Ask HN: New attempt at mobile markup – keep or bail? • Hacker News Board

Re: Ask HN: New attempt at mobile markup – keep or bail?

#211

Post by dredmorbius » Mon, Nov 02, 2015, 9:43 AM UTC

akamaka wrote: post #88

ggreer wrote: post #43

Thank you for making this. My one suggestion would be to make the upvote/downvote arrows larger and farther apart. I'd say around 5% of my votes on mobile are incorrect. Often I'm lazy about zooming in to make sure I hit the correct arrow. Actually, I'd like that change on larger devices as well. I've often misvoted on my Surface. As large touchscreens become more popular (iPad Pro, the Surface line, etc), I could se…

Alternately, how about being able to undo a vote, like reddit?

I've heard via email that this is in the cards.

Re: Ask HN: New attempt at mobile markup – keep or bail?

#212

Post by darkhorn » Mon, Nov 02, 2015, 9:45 AM UTC

In the login page can you add autofocus on the username please?

Re: Ask HN: New attempt at mobile markup – keep or bail?

#213

Post by tambourine_man » Mon, Nov 02, 2015, 9:45 AM UTC

We desperately need a mobile version of HN. I know I use it on mobile almost exclusively.

But this is terrible, I'm sorry. As others have said, there have been dozens of great HN mobile versions done by the community. Why not endorse one?

Re: Ask HN: New attempt at mobile markup – keep or bail?

#214

Post by Natanael_L » Mon, Nov 02, 2015, 9:47 AM UTC

ploxiln wrote: post #165

joezydeco wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But why does horizontal mode (my standard casual reading mode) look so blown out? ==> http://imgur.com/5Z6q6wI (iOS 9, iPhone 5, Safari)

fwiw, as of right now wide view looks fine (full-width) in firefox on android.

I'm on Firefox Mobile right now on my tablet, a Samsung Galaxy Tab Pro 8.4. The full site looks perfectly good with the only exception that "click targets" are annoyingly small.

My suggestion is that each user should be able to set his desired text size / DPI resolution per device (tracked via cookies of course), so that I can have properly clickable comment links and upvote buttons and so on on my tablet, and keep everything as before from my laptop.

Re: Ask HN: New attempt at mobile markup – keep or bail?

#215

Post by Natanael_L » Mon, Nov 02, 2015, 9:54 AM UTC

joezydeco wrote: post #75

sdrothrock wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or something like this (c is a bit ambiguous for me) 200 pt, foobar (8h) | flag | 192 cmts

If the clickable area is what counts, how about this? +200 by foobar | flag | comment (192 in 8h)

I definitely approve of this version, better visually too

Re: Ask HN: New attempt at mobile markup – keep or bail?

#216

Post by Nib » Mon, Nov 02, 2015, 9:56 AM UTC

I hope I'm not too harsh, but a straightforward no will be my answer. It's a work in progress, but atleast on an iPhone 5, it seems to be worse than the desktop version of it. It does save me a pinch or two, but at the end it doesn't look user friendly and the upvote/down vote button are still the same. And commenting doesn't seem mobile friendly to me. So essentially the only 2 things a user should be doing on HN: comments and votes haven't improved.

There is a web app, namely HackerWeb, which even though lacks enough functionality but looks more humane and real. Try that out; and if not copy it, atleast take hints to improve your version of the site.

One more thing, why don't you guys come up with an online open contest, and let the community hack a newer version? That'll be fun, and make your lives a little easier as well.

Re: Ask HN: New attempt at mobile markup – keep or bail?

#217

Post by huhtenberg » Mon, Nov 02, 2015, 9:57 AM UTC

Here's how it looks on iPhone4 - http://i.imgur.com/olj9ocC.png - lots of wasted space and a messy header.

For the header, I'd consider splitting it into two lines, like this - http://i.imgur.com/7EAROA8.png. That is, keep top line for user-specific items, and put the rest in the bottom line. This also means moving "submit" to the top and hiding it when a user is not logged in.

Re: Ask HN: New attempt at mobile markup – keep or bail?

#218

Post by dredmorbius » Mon, Nov 02, 2015, 9:59 AM UTC

Keep.

It's not a huge improvement, but it's slightly better.

I'd actually sent HN a long review of mobile experience on a 10" tablet acouple of days ago and received a response from dang earlier tonight tipping me off to this. I'm not sure I'd have noticed without that.

In vertical orientation, viewport width is better, and an annoying glitch where font size changed apparently randomly on some nested comments is gone.

Overall UI/UX of links and controlls needs improvement. Especially voting arrows. I'm told an undo is in the works.

My view is that HN's basic page layout needs a full revamp at least internally, to give better styling control via CSS. This doesn't mean huge theme changes, though that's also possible.

Building the page around a sane line length would be a really good start.

What issues are the result of braindead mobile browsers (lack of ctrl-+ font zoom, click registration errors, left/right click distinction, click vs select, etc.) I don't know, though I suspect that's part of it.

Re: Ask HN: New attempt at mobile markup – keep or bail?

#219

Post by hazbo » Mon, Nov 02, 2015, 10:03 AM UTC

Much better on the iPhone 6. Don't bail.

Re: Ask HN: New attempt at mobile markup – keep or bail?

#220

Post by Sami_Lehtinen » Mon, Nov 02, 2015, 10:06 AM UTC

quicksilver03 wrote: post #205

It's better than the previous layout, however reading comments still requires horizontal scrolling on both Firefox and Opera on a Nexus 4 running Android Lollipop. If you could wrap comments to the right margin it would be perfect.

Agreed. I've abandoned so many sites which are extremely badly designed. Most common reason for this is lack of text wrapping. Nobody wants to use such sites.