
Mobile Playbook by Google - qasar
http://www.themobileplaybook.com/ 
======
jsnell
I can't decide which part of that site is more hideous. The actively hostile
user interface or the buzzword-laden "content".

~~~
watty
Can you expand on the "actively hostile" comment? I thought it was a
technically and aesthetically impressive implementation but I'm no designer.

~~~
jsnell
Other people already posted different annoyances, but my issues with that page
were:

The animations are choppy to a distracting level on Chrome 22 running on a
reasonably beefy desktop machine.

The font size is unreadably small, and due to the three column layout it
doesn't degrade well when zoomed. It'd be merely crappy if zooming required
vertical scrolling. It's disabling all methods of vertical scrolling entirely
that really make this design special.

It replaces normal page navigation with a custom version, which is already
bad. They then compound that error by mapping that custom navigation to the
wrong keys. An example: maybe you'd like to check one of the footnotes they
have. In a sensible design those would be hyperlinks, but for whatever reason
that wasn't done. Ok, so I guess you need to go to the end of the document to
see the footnotes. Wouldn't still be too bad, but they forgot to map the "End"
key. So the only way to get to the end of the document is with the slider. And
after doing that, how do you return to the original position? Well, I'd expect
to be able to do Alt-Left for that. Except that this keybinding has been
overridden too, and you need to instead click on the back button.

Doing this kind of stuff might be just about acceptable in a web app. But this
isn't an app. It's a document. And they've managed to break the only two
things that matter for a document. I need to be able to read it, and I need to
be able to navigate it.

~~~
halefx
FYI, the animations look great to me in Chrome 22 on a year-old Dell laptop.
The font size is smaller than I would have used, but I wouldn't describe it as
"unreadable".

There are some other big problems, though. They've obviously never heard of
Unobtrusive Javascript[1]. Try opening the site without Javascript. And the
HTML/CSS is garbage. What a joke.

[1]: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unobtrusive_JavaScript>

~~~
jsnell
My vision isn't very good. The text becomes comfortable to read at around
175%-200% zoom level. The default size is so far outside that range that I
have no qualms about describing it as unreadable, even if it's not literally
true and I could read it with sufficient concentration.

Just to be clear, I don't think the problem is the tiny font size as such.
It's the tiny size combined with gratuitously unscrollable and unscalable
layout. It's a similar problem to many default themes for blogs disabling
zooming on mobile browsers for no good reason. This got so bad that the
Android browser sprouted an accessibility option to force zooming to always be
enabled.

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aresant
Goog does a good job illustrating just how "different" mobile is.

In our experience at ConversionVoodoo.com over the past couple of years a
properly mobile optimized site for a direct-response style business is a
difference of 2x, for traditional ecommerce it's 1.5x, for content it's as
much as 3x!

In other words make absolutely, positively sure that mobile optimization
becomes an organizational priority if you're seeing more than 15% mobile
traffic.

------
dendory
Honestly this is exactly the type of site design we should be moving away
from. Fully scripted, so can't be search engine indexed or read without
scripting, doesn't even work on many browsers, takes longer to load because of
the way the pages are designed, multiple columns so hard to zoom in if the
text is too small on your screen, breaks the back button, and so on. This is
nothing but a text based presentation, why not keep the page simple, without
any extras, and let me read it like a normal web page?

~~~
xentronium
I opened the source, and whole text is there, so at least it can be indexed.

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tomasien
Read something really simple, informative, and beautiful created by Google. Go
to Hacker News to read people bitch about how they'd have done it differently
and better.

~~~
prodigal_erik
It's not simple, it's so absurdly overcomplicated and obsessed with one of
many possible renderings that they've made the content inaccessible to most
browsers we've ever had, apparently including the default browser on most
Android phones (ICS didn't bundle Chrome). Their own search engine can't
preview or cache it properly. They should regard widespread authoring like
this as an existential threat to the web of openly interoperable hypertext and
discourage it however they can.

~~~
tomasien
"Inaccessible to most browsers we've ever had" does not move me. What about
most browsers the likely readers are using now? That's what moves me.

------
yummies
A tip for anyone trying to view this on a smartphone:

If I load the page on my Android phone with the stock gingerbread browser in
portrait, I get what I can only guess is the desktop page. If I load it in
landscape, I get the tablet page asking me to rotate to landscape. If you then
rotate back to portrait and refresh, you may be lucky enough to get the mobile
phone page. It may also be completely random.

Ironic how difficult it is to load this content on a mobile device.

~~~
magicalist
Weird. The phone version looks fine in the Android browser or Chrome here, but
my phone is on ICS.

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hippich
And yet their presentation do not work on standard ICS browser :)) Getting
"Greetings, Mobile Champion!...." message.

~~~
notatoad
The android browser is, in general, terrible. Google has partially redeemed
themselves by shipping chrome as the default on JB, but right now android is
the thing holding back the mobile web.

~~~
untog
Unfortunately, Jelly Bean doesn't use Chrome for internal webviews. I'm
playing around with a Phonegap wrapped HTML5 app and I'm blown away by how
much better iOS Safari is. I though Google were supposed to be the web guys?

~~~
HorizonXP
Apparently, BlackBerry 10's browser for HTML5 based apps is going to blow both
of them away.

~~~
notatoad
I'm not sure how it's going to blow safari away. Safari is roughly equivalent
to the current state of the art in desktop browsers (the only glaring omission
I can think of is indexedDB). If BB10 goes beyond that, it's going to be
unusable anyways because it's all going to be BB specific.

~~~
HorizonXP
HTML5test.com says you're wrong.

[http://html5test.com/compare/browser/bb10/chromecanary/safar...](http://html5test.com/compare/browser/bb10/chromecanary/safari60.html)

------
TeMPOraL
On the main page (viewed from PC) they advertise a nice-looking tablet
version, yet on my ASUS tablet with Android 4.1 and Chrome as a browser, I get
the crappy mobile version of the site. Interesting.

------
simonster
This would appear to infringe on RIM's Playbook trademark:
[http://tess2.uspto.gov/bin/showfield?f=doc&state=4001:25...](http://tess2.uspto.gov/bin/showfield?f=doc&state=4001:25e2gp.2.27)

~~~
unreal37
LOL. People have been using The ____ Playbook for years.

Checking the USPTO web site, it shows the "Blackberry Playbook" and "Playbook"
applications as being "status: suspended". Did they even manage to get the US
trademark on that?

------
error54
Their mobile site tester[1] is doesn't do much. All is does is show one page
of the website you entered in a mobile browser then it asks __you __if it
showed up correctly. The report is pretty much some canned messages about how
to improve a mobile website. Maybe I'm expecting too much but after the effort
that they put into the presentation I hoped for a little bit more out the
mobile site "tester."

1 - <http://www.howtogomo.com/en/d/test-your-site/>

~~~
error54
Just because I was curious, I looked up some mobile site testers. These do a
much better job than the Google one: <http://validator.w3.org/mobile/>
<http://mobiready.com>

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orangethirty
It won't load without JS enabled. Plus it is very buggy when it does load on
up to date browsers. Google's JS has been getting buggy this past few months.
Even Gmail, which was rock solid.

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hrktb
It's nice and pretty.

Now on an ipad3 it's slightly laggy. Transitions are slightly slow, and every
interface element feels a bit "almost there" in term of responsivness.

Then, downloading the pdf and viewing the same content in a native viewer is
liberatingly smooth, fast, responsive, albeit without the animations and
custom controls.

This demo seems very apropriate to experience the gap between "html5 and JS
everything" and "single purposed and optimised" presentation formats.

------
dsuriano
Interesting that the tablet on the lower left is an iPad.

~~~
unreal37
Uh, no it isn't. I guess you buy into the belief that Apple has trademarked
the black square with a screen tablet.

~~~
namzo
Actually, it's not just any tablet.. It's actually an iPad with safari browser
open. Look at the image without the overlay
([http://www.themobileplaybook.com/assets/images/cover_tablet....](http://www.themobileplaybook.com/assets/images/cover_tablet.png))

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ahsteele
I first followed the link to this presentation on my iPad 3rd generation. It
actually provided a pretty decent experience in that form factor. That said
using this site in Google Chrome 22 does suck. Apparently the app designers
don't yet understand responsive design / progressive enhancement. Yes it's
hard, but I'd expect a presentation such as this to show how to do all the
right things.

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dmix
The page transition is jarring in Chrome.

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rabidsnail
It doesn't block page transitions on all of the assets on the next page
loading. I click the next button and get to wait 30 seconds while all the
images show up.

------
mgcross
Nice. From the browser detection script:

if (isNexus7 == true) { istablet = false; }

------
sidcool
An excellent campaign from the champion Google. If I were an entrepreneur, I
would suck it all up.

------
phmagic
hilarious.

------
recoiledsnake
Get this message on the latest version of Opera.

>Greetings, Mobile Champion!

>We noticed that you're using an unsupported browser. But have no fear, you
can view themobileplaybook.com from the latest versions of Chrome, Internet
Explorer, Firefox, or Safari. Please update your browser and come back to
visit us.

>Alternatively, we suggest checking out the site from your tablet if you have
one or from your smartphone device.

What galls me about these messages is the insinuation to the Opera users that
their browser is somehow outdated and that we need to update or upgrade it. If
you can't be assed to test on Opera at least change the message to asking to
use a different browser, not to "upgrade" to one.

~~~
andrewljohnson
I suggest the community downvote comments like this. I'd like to see a
published community guideline encouraging people to not make meta comments.
The vast majority of readers don't use Opera, and a personal quest to see
Opera treated as a first class browser doesn't belong in this thread.

This is a cheap and easy way to score points.

~~~
Zombieball
Opera is by far one of the best browsers for Android in my opinion. Firefox
frustrated me considerably as every time I horizontally scrolled I would open
a side bar for managing favourites sites / tabs. This may have been changed in
newer versions of firefox for the Android unfortunately I can't run it as
Firefox consistently crashes on CM10 (not sure if this is a bug on Firefox's
behalf or CM 10)

(edit)I have a feeling quite a few people probably use Opera browser on their
handsets...

~~~
andrewljohnson
The irony that you would talk about opera in response to my comment is
staggering.

~~~
Zombieball
Forgive me, I fail to see the irony in talking about Opera in response to a
comment regarding the Opera browser....

