IMO the idea of a mobile site is a good one but right now the font sizes are definitely too large for comfortable reading (esp in landscape orientation) where before they were way too small.
It seems to differ per page. Font size on the homepage and threads page are ridiculously large for me in landscape and ok in portrait. Font size on article comments is ok now - think they may have just tweaked it.
Edit: I take that back. Still unreadably large in portrait.
I second the request. Some things that makes it specially hard to read on iPhone:
1) It wastes a lot of horizontal space with white paddings on both sides. It may be a stylistic decision but takes valuable space that could be used to show more words in a line, leading to less lines
2) There is no right padding in the text lines, the text touches the right side of the inner container.
All in all it would be better to simply serve the Desktop version, maybe with an slightly increased font size so it is more readable.
And please don't make the same mistake many sites (Slashdot among them) make: trying to ram an ill thought bad designed new version on their faithful userbase just for the sake of change and novelty.
There are things to improve but the best way to determine it is to actually test it beforehand in the same environment it will be used in production. These changes were definitively not tested on iPhone's Safari and it shows.
I agree with the earlier comments you make (re spacing) but this change isn't happening purely for the sake of it. Folks have been asking for a mobile-friendly HN for a long time. Even though I'm not overjoyed with the version I saw today, I'm glad it's progressing.
>> All in all it would be better to simply serve the Desktop version, maybe with an slightly increased font size so it is more readable.
It is the desktop version with width adjusted.
>> ... new version on their faithful userbase just for the sake of change and novelty.
A mobile version of the site has been requested over and over again. So, it is definitely not for the sake of change and novelty.
While it may not be perfect, it is still a better read on my OPO than the earlier desktop version.
I usually specify my max-widths in em (empirically found the sweet spot at about 40-60em).
I do it because I think it maps better to text widths, which is what you ultimately want to prevent getting overly wide. It also handles different font sizes fine, making the site still accessible for people with big system-wide fonts.
I'd like to know, is there a downside to em or a reason to use px instead?
Hrm, that's an interesting concept I hadn't heard of before. I use px because that's what Chrome's responsive view uses, and because that's what viewport uses. I think 'big text' is generally going out of fashion in favour of proper zoom (though we should really get some numbers on that).
Are the comments rendered differently on the mobile site, or simply the homepage? For what it's worth, I'm still getting the desktop version of the comments on Firefox for Android[0].
It’s not a separate mobile site. It appears they’re adding a little responsiveness to the current design. And that’s a great idea for this kind of content.
I've been using http://hn.premii.com with great success. Super slick UI and runs great as a full screen Chrome app. Missing features are adding comments and upvotes, but it provides direct link to real HN comments page where you can do that instead. Their Android app is good too, but web client feels faster on my phone.
I just wanted to extend my appreciation for your work. It's by far the most used app on my iPhone; even occupying a spot on the main navbar.
Occasionally, I've noticed scrolling performance degrades when viewing comments (only for articles with many comments (>100). But force closing seems to resolve the issue. Otherwise, it's rock solid and beautifully functional.
It's an iPhone 5s. It only occurs after I've used the app for a while, then switching to an article with a large number of comments; scrolling can become laggy enough to render the app unusable (i.e. scrolling even a small amount takes over a second; lag seems to scale based on the comment count).
I'm guessing that if the DOM is parsed completely prior to rendering the comments, that shouldn't be a bottleneck--unless the parsing step is re-run as scrolling occurs to render comments dynamically.
Or given that a forced restart resolves the issue, perhaps it's a memory issue; i.e. if the JSON data is held in memory for each article viewed, and it continues to grow. This is certainly not a showstopper, and it's a fantastic app! But figured you'd appreciate the info.
+1 for a great app! It's a pity that it's a read-only view on Hacker News; you can't upvote stories, comment or submit anything. It puts you in lurking mode, alas.
And for the people thinking "How does that HackerWeb compare to the web app of Lim Chee Aun?": it's the same as http://cheeaun.github.io/hackerweb/.
OP means responsive design, not 2010-era separate mobile site. Front page is responsive (but still needs some fixes), comments pages are still super wide and need scrolling on each line.
The new frontpage disables Android's double-tap-and-drag-down zoom function, which is a gigantic regression for a site with tiny arrows and tiny links.
Are you here to read the menu? I spent a huge amount of hours reading comments on HN on mobile. In fact it is the only site that does not work on mobile that I don't refuse to visit. So while I don't understand why it took HN nearly 7 years to become slightly more mobile friendly, I will take any improvement to its readability.
I made this site for myself: http://www.serializer.io it's linear and takes content from r/programming and product hunt too but it's what I use for reading HN on my phone.
Edit: I guess that isn't so awful, but before you could see maybe 20% of the links and zoom in as needed. Now it's forcibly zoomed in so much you can only see one link and everything is squashed together.
Perhaps HN mods could have a poll on the different changes? I like big fonts; I like the bigger buttons; I'm less keen on the big margins but I don't particularly care about them.
77 comments
[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 145 ms ] threadEdit: I take that back. Still unreadably large in portrait.
1) It wastes a lot of horizontal space with white paddings on both sides. It may be a stylistic decision but takes valuable space that could be used to show more words in a line, leading to less lines 2) There is no right padding in the text lines, the text touches the right side of the inner container.
All in all it would be better to simply serve the Desktop version, maybe with an slightly increased font size so it is more readable.
And please don't make the same mistake many sites (Slashdot among them) make: trying to ram an ill thought bad designed new version on their faithful userbase just for the sake of change and novelty.
There are things to improve but the best way to determine it is to actually test it beforehand in the same environment it will be used in production. These changes were definitively not tested on iPhone's Safari and it shows.
I agree with the earlier comments you make (re spacing) but this change isn't happening purely for the sake of it. Folks have been asking for a mobile-friendly HN for a long time. Even though I'm not overjoyed with the version I saw today, I'm glad it's progressing.
It is the desktop version with width adjusted.
>> ... new version on their faithful userbase just for the sake of change and novelty. A mobile version of the site has been requested over and over again. So, it is definitely not for the sake of change and novelty.
While it may not be perfect, it is still a better read on my OPO than the earlier desktop version.
I do it because I think it maps better to text widths, which is what you ultimately want to prevent getting overly wide. It also handles different font sizes fine, making the site still accessible for people with big system-wide fonts.
I'd like to know, is there a downside to em or a reason to use px instead?
[0] User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Android; Mobile; rv36.0) Gecko/36.0 Firefox/36.0)
https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/hacker-news-yc/id713733435
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.premii.hn
Occasionally, I've noticed scrolling performance degrades when viewing comments (only for articles with many comments (>100). But force closing seems to resolve the issue. Otherwise, it's rock solid and beautifully functional.
It actually gets ycombinator page, parses DOM and generates JSON that I can use in my app. I think that might be the reason.
I'm guessing that if the DOM is parsed completely prior to rendering the comments, that shouldn't be a bottleneck--unless the parsing step is re-run as scrolling occurs to render comments dynamically.
Or given that a forced restart resolves the issue, perhaps it's a memory issue; i.e. if the JSON data is held in memory for each article viewed, and it continues to grow. This is certainly not a showstopper, and it's a fantastic app! But figured you'd appreciate the info.
And for the people thinking "How does that HackerWeb compare to the web app of Lim Chee Aun?": it's the same as http://cheeaun.github.io/hackerweb/.
I don't see any changes to this one to make it responsive either.
The menu doesn't fit the viewport and gets jammed if your username is more than a few characters long (or you have many karma points)
You still need to zoom to hit the up/down arrows, so not much is gained.
The menu even wraps on the iPad in landscape orientation: http://i.imgur.com/4ghJIufh.jpg
This is absolutely awful, how do I fix this?
Edit: I guess that isn't so awful, but before you could see maybe 20% of the links and zoom in as needed. Now it's forcibly zoomed in so much you can only see one link and everything is squashed together.