" work? Do we read down the left column and then go up to the
right? And how do we know where we are if we switch back to 1 column.

Of course, we can simply drop the facility to switch but I am curious if the
two can work together in a usable way.

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yason
I generally like page flips, like reading a PDF page by page instead of
scrolling continuously. But the downside is that generally page-flipping is
coupled with fixed layout. And usually there's too much text on a single page,
making the font absurdly small.

The good side about scrolling is that I can choose whatever font size I want
and the page just grows as necessary while I can still scroll up and down. On
the other hand it's a bit more difficult to locate yourself or jump around in
a big chunk of scrolling text. PgDn/PgUp is a _kind of_ a page flip but
usability-wise it's better to have a bit of margin on top and bottom, just
like on a real paper page. Then you know where the page ends and where the
next page begins, and you don't have to scan the lines to see if the browser
scrolled 100% or left 3 lines visible from the previous position or what.

I think I would like best a solution where the content is paginated but it
would be dynamically fitted onto a page whose size is the browser window size.
It would only fit as much text of proper size on one page that nicely fits
there. If I use a big font, then it's 20 lines; if I use a small font, it's 40
lines. But I would still get pages, maybe fewer or more. A page would have
proper margins and I could reason about navigating back to something I read
"ten pages ago".

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joe_the_user
Even on a phone, I suspect the interface and the content need to be in harmony
so generalizations like this are a bit excessive.

And moreover, just about thing you view on the phone will be something people
also view in another way - as a website or a paper magazine. It's
aesthetically and economically justifiable to have the two-plus views be in
something like harmony. Facebook's infinite scroll on the website seems
clunky, yet it's somewhat logical to have a relation between website and
iPhone app.

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naner
I came to a similar conclusion, but I think the flip always looks and feels a
little off. I prefer the page slide like the NYTimes website optimized for
Chrome. Not a continuous slide, but a slide from one page to the next.

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comex
Pagination is definitely better than manual scrolling, but I find iBooks'
animation too visually fancy. The Kindle iPad app is better: it just slides
the new page in.

