You can make complex web apps responsive • Hacker News Board

Re: You can make complex web apps responsive

#21

Post by k3n » Thu, Jun 13, 2013, 2:44 PM UTC

danso wrote: post #11

k3n wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> too often, non-designers underestimate the work and design considerations involved. The story of my life! In my entire career as a web developer, the hardest non-technical task I've ever faced is convincing management that we need a designer. I guess they think all they do is come up with some colors or something, because there is never any value given to having someone on-hand that actually knows what they're doin…

Not just design work though, but also content and features work, which pulls in product development and sometimes, infrastructure people. Responsive/mobile design necessarily makes content disappear or moved around, which can substantially change the function of the site. For example, in Adioso's implementation: http://adioso.com/us/new-york-new-york-to-rome-it-next-month... ...resizing to the mobile width hides the…

Fully agree. At least 'graphic design' is easier to explain than 'information design', which most here at work probably think is a farce or a figment of imagination.

Re: You can make complex web apps responsive

#22

Post by cheeaun » Thu, Jun 13, 2013, 2:45 PM UTC

JangoSteve wrote: post #13

This is a good writeup. We've started doing the same thing for the startups we've been building, and funny enough, in almost the exact same way, using Zurb Foundation and everything. We found that, as awesome as Zurb is, it doesn't go quite all the way with its mobile components. It's missing things like full-width padded lists (for fat fingers), and a few other touches. Which is why we just started building foundati…

Is this foundation-mobile plugin on GitHub?

Re: You can make complex web apps responsive

#23

Post by JangoSteve » Thu, Jun 13, 2013, 2:48 PM UTC

cheeaun wrote: post #22

JangoSteve wrote: post #13

This is a good writeup. We've started doing the same thing for the startups we've been building, and funny enough, in almost the exact same way, using Zurb Foundation and everything. We found that, as awesome as Zurb is, it doesn't go quite all the way with its mobile components. It's missing things like full-width padded lists (for fat fingers), and a few other touches. Which is why we just started building foundati…

Is this foundation-mobile plugin on GitHub?

Ah yes, sorry, I didn't post the link because we literally just started it, so there's not much to see yet (all we have so far is the mobile lists).

It's here though: https://github.com/alfajango/foundation-mobile

If anyone has ideas for components we should include (or if you want to contribute), please post on the issues! For example, you can see my own post for our upcoming full-window, modal drop-downs: https://github.com/alfajango/foundation-mobile/issues/1

Re: You can make complex web apps responsive

#24

Post by tomhoward » Thu, Jun 13, 2013, 2:50 PM UTC

mberning wrote: post #19

Shorel wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OTOH, I believe something like Gmail is far more complex in terms of webapps than something with a thousand boring forms.

It depends on what those forms do. I think we both can agree that something like Gmail is much more complex than what was presented in the article.

More complex, sure, but the real point is that they're both significantly more complex than a basic text content site.

Re: You can make complex web apps responsive

#25

Post by JangoSteve » Thu, Jun 13, 2013, 2:50 PM UTC

zalew wrote: post #14

JangoSteve wrote: post #13

This is a good writeup. We've started doing the same thing for the startups we've been building, and funny enough, in almost the exact same way, using Zurb Foundation and everything. We found that, as awesome as Zurb is, it doesn't go quite all the way with its mobile components. It's missing things like full-width padded lists (for fat fingers), and a few other touches. Which is why we just started building foundati…

nice, followed you, I hope I don't miss it. will it be released on zurb plugins page or only independently?

Awesome, thanks! We already have a Github repo up (see my other comment), we just haven't pushed a lot to it just yet. We're building it as part of a couple other projects, so we're pulling our code over as we implement it. So far, it's a joint project between us (alfajango.com) and our friends over karmacrm.com.

It'll be released independently, but we've been talking to the Zurb people (they're pretty cool), and they said they'll link to it from the Foundation homepage and will help us implement or change things in Foundation if we need to (and if it's a good idea of course).

Re: You can make complex web apps responsive

#26

Post by laumars » Thu, Jun 13, 2013, 2:59 PM UTC

monsterix wrote: post #9

Long answer short: No, you can't get a complex webapp resolved responsively with all its complexity on a mobile. Two reasons for that: 1. The mobile browser (excluding the iPad/larger tablets) are yet to achieve the level or even meet standards, for that matter, where a really good developer could go an dive and into creating a complex webapp. 2. Even if point no. 1 is met by vendors (which is questionable) then also…

You're going to have to explain point 1 a little better because it reads like you're saying that mobile browsers don't have feature rich and standards compliant engines. And that mobile browsers differ from tablet browsers. Neither of which is true.

Re: You can make complex web apps responsive

#27

Post by EGreg » Thu, Jun 13, 2013, 3:13 PM UTC

What's with all these CSS frameworks which serve one css file for everybody? Toolkits like GWT have had the sense to serve only what each environment needs, since 2004. If you are worried about mobile devices being able to handle things, how about NOT downloading things that they don't need?

Your CSS framework should include a precompiler that generates files for each platform. Then either the client or the server can decide the right file(s) to load.

Re: You can make complex web apps responsive

#28

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Jun 13, 2013, 3:19 PM UTC

EGreg wrote: post #27

What's with all these CSS frameworks which serve one css file for everybody? Toolkits like GWT have had the sense to serve only what each environment needs, since 2004. If you are worried about mobile devices being able to handle things, how about NOT downloading things that they don't need? Your CSS framework should include a precompiler that generates files for each platform. Then either the client or the server ca…

[deleted]

Re: You can make complex web apps responsive

#29

Post by monsterix » Thu, Jun 13, 2013, 3:21 PM UTC

laumars wrote: post #26

monsterix wrote: post #9

Long answer short: No, you can't get a complex webapp resolved responsively with all its complexity on a mobile. Two reasons for that: 1. The mobile browser (excluding the iPad/larger tablets) are yet to achieve the level or even meet standards, for that matter, where a really good developer could go an dive and into creating a complex webapp. 2. Even if point no. 1 is met by vendors (which is questionable) then also…

You're going to have to explain point 1 a little better because it reads like you're saying that mobile browsers don't have feature rich and standards compliant engines. And that mobile browsers differ from tablet browsers. Neither of which is true.

Top off my head (though people have already negatively voted my opinion) here are a few:

1. File uploads on iOS is not supported as per standards. Android is making a difference here.

2. HTML5 Full-Screen API is not supported on mobile browsers. On the iPad, Safari doesn't switch to full-screen mode at all, whereas on the iPhone it does.

3. Available memory is very very limited. About 5mb or so. So you can't load too many images on the same page or it'd crash. Not even a complex webapp to be frank.

4. Number of ports per connection on mobile browser are fewer than on a desktop browser. So a complicated/heavy webapp isn't going to make a cut.

There are other serious limitations too.

Like you can't tell the browser to remain in landscape or portrait via your site if you wanted to. CSS properties like position:fixed or z-index and binding of events on the layer with highest z-index is buggy or simply doesn't work.

Other options like raw in-line base64 images inside CSS are not rendered properly etc. etc. etc. The list could go on ... :)

Re: You can make complex web apps responsive

#30

Post by wahnfrieden » Thu, Jun 13, 2013, 3:26 PM UTC

rickdale wrote: post #18

Just used adioso for the first time. Then I read the post. From my perspective, it looks cool and all, but the dates load extremely slow and you have to click the right arrow to pick your dates, rather than pop-up calendar, which they also use on a different part of the site and works out better.. Also, I wanted to fly to Vegas, it picked out my local airport and an 8 hour 1 stop trip to Vegas. By selecting an airpor…

I too had a terrible experience. For a minute after I first searched, it gave results that were all twice as expensive as Kayak ($1100 instead of $5-600). There was no indication that it was loading more. I would have bailed at this point, but I returned to the tab (out of curiosity of their design) and saw it updated with reasonable flights.