Hacker News Reader

Comment by tednaleid | Hacker News Reader

I hadn't run across OnSwipe yet on my iPad, but I went to slate.com and saw it. Not impressed and definitely not the browsing experience I want on my iPad. At least they put a link on the bottom to go to the normal desktop version. That should be the default, and someone should have to choose to go to the "enhanced" version.

Or, just make a native app for your website. People that want that kind of experience will seek it out. Most people just want the web, not a simplified version of it.

It'd also be great if OnSwipe had a global "opt out" so that your browser would _never_ get the dumbed down version if you set some flag telling them to go away.

View on HN

> It'd also be great if OnSwipe had a global "opt out" so that your browser would _never_ get the dumbed down version if you set some flag telling them to go away.

This is the only humane option. There should be a way to escape this scourge.

I think OnSwipe is in for a lot of acrimony without this, especially from tech savvy users who might otherwise be promoters in some spaces. They'd have an easy defense of "if you don't like it, click this button and you're done". As it is, almost all stories are going to have 90% complaining about how much people dislike it (like this post).

That button is there and has always existed there.

For Wordpress, that might be a great idea of making it a global opt-out. I'm actually going to suggest that to the team there and on ours.

Thanks, I think that'll release a lot of the pressure that it sounds like you're getting from your other comments here. I think that trying new things is good, and I support that, but without an escape hatch some people are going to feel trapped.

We have a native app that is similar in that it makes extensive use of css transforms to animate content on the iPad (Zite, btw. I believe it is smoother and less crashy than the OnSwipe pages I have seen).

The biggest issue we've come across is limiting the total screen area (in pixels) of elements having "-webkit-transform: translate3d(0,0,0);" (this is the declaration you use to force the browser to use 3d acceleration to animate this element). Once it goes beyond a certain size, there isn't enough memory on the iPad to handle it and you get jerky animation and crashes.

This will help:

http://mir.aculo.us/2011/02/08/visualizing-webkits-hardware-...

For another thing, on WordPress.com the "View Standard Site" button hardly ever works for me.

I keep on trying it, hoping for the better, and cursing every time I'm forced to deal with the OnSwipe theme.

And on Mike Taylor's blog (http://reprog.wordpress.com/), the scroll used to be broken in OnSwipe (it kept scrolling me back to the top). Not sure if it's still the case, these days I just keep to my feed reader instead of visiting his site because I don't want to deal with OnSwipe.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com