

Ask HN: Why is http://News.YCombinator.com not mobile compatible? - dopp

I surf from my smart phone for a significant amount of time, and I'm sure I'm not alone.  I couldn't help but notice that this site is not mobile compatible.  Any particular reason as to why http://news.ycombinator.com is not compatible with smart phone browsers?
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comex
The desktop site is perfectly usable with some zooming in to hit the vote
buttons. That's a hell of a lot more compatible than half the sites with
"mobile" interfaces that look fancy but have terrible usability.

(I've complained about some of these on HN before, but a particulary bad
offender is that blog theme that lets mobile users swipe left or right to go
to the previous or next blog post. Aside from being undiscoverable, ugly
(since the swiping entirely misses the point of iOS's UI, acting only after a
swipe has been completed rather than smoothly tracking the finger with an
interface element-- Google Images also has this problem) and useless (who
wants to skip to the previous or next blog entry in the middle of reading the
current one?), this feature always catches my not-quite-vertical swipes and
tries to take me off the page while I'm reading!

Of course this doesn't have anything to do with Hacker News, but I think it's
the mindset that adding a mobile site is solving a compatibility issue, thus
always an improvement over inaction, that's responsible for the vast number of
crappy mobile sites out there.)

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chc
I'm guessing you use Android. The site is OK aside from the butons on Android,
but the text is unreadably small on iPhone.

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comex
I use an iPhone 4; I find that the Retina Display makes it easier to read
small text. I guess experiences differ.

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radq
You could use <http://ihackernews.com/>.

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aymeric
It might simply be the case of someone editing the live stylesheets to include
the mobile media queries and make it look good on mobile and sending the file
over to pg.

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adyus
It would seem easy to retrofit using something like Foundation
(<http://foundation.zurb.com/>).

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mcav
There seems to be little bandwidth from its creators for substantial UI
improvements. Fortunately, there are a few mobile apps, at least on iOS.

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storborg
In what way is it "not mobile compatible"? Works fine on any phone I've seen
it on.

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Urgo
Sure you have to zoom in but otherwise it renders fine on android..

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billpatrianakos
Works fine for me. On my iPhone I automatically get redirected to
ihackernews.com otherwise it's very readable on the iPad too. The new Reader
in Safari in ios helps a lot with some articles.

