Slashdot Mobile: Now For Tablets As Well As Phones 123
Gaurav Kuchhal (Head of
Product, Slashdot) writes "Slashdot Mobile has finally made it out of the gates for tablets as well as phones. The Mobile site for phones launched some weeks back, but now you can take advantage of the changes we've made to read Slashdot easier to read through touch-screen devices on tablets as well as phones. That includes features we've folded in to the mobile version from the desktop-browser view of the site, so you can scan user profiles, sip from the Firehose, and keep up with notifications. See this blog post for more details, and keep the feedback coming. If you see a problem, please tell us about it!"
any chance of getting those in the reg. version? (Score:5, Insightful)
Some of those features seem pretty useful, especially notification of replies. Will they be added to the regular, non-mobile/tablet version of the website as well?
slow and clumsy (Score:5, Insightful)
I just tried on my htc desire with cianogene mod. It is much slower than the "original" version. I need to click a link to read the summary, which completely defeat the purpose of having a homepage. If I want to click the stories I want to read, i'd use an RSS feed reader not slashdot home page.
I won't use it.
tiny useless summaries (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:tiny useless summaries (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Tablet is HIGHER resolution than many laptops (Score:5, Insightful)
Exactly this. I don't EVER want to see a mobile version of any website on my tablet. And yet far too many websites refuse to give me the full site no matter what I click, ignoring the flag in my browser for "request desktop version" and not having anything of their own I can click to get there.
I have never seen a site that works better on my tablet in mobile version than full, but I have seen many sites refuse to let me even try the full version.
Additionally, my phone is now in the same range, I only want the desktop version on it too. again, not an option on many sites.
Re:Tablet is HIGHER resolution than many laptops (Score:3, Insightful)
The only major problems I'm aware of with the full version of Slashdot on mobile devices are the ratings slider (which could be trivially fixed by adding support for touch events or by providing an alternative set of up-down arrow controls for the two values that appear only on mobile devices via CSS trickery) and the fact that the minimum column width is too damn wide for viewing on a phone, so you end up scrolling back and forth (which again could be trivially fixed with CSS by adding the various -*-text-size-adjust CSS properties). Incidentally, that second part is a pain in the backside on high-resolution laptops, too, because of the way scaling works in most browsers.
It would, of course, make sense to load fewer items initially on mobile devices, for performance reasons, and there are probably a bunch of other minor behavioral tweaks, but none of those sorts of changes requires a separate site, or even anything approaching a separate site. In fact, if done correctly, those sorts of differences should be entirely transparent to the user up until the user hits the magic point where it can't scroll any further until after it loads more data.
In short, most of the time, the only reason for needing a mobile version of a website is that the CSS and JavaScript designers/coders made poor design decisions in the first place. Thus, in most cases, the enhancements that improve usability on the mobile site would also improve usability on the full site for folks with less-than-perfect vision or too-high-resolution screens, and the enhancements that remove functionality on the mobile site just piss people off. The exceptions are few and far between, and by that, I mean that I can't think of any, but I'm willing to accept that in theory, one or two might exist somewhere in the world.