

A better way to read HN on the iPad - Happy Thanksgiving From Onswipe - mgrouchy
http://blog.onswipe.com/news/a-better-way-to-read-hacker-news-on-the-ipad-happy-thanksgiving-from-onswipe

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dogas
It took me > 60 seconds to figure out how to turn the page. My feedback is
this: I hate it. When I'm using my ipad, every blog that has onswipe enabled
leaves me frustrated. The UX feels slow, choppy, and unnecessary.

I don't understand what problem is trying to be solved. Browsing web pages on
the ipad is a pleasant experience. I can scroll with my finger. With onswipe,
I can no longer scroll with my finger. Why was that a problem? that's not a
problem. It doesn't need solving. Please tell us explicitly the value you are
trying to add, because I cannot see it.

~~~
ChrisLTD
_"The UX feels slow, choppy, and unnecessary."_

While I am glad people are experimenting with new UI metaphors and reading
experiences, every product I've seen from Onswipe has been, as you say, slow
and choppy. And not just a little slow or a little choppy, I'm talking
unusably so, often to the point where it crashes my browser.

I get the impression they aren't testing this stuff at all on the first
generation iPad.

------
sgdesign
I have to say that I'm a little bit baffled by things like this or recent
updates to Flipboard that introduce "features" that I can't imagine anybody
asking for.

Why show articles in a grid instead of a list? A list makes the hierarchy
clear, and is easy to parse.

Why have articles text on multiple columns instead of one? Multiple columns
are a left-over from print newspaper who had to use them for practical
reasons. I personally find them less readable than a single column (except
maybe for very short articles).

Why prevent me from zooming in or out to adjust the font size? This is
actually one of the coolest thing about browsing the web on the iPad, and you
break it.

I think it's a shame, because I really like some of the other features, like
the preloading of the content, and stripping away the ads and distractions.

~~~
jasonlbaptiste
Hey, so this was just one of many layouts and it seemed to be the "cleanest".
There's a straight up list layout that we have that would have worked as well,
which I almost went with.

We've thought about font resizing, but do you think that's needed when
everything is "in focus". ie- no need to zoom in away from ads or to see the
rest of the article.

~~~
jacquesgt
Yes, it's needed. People with less than perfect vision appreciate being able
to zoom in on small text to make it more readable.

A few other things that are needed (and work in the non-Onswipe version of
pages):

1\. Rotating the iPad to landscapes houldn't trigger a choppy relayout that
takes five seconds. It should show the exact same content as in portrait mode,
zoomed to fill the width of the screen. Users can then decide whether to zoom
out and show more content, or stay zoomed in to take advantage of the
increased horizontal resolution.

2\. The back button should work. Pro tip: If I tap the back button 20 times,
and nothing happens until the 20th time, the back button is broken.

------
schrototo
Have you guys not noticed that every time someone posts a link to an onswiped
article, half the comments are about how shitty onswipe is?

~~~
jasonlbaptiste
You either love it or hate it. The tech crowd seems to be more towards a hate
level due to certain expectations. Overall, >95% of readers using an Onswipe
experience opt to keep it the default.

~~~
tzs
I've not encountered a single blog owner at Wordpress.com who opted to keep it
once they found out it had been forced on them and checked out the user
experience it provides.

As far as certain expectations, I admit to that: I expect to read small blogs
without my browser crashing and without jerky scrolling. If you think those
expectations are only of the tech crowd, you are delusional.

If 95% of the readers on Wordpress.com opt to keep it that is most likely due
to the fact that you don't provide an opt out. All you provide is the ability
to temporarily turn it off for that one session, and that is at the bottom of
the page, so if you can reach that without a crashing there is not much point
to turn it off. Also, if you are in landscape mode the opt out is often not
clickable because your software scrolls back to move it off the page, and
clicks are not recognizes during that auto scrolling. Put an to out at the
top, with an option to permanently opt out, and let's see if that claimed 95%
holds up.

Months ago, you said several times that you would be fixing these problems
with the Wordpress.com version of OnSwipe. We are still waiting.

~~~
shinratdr
> I expect to read small blogs without my browser crashing and without jerky
> scrolling. If you think those expectations are only of the tech crowd, you
> are delusional.

This should be the mobile web developers creed, their Hippocratic Oath.

------
keeptrying
If you look at my previous comments, you'll see that in all my years at HN
have never written a negative rant on a product. Till today.

Onswipe is so bad. It makes me want to throw my iPad against the wall. Even
the "Show original article " link takes 30 taps to work. Arrrgh. Slowest,
nastiest, crashing thing I have to encounter. It hurts that magazines like
slate use it because it means I can't read the article.

One interesting thing is that swipe will increase pageviews but lowers the
experience because people like me will repeatedly load the page after it
crashes and hit the "view original version".

Just writing this post has got me in hives. Please just destroy this software,
it would make the world a better place.

------
steipete
Onswipe is horrible. Either use native scrolling or web-scrolling. Don't fake
it. It doesn't work, fails in the most crappy ways. Just stop.

------
js2
Takes over 20 seconds to load, then crashes safari on a first gen iPad. I
loathe on swipe. It is not the way I want to experience the web.

------
shinratdr
You know, just because I own a first generation iPad doesn't make me not worth
supporting. I hate this attitude that devs are taking. Oh, I'm serving content
to an iPad, well then let me grind the hell out of that CPU/GPU with this
overly intensive site.

I like HN on an iPad as it is. It DOESN'T serve me some choppy, overly
animated version of the site. HN loads on an iPad 1 in a split second. I have
the Safari Reader feature if I don't like the article layout. I'll never use
this. Furthermore, it's projects like this that give web apps a bad name in
general.

------
JofArnold
I've sent so many complaints to onswipe-powered sites I've lost count. The
iPad lets me view HN perfectly well - not only can it render large sections of
text just fine but it can zoom and pan intuitively enough for even my mum to
feel at home. And if I really tire of the cruft there's always the built-in
Reader function.

Tl;dr Dislike.

~~~
shinratdr
On top of all that, it's FAST. There is nothing futuristic or complimentary
about waiting a full five seconds for an action or animation to complete.

------
alexwolfe
Visually it looks very interesting (similar to flipboard) however it sounds
like from the ultra negative comments that the experience may not be ideal.
Changing it to a scrolling version of the same layout opposed to swiping could
probably alleviate a lot of the pain felt here.

I'm interested in what technology you used to scrape the articles from Hacker
News? There is no official api so it would be interesting to hear the process
you used, Thanks!

~~~
lt
<http://www.hnsearch.com/api>

------
fara
Why would you forbid other clients than iPad to browse into your site? I think
you should warn the user that it may not be optimized but let the user in.
It's irritating, the web should be open.

~~~
jasonlbaptiste
The tech is made specifically for touch enabled devices right now. Other
tablets don't have market share, so we're focusing on the sector of the market
that's 97% of readers. Once we nail that, we'll spend time on another tablet
browser when it gains market share.

~~~
kittxkat
Yeah, that seems perfectly reasonable for me. But once again, you could just
state that _it may break_ and is not made for your browser, but there is no
reason to not show the content, and more drastically, even forbid entrance.

------
jasonlbaptiste
Direct link when on iPad: <http://onswipe.com/hackernews>

Let me pre-empty where I know there's going to be some dislike as a lot of the
HN crowd just wants the normal non-swipeable web. Most of that frustration
comes from a > year old version powering Wordpress.com (which we're
upgrading). Would love to hear feedback on _this_ specific version of our
platform. Most articles in this version should render well, except those that
aren't really news or blog content (ie- direct link to webpages).

~~~
kgermino
Is there a way to see comments or is this articles only?

Thanks!

~~~
jasonlbaptiste
Just articles since this is focused more on reading, sorry :/. That kind of
sucks though, since the big value of HN happens to be the discussion. In
reality this is meant to be: you want to read all the awesome content making
the HN front page without clutter and in one place for your iPad, go to this
url.

------
nickpp
onswipe - the iPad's Flash

------
tzs
I sent feedback to Apple, noting how some sights use user agents to recognize
iPads and give a degraded experience, even though one of the points of iPad is
that it provides the real web, and asking for some kind of user agent setting
option so we could tell those sites we are on a desktop.

~~~
DenisM
I'm sure there is a custom web browser in the app store, which is a webkit but
with a variable user agent.

~~~
JofArnold
I haven't had chance to double check this, but my experience has been they
find ways around user agent. Eg spoofing desktop Safari in iCab didn't help.
YMMV.

~~~
rdl
I use a proxy to strip out this crapware. Even worse are the sites which
advertise their ipad/iphone app aggressively.

------
iantimothy
From my experience landing on sites that have Onswipe turned on, a fair number
of these sites don't have content that look good with the Onswipe theme. The
reason seems that when the owner of the site is preparing the content, they
use the normal theme to see how everything looks, and it probably looks good.
They can't ensure that everything looks nice with Onswipe on because most
people are probably preparing content on a non touch screen browser and aren't
taking the time to use an iPad to verify the content they just posted looks
nice with Onswipe.

Is there a way for content owners to know how things will look on an iPad
without one?

------
rythie
The main problem with most sites on the iPad and even more so on the
iPhone/other phones is that with font is too small and the text doesn't use
the full browser width. (Zooming means you have to constantly swipe left and
right). [FYI I have perfect eyesight AFAIK]

I don't want a new UI, just people to fix their sites for the above.

------
jimfl
I have found Flipboard + the @newsyc20 Twitter feed to be an ideal way to read
Hacker News.

------
alexweber
<http://ihackernews.com> is a bit nicer

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metafour
On my iPad 1 when I rotate to change the display orientation it crashes
Safari. Even going landscape to landscape crashes Safari.

------
Frozzare
I think the Hacker News HD application is great.

------
dyc
There are times when you believe in your product and know what's best for the
customer. This shouldn't be one of those times. Don't ship junk.

