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

31–40 of 103 posts

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

#31

Post by giancarlostoro »

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?

Not sure but I comment from both my phone and desktop.

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

#34

Post by kwhitefoot »

rektide wrote: post #21
brimstedt wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This means two actions (zoom+click) when one would be enough. Efficiency first!

Efficiency for whom? This works great for me. You'd make my experience awful by making things bigger, reducing information density.

Surely CSS can detect and cope with screen sizes.

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

#36

Post by sgbeal »

anonymouskimmer wrote: post #15
sgbeal wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

i'm currently living on a boat (since a month) and don't have that luxury. It's a phone or nothing. #TheAddictionIsReal

Nothing that can be done about it now, but for the future you might want to look into getting a smart phone keyboard. I presume that tabbing through the links would work even on a smart phone browser.

> Nothing that can be done about it now, but for the future you might want to look into getting a smart phone keyboard.

i've tried 3 of them over the past 10+ years and hated every one of them. The fact is that Android apps are simply not designed with physical keyboards in mind. They're designed for touchscreens, with keyboards being (if anything) third-rate citizens.

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

#37

Post by cratermoon »

Yep, it's tiny. On my iPad mini it's still enough of a pain that sometimes reach for the pencil. On my Android phone, I've noticed that sometimes the text size switches between tiny and not-quite-tiny when I refresh when I'm visiting new.

The accessibility on mobile devices leaves much to be desired.

Even on desktop the text is small, down to 7pt, which leads me to have Chrome show HN at 125%.

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

#38

Post by RGBCube »

CharlesW wrote: post #29
vdgio wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Any specific app you would recommend?

On iOS, HACK is my favorite of the several I've tried: https://apps.apple.com/ca/app/hack-for-hacker-news-reader/id... There's an Android version as well: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.pranapps.h...

The pain point for me with Hack is that the vibrations need the pro version to close (or literally anything in the settings).

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

#39

Post by sgbeal »

lpapez wrote: post #35

Why 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.

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

#40

Post by gumby »

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.

Out of curiosity, what parts of the UI do you screen out?
Post reply on HN