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Will You Change Your Web Site For the iPhone?
An anonymous reader calls to our attention a blog post about the way the iPhone's multi-touch UI will strain the interface conventions of Web 2.0. This looming clash comes clearer as Apple releases more details of the iPhone's UI. Much has been made about the iPhone including Safari to provide a full web browsing experience. But this reader is wondering how compatible certain sites will be with the iPhone's input. From the post: "[Web 2.0-style interaction] makes somewhat heavy use of 'onmouse' events and cursor changes... along with CSS a:hover styles. The iPhone challenges those particular Web 2.0 conventions, though, because it is a device that not only adds support for another pointer, but at the same time eliminates them as interface objects... [T]he user doesn't get to express their attention with the iPhone... They only get to express their immediate action." This reader asks, "What other pitfalls lurk in the multi-touch web? Do any Slashdot readers plan to adjust their sites to ensure they work with the iPhone, and can you think of any similar issues that will crop up with such a different browsing experience?"
Websites will accommodate the iPhone if want to continue receiving traffic. If a site doesn't, it will be left in the dust by sites who do.
I design my sites for compatibility. Sure I might tweak a small feature here and there in special cases, but compatability remains key. If the site is not compatible, then I lose some viewership somewhere. Google in many ways is what we all strive for, since they manage to add cool features, but still manage to provide backwards compatibility.
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
This isn't about HTML standards, it's about changes to the way people will interact with websites.
By the way it's a bit nieve to say that as long as you stick to the standards you're fine. The standards all leave room for ambiguity, such as different browsers interpreting elements as defaulting to inline or block, and there are many standards that aren't fully implemented. It's pretty hard to make a Web 2.0 site that looks good, it easy and intuitive to use, complies to appropriate standards, and works on all browsers (even all the big browsers).
As someone said "The great thing about standards is that there are so many to choose from."
// MD_Update(&m,buf,j);
(Actually, I don't even use Safari that often, but when I find a site that tells me I can't use FF I'll fire up Safari and go through this process.)
Warning: Apple/Nintendo fangirl. Likes her electronics cute & cuddly. May be rabid.
Redesigning a web app that uses a significant amount of AJAX functionality is going to take hundreds of hours of developer time. Suppose the average AJAX developer costs $50/hr. For 600 hours of work, we would need to make MORE THAN $50x600 = $30,000 worth of developer time to redesign!
For the redesign to be worth it, we would need to pull more than $30,000 in AFTER TAX, AFTER RISK profit! Not revenue--profit.
Since web businesses have lower margins than "traditional" businesses, we are going to require many hundreds of thousands of potential iPhone-only dollars being spent at our site before we consider it.
Show me the study with killodollars (per site) of potential iPhone purchases, and have it coming from Gardner, or Forester, or whichever "reputable" BS analysis company--and we'll start to consider it.
A slashdotter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber.
google suggest would work just FINE on a T-9 key input system.
Snowden and Manning are heroes.
I have noticed that every demo of the phone browser uses the NY Times site, which very nicely puts its stories in narrow columns on its page. This makes me wonder how well pages will look that have more normal, wide segments of text, especially in portrait mode, and especially with fixed width pages. Will we be doing a lot of horizontal finger scrolling to read such pages?
Mike from www.myallo.com/blog
Actually in Australia there are blackberry plans with unlimited internet, with slightly more expensive calls and sms. I'm also predicting the same provider who offers this will probably get the iphone (more because of who owns it than anything else) when it finally makes its way to aus.
I always wondered where this setting was...
Interestingly enough, apple.com just got a redesign. One of the new things added was menus that require hovering to expand. See here for an example. The menus in question are on the right. I wonder what this means for the iPhone?
When I use javascript is always in a way that is not going to cripple the user if they have it turned off. For example, on Ye Olde Booke O' Seadogs the javascript is for a minor visual effect (hover your mouse over the jolly roger). In case you are wondering, those popout menus are pure CSS (with a hack to get it to work in IE, of course). In forms I've used javascript to set focus to the first field. In either case, disabled javascript is not a problem.
I use this simple rule: Use javascript to enhance the user experience, not to restrict it.
-- Will program for bandwidth
I have a client who insisted on it.
We have menus that only appear on hover (and close immediately if you move out of them). We have interactivity that's triggered by mouse over events. Said interactivity also causes unrelated elements (a login box) on the page to move somewhere else, and then move back later. We have significant content that appears only as tooltips, including explanations about what the (cryptic) icons will do when you click on them. I managed to pursuade the client not to have a video that starts playing when you move the mouse over an unrelated element on the page (the logo). Now it plays when you click on the logo, with absolutely no hint that the video even exists. Except for a tooltip that appears when you hover over the logo.
This is just on two pages. You don't even want to know about the atrocities I've had to commit elsewhere.
It's really a good argument for never, ever letting a client design any kind of UI for anything. Unfortunately, you sometimes get clients that think they know better than you do, and will not be told different.
So yes, there is demand for it. Just not from anyone who knows what they're doing. Hence MySpace.
The original version was most definitely not a clean job. I learned, though, and rewrote. Then rewrote it again. Then I had a blind co-worker critique the website and I implemented his recommendations (moving the menu div to the end of the document was his suggestion). I use my seadog website as a learning tool. The last round taught me how to divide up the content properly without any style at all, then apply a style sheet afterwards. I wish I still had the a copy as I original wrote it years ago. It was, no doubt, an example of doing everything the wrong way.
-- Will program for bandwidth
He didn't say take the hover out of websites. Just make it non-essential. For instance, if you have a menu, have them respond to both hover AND click.
If I target desktop devices, and hover is perfectly intuitive and usable for my target public, I'll use it as much as I want.
Just because there's some new fancy device which can't perform rollover and 0.5% of my visitors will use it, doesn't matter I should wreck the desktop users experience.
Instead, the proper approach would be proper fallback. If touchscreen devices report their input method, I could provide alternative means of accessing the information.
Usability experts seem to forget: yes sites should be accessible to everyone (mostly), but this doesn't need to be at the expense of probably 90% of the site visitors out there, which use desktop machines as of yet.
Almost every "Web 2.0" site I visit actually works less well than equivalent sites did years ago. [...] Forum software prevents me from replying in a new window, or heck, even gracefully switching between threads.
Remember, a lot of sites sucked pre-web-2.0 too. Many a time I've seen web 1.0 sites which break if you want to perform two searches for different strings at the same time - instead they store your search against your 'session ID' cookie and overwrite the first search when you do your second - then terminate your session for inactivity after about 30 seconds.
I think part of the appeal of 'web 2.0' was that, initially, it was being done only by competent designers - if it was web 2.0 you knew it would be okay with tabs and multiple windows. However, web 2.0 is now popular, so the crap designers who designed the crap web 1.0 sites are now designing crap web 2.0 sites, and so the cycle begins anew.
The phone is a thin client. Currently, only a few phones really qualify as being a robust thin client, but the smart phone is really the first widely accepted consumer thin client. And currently, the portion of the total cell phone market that is smart phones/thin clients is small. But this is going to change in a big way relatively quickly as the technology (both in the phones and in the networks) becomes ubiquitous.
I'm not sure of the numbers, but I believe that the number of phones surpasses the number of computers on the internet by a wide margin. So anyone who wants to target an audience bigger than the current one that uses desktops and laptops better get their rears in gear and begin to at least plan for this whole new market.
Apple and Google have been planning (and I think creating) a part of the network tailored to phone devices. Or more than just the phone devices. The release of Safari for Windows makes more sense if Google and Apple are about to open their own structured section of the net that will be putting more services on the browser while giving more capabilities to the user and developer. Safari gives them more control over the browser, but it's not exactly a return to the MS "embrace and extend" paradigm because (so far this Millennium) Apple and Google have been good about supporting open standards. Watch for Apple and Google to begin offering more tools to developers and businesses to create their own niches in this new environment.
When you start looking for a grand strategy, and I mean a really grand, audacious, breathtaking strategy, all these recent moves by both Apple and Google make a lot more sense. Apple has Safari (and the open source WebKit), the iPhone and iTunes (as well as the iLife suite on the OS X computer platform). Google has Google Labs, Calendar, mail, maps, marketplace, YouTube, Google Gears, Blogger, Picasa, the list goes on. Google has a huge latent infrastructure, if the stories of shipping containers are true. Apple has OS X server which now runs on intel hardware. And WebObjects. Could Google and Apple offer a virtual(ized) OS X server to businesses and individuals (hosted on Google's servers)? (This could also be a way to move more developers to Macs. Remember, Apple is all about selling hardware.)
All of this is just a wild guess, of course. There's a lot of clues, but it might all be coincidental.
It's not offtopic, dumbass. It's orthogonal.
"We can categorically state we have not released man-eating badgers into the area." - UK military spokesman, July 2007