

Why zooming on mobile is broken (and how to fix it) - matthiaskramm
http://coding.scribd.com/2012/02/29/why-zooming-on-mobile-is-broken-and-how-to-fix-it/

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drats
This looks quite interesting. Even more interesting to see it come from a
company that's done as much to damage the web and offend the notion of UI as
Scribd. I personally will never forgive Scribd for encouraging people to post
documents with them and then demanding a sign-up to get the pdf. It just has
this spammy "re-hosting other people's content surrounded in ads" feel to it.
Scribd should never have been made.

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mirsadm
Quite a few apps do this already. Hasn't the Android browser been doing this
for yonks now?

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hatsuseno
This technique is already used in the wild, Android devices have been doing
this forever, Windows Phone 7 as well, although I'm not sure on the iPhone, I
recall someone describing the effect even in their browser. The 'problem' is
this is opt-in behaviour, so only a few apps use it, while it should be a
default behaviour for any kind of formatted text.

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stbullard
Whoa - I was looking for a hyphenation and join-back tool earlier today, and
couldn't find anything even remotely useful. Scribd has a pretty good record
of contributing to open source: any chance you'd make that component
available? Alternately, is there something off-the-shelf that's almost as
good?

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matthiaskramm
I'll try! I'm a big fan of open source, and I actually have a long list of
components I want to open-source at some point, like for example Scribd's PDF
to html5 conversion software.

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dmethvin
Back in September, Microsoft demoed a similar Windows 8 thing they called
"semantic zoom". Obviously it requires the app to understand when zooming is
taking place so that it's possible to do something smarter with it than just
magnifying the pixels.

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leephillips
Terrible typography, even worse than Kindle, etc. That's what you get when you
try to reflow text with no hyphenation and only a crude linebreaking
algorithm. Also, as others have mentioned, there's nothing new here.

