Earlier quoted context omitted.
Any specific app you would recommend?
I'm using Harmonic for Android. Not sure if it's available for iOS. https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.simon.harm...
Just installed, thank you.
Ask HN: Why does HN require tiny baby fingers to operate on a phone?
41–50 of 103 posts
Re: Ask HN: Why does HN require tiny baby fingers to operate on a phone?
#42They're encouraging you to think like a hacker and fix it yourself with either a user stylesheet or an app.
Sure, I appreciate it's "old school" - though the markup, nested tables, embedded formatting, spacer gifs, etc make this rather hard.
Re: Ask HN: Why does HN require tiny baby fingers to operate on a phone?
#43January 2007. Steve Jobs introduces the iPhone web browser. “And to zoom in on any page, you just drag with two fingers… like this.” The crowd goes wild. Nobody has ever seen multitouch gestures before. Still works!
Then when you go to zoom, it registers a click first, and you hit some random link instead.
Re: Ask HN: Why does HN require tiny baby fingers to operate on a phone?
#44Ya, it's been said that "it is part of the issues to be fixed in the next UI update" for like 10 years now.
To me, the most annoying part of using HN w/o other clients on mobile is not this, which can be addressed with extra care or zoom in. It's the idiotic decision to somehow think the post text is less important than comments and so the font color must be set to be lower. It's so low that it's unreadable in mobile. For long posts like many show-HNs, I have to just skip reading it until I get back to desktop, which isn't only not ideal, but also defeats the purpose of show-HNs since the ones that doesn't stay at top are the ones needed all the attention and HN is not helping by making it unreadable.
Ya, a simple css color change to match comments' color need to be part of the fixes to be addressed when there's a blue moon.
Re: Ask HN: Why does HN require tiny baby fingers to operate on a phone?
#45I have wondered if the very minimal changes have been as there's some anticipation that the easier HN becomes on mobile the more likely users would comment while on the go, which may be considered a negative if it affects comment quality (eg: generally shorter time windows to read/parse content and therefore make thoughtful comments about, more challenging on phone OS UIs to write and edit longer form comments).
I'd be curious what the internal stats are for comments made on mobile since I wonder if the stats are already high and whether they show any trend of less highly rated comments.
Re: Ask HN: Why does HN require tiny baby fingers to operate on a phone?
#46Earlier quoted context omitted.
is this a serious answer or trolling? how would web experience on mobile be if i have to manually zoom everything all of the time? fact is NH on mobile web is not optimized for unknown reasons. its not a big challenge to do it either. I have a userscript that makes everything bigger and removes junk out.
Is there any evidence that discourse here would be improved by encouraging mobile users to slam out mobile-sized comments?
While I understand the sentiment, I think people here can discern between an iMessage and an hn comment. I would be curious to know the percentage of people commenting on mobile devices. I’d guess it’s a lot. I prefer the ui the way it is, I don’t mind the old school feel. I’m sure I could go get an App to make it better. But I don’t think mobile vs desktop necessarily correlates well to quality of hn comment. I could be wrong tho.
Sent from my iphone
Re: Ask HN: Why does HN require tiny baby fingers to operate on a phone?
#47Why not simply inject a tiny bit of client side CSS and fix it yourself? True to the hacker spirit.
> Why not simply inject a tiny bit of client side CSS and fix it yourself? True to the hacker spirit. Because, as the OP states, i'm on a phone.
hopefully someone can create a script for phones since Firefox Nightly in Android got Tampermonkey add on
Re: Ask HN: Why does HN require tiny baby fingers to operate on a phone?
#48I prefer it to most sites, it leaves more room for text. HN feels much more information dense than similar websites like reddit.
On a desktop it's fine. For fingers on a phone screen it's... well, it's less than fine.
On my sort of large phone all the links and buttons are just big enough that I can press on the right things consistently without zoom. My issue is that I accidentally hit them when scrolling sometimes.
Re: Ask HN: Why does HN require tiny baby fingers to operate on a phone?
#49January 2007. Steve Jobs introduces the iPhone web browser. “And to zoom in on any page, you just drag with two fingers… like this.” The crowd goes wild. Nobody has ever seen multitouch gestures before. Still works!
is this a serious answer or trolling? how would web experience on mobile be if i have to manually zoom everything all of the time? fact is NH on mobile web is not optimized for unknown reasons. its not a big challenge to do it either. I have a userscript that makes everything bigger and removes junk out.
You know you can just go adjust the zoom on most browsers & it'll stick for the site, yes? On Chrome there's a "zoom" option in the drop down.
HN is well optimized on mobile. It's great as is. Lot of people just bullying their opinions.
Re: Ask HN: Why does HN require tiny baby fingers to operate on a phone?
#50When I see both an up and a down arrow next to a comment and I zoom in so that I can touch just one of them it seems the other one lights up as well. At least that is my impression on the iPhone.
So do these little tiny arrows really vote up and down or are they just a neutral engagement signal?
I always intended to look in the code but as it fits this topic, I guess I can just as well ask here.