Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: Why does HN require tiny baby fingers to operate on a phone?

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 103 posts

Re: Ask HN: Why does HN require tiny baby fingers to operate on a phone?

#71

Post by AnonHP »

shashashasha___ wrote: post #13
pavlov wrote: post #3

January 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.

HN is not designed well for desktop either. The voting buttons are too small and close to each other. I’m sure every HN user on every platform has clicked wrongly many a times.

Re: Ask HN: Why does HN require tiny baby fingers to operate on a phone?

#72

Post by shashashasha___ »

gumby wrote: post #40
shashashasha___ wrote: post #13

Earlier 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.

Out of curiosity, what parts of the UI do you screen out?

lots of small links i don't care about (like flagging things, parent, ...) + dates and such. i focused the experience on reading, so i also make all comments collapsed by default so i can first read the top level ones. also have parts that were in viewport have style of 'visited' so I can ignore it next time.

in other words, lots of changes to make the experience easier (to me)

Re: Ask HN: Why does HN require tiny baby fingers to operate on a phone?

#74

Post by Semaphor »

shashashasha___ wrote: post #13
pavlov wrote: post #3

January 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.

> fact is NH on mobile web is not optimized for unknown reasons

It’s literally the only site I use zoomed-in on desktop as well, 150%.

Re: Ask HN: Why does HN require tiny baby fingers to operate on a phone?

#75

Post by raverbashing »

AnonHP wrote: post #71
shashashasha___ wrote: post #13

Earlier 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.

HN is not designed well for desktop either. The voting buttons are too small and close to each other. I’m sure every HN user on every platform has clicked wrongly many a times.

And that is (thankfully) solved by the undown/unvote buttons

Re: Ask HN: Why does HN require tiny baby fingers to operate on a phone?

#77

Post by qwery »

Your web browser is broken. Well, they all are. Browsers on small screens should be built to browse web pages on small screens. There are seemingly obvious things to do like increasing font sizes[0] and margins -- the browser decides what to do with the content, after all. But such things aren't true solutions when the page is designed for a different device / resolution / form factor[1]. Your problem is with input though -- making elements bigger is a hacky solution at best.

Browsers on touch screens should be built to browse web pages on touch screens. Touch input events are a particularly poor representation of the operator's intent -- compared to keys, pointing device with cursor, etc. -- yet a lot of software built for touch seems to assume the opposite. The software decides that the user definitely wants to click on something and it just needs to find which thing.

As all good web browsers know, the extremely precise touch event position corresponds exactly to the (region of the) element that the user wants to click on. This is a certainty[2]. So what if the user tapped precisely on a background element for no reason at all? So what if there are multiple clickable things nearby? The user would have sent different coordinates if they wanted to click somewhere else.

[0] you generally do get some control over this, in lieu of a solution to the problem

[1] and the browser must, as much as possible, style the content in the way (not-) specified, even at the cost of the user experience / accessibility

[2] It is, by definition, without doubt. A fact. A universal truth. A ---

Re: Ask HN: Why does HN require tiny baby fingers to operate on a phone?

#78

Post by tredre3 »

qwery wrote: post #77

Your web browser is broken. Well, they all are. Browsers on small screens should be built to browse web pages on small screens. There are seemingly obvious things to do like increasing font sizes[0] and margins -- the browser decides what to do with the content, after all. But such things aren't true solutions when the page is designed for a different device / resolution / form factor[1]. Your problem is with input t…

Web browsers (and the whole touch input stack really) are already fully aware of touch precision and do very clever things to infer what you're actually trying to touch. In my experience it's already surprisingly accurate, too.

Saying that making things bigger isn't a solution is nonsense. Shifting blames to browser makers is even less of a solution.

Making HN 200% bigger if it detect a small screen would fix most issues and it's 3 lines of CSS. But sure, let's wait until that magical browser you describe arrives to fix everything instead. Any day now.

Re: Ask HN: Why does HN require tiny baby fingers to operate on a phone?

#79

Post by friend_and_foe »

Smartphones and touchscreens in general have a UX issue: the surface you read gets interacted with directly. So attempting to create a content rich reading surface has this problem. With smartphones it is compounded by the small size of the screen.

You'll see this with all sorts of other mobile UIs that are web based. Honestly, as much of a pain in the ass as it can be, I prefer it to existing mobile UX "solutions" out there, it might suck to pinch zoom on links before I touch them, but it sucks even worse to interact with the majority of mobile web interfaces.

Re: Ask HN: Why does HN require tiny baby fingers to operate on a phone?

#80

Post by BaseballPhysics »

chomp wrote: post #27
shashashasha___ wrote: post #13

Earlier 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?

Did you "slam out" that comment on your phone? I'm only asking because its shorter than most of the comments I post, here; comments I post almost exclusively from my phone because nine times out of ten that's where I'm browsing HN.
Post reply on HN