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

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

#51

Post by aendruk »

kwhitefoot wrote: post #34
rektide wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The issue here isn’t screen size.

  @media (pointer: coarse) {
   /* UI for fingers */
  }
I frequently use small viewports on my laptop and the pervasiveness of this misconception drives me mad. I try to fit more information on the screen and websites respond by spatially bloating as if designed to impede.

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

#52

Post by Quarrelsome »

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.

there's an interesting discussion to be had here around desktop vs mobile applications/UIs. Despite the promise of the existence of a unifying paradigm I find that often technology providers pick a preference or a preference bleeds through culture (more of our QAs use this device) or by pandering to the majority user (typically phones today). In our case I imagine the culture of traditionally accessing HN through an IDE-capable device results in the default being optimised for desktop use.

Spotify recently (well over a year ago now) merged its two clients with the mobile UI being the winner. Its interesting how as a desktop user you notice all these imperfections where you are now the loser. The search is top(ish) left instead of top right and various UI elements work now _so_ much better when you are able to swipe right (to easily navigate albums in a scrollable carousel) or swiftly swipe downwards (where on desktop one must find and drag a scrollbar).

I imagine we've all experienced some of the more irksome manifestations that have already transpired due to this schism such as: websites that tell you to download an application, a support call for a broken web function that results in "use the mobile app, it works there" and isn't fixed for weeks or months, or the horrific pop-ups that encourage the use of one or the other application as dev teams hint at their disinclination to continue minority support.

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

#53

Post by RGBCube »

dinosaurbone wrote: post #18
vdgio wrote: post #9

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...

I'm trying Harmonic right now and it is really lacking in features, sure, the Material You is great but I can't edit my comments or see how many votes a comment/post has (and there is no Inbox?!).

Love the browser concept in it though, never seen anything like it before.

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

#55

Post by CharlesW »

RGBCube wrote: post #38
CharlesW wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

Thank you — I knew it was free but didn't recall that I'd done the in-app "Premium" purchase. I'd still recommend it for anyone open to non-free (as in beer and/or freedom) apps.

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

#56

Post by mdlman »

klyrs wrote: post #33

I gladly suffer the ux for the information density. I occasionally favorite comments that I meant to flag, or vote the wrong way, but these actions are all undoable. I've never deleted a comment by mistake; there's a confirmation prompt for that.

Ha. Just tried to upvote your comment and opened your profile instead. Still appreciate the information density, but I can see how it’s a pain for people who are more active here than I.

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

#58

Post by jrflowers »

This is a site where I have seen people say that light grey text on a tan-grey(?) background is actually a good thing, which reminds me of two relevant bits of history.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norrmalmstorg_robbery

and

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leopold_von_Sacher-Masoch

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

#59

Post by lpapez »

redsaber wrote: post #47
sgbeal wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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

You don't even need Nightly since February, version 110 added it :)

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

#60

Post by lpapez »

sgbeal wrote: post #39
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.

In that case you can use Firefox Mobile and Tampermonkey addon to inject custom CSS.
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