Slashdot Mirror
Slashdot Mobile: Now For Tablets As Well As Phones
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!"
FP> Glad to see you's guys finally going mobile. Keep up the good work!
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?
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Serious question. Why did you create a separate web site rather than just use a different stylesheet with the "handheld" css media type?
you get past the "your device\browser is not supported" page
They were in negotiations about being acquired by Dice.
Nice design.. but does not work wihout javascript enabled.
My tablet has higher resolution than many laptops sold today, so I'm not interested in a different layout.
Regardless, I'd like to choose whether the mobile or normal layout is shown.
Sincerely. Even though I still use this system that I banged together a few years ago (more info here), the new mbeta page looks really nice.
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
How come there is no tiles? Give us tiles!
lucm, indeed.
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.
I know you guys hate Windows, but come on. The emulator app is free, this one isn't hard.
For those who seek perfection there can be no rest on this side of the grave.
give us the full summary of every article on the index page, or this is completely useless. if i have to click on and then wait for the loading of every individual story just to get summaries, there's no way i'll use the mobile site.
Specialization is for insects. -Heinlein
Just trying out the new mobile site and am loving the experience
The 'load more articles' is hideously slow on phones, especially when low bandwidth is available. Using the web standard back button, the 'more articles' disappear. Also, a LOT of mobile devices like to de-cache tabs when they haven't been touched in as little as half a minute depending on other activity. This also wrecks the 'more articles'. All I ask for is a way to load each clump of articles on its own page, instead of cramming them all onto one page and making me click a button...wait...click a button...wait...wonder if my phone is even loading it...
Hugely annoying ad "The HTML 5 Center" across the top looks more like a header or a mistake in the template than an ad...
I like the new mobile site it is very clean, but the biggest problem I have is you can't select your comment score threshold. I like to browse from 2 to 4 depending on the number of comments I get back, but the "Top Rated" link doesn't give me as good of control over what I want to see at the time and quite often I'll get 1's in there.
My only other issue is that it is *very* touchy and sometimes trying to grab the screen to scroll gets interpreted as a tap and it loads up the article.
Other than that, great job guys!
------
"And may your days be long upon the earth."
Read a story you'd like to contribute your voice to? I hope you're logged in, because if you're logged out you may not be able to find the story again once you log in.
I think you just described Reddit, and perhaps most other forum sites too...
Fix commenting in the mobile environment before releasing new stuff. If you have to edit something it's unadulterated pure frustration.
The beta looks decent but on the nexus 10 there is a noticeable lag when scrolling which is not there on the full site. I would think that a mobile optimized site would be more responsive and not less.
"I myself am made entirely of flaws, stitched together with good intentions."
Basically non-functional on either my phone or the Android Tablet I am current developing on:
Android 2.3 & 4.0 w/ current Opera for Android.
This is a rough crowd--would be nice if a "Mobile Site" would work with a pair of pretty vanilla "Mobile Devices".
Maybe Slashdot needs a QA department?
That if I load Slashdot on a phone / tablet that it'll helpfully ask if I want to download the app instead. Every single time, or even at random. I wonder if sites know how fucking annoying it is to be asked this question repeatedly.
Ah well, Slashdot has never been known for being state-of-the-art.
God, I wish it would stop trying. Plain old HTML works on every device.
Does it load a different interface dependent on device! Or doesn't look the same across all? If so, it's a very very iOS looking design, at leas the top menus. Just strange for a site that Rae's against Apple so much...
- "Scientia non habet inimicum nisp ignorantem"
Opera mini doesn't work. Standard browser is slow on reasonably new phone (dual core 1.2Ghz with Android 4). But with hours of tweaking, I am sure I can find a solution to read text somewhat comfortably on a screen (yes LCD, not CRT, modern stuff). A site for nerds with time on their hands. Feeling young again... I am underwhelmed.
Already got the email from Slashdot ... and getting email from Slashdot is kinda new, especially since it's coming from a 3rd party (elabs10.com).
And I'm not sure I especially like a Slashdot which emails me such things through a mass-mail host. Especially one which has apparently been blacklisted as a spammer. I'm pretty sure I never told Slashdot they could do that.
Maybe "Dice Holdings" are becoming asshats?
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Why would you post this today? Sometime last week you updated the mobile code and broke scrolling. Seriously. On the Android 4 browser you can now basically no longer properly scroll the mbeta.slashdot.org site. It's like it's eating touch and/or scroll events for lunch. You clearly tried to fix this, because you can now fling again, but if you are in contact with the touchscreen, the site stops scrolling within a second or so. This problem was not present a week or two ago. Very, horrifically annoying. Showstopper bug. Go fix it, do not pass go, do not collect 200 dollars.
The other annoying thing - the horrifically slow and error prone paging between stories. And stop trying to intercept swipe events on comments - I'm not trying to switch stories, I'm generally trying to click something to expand/reply/etc. But it's even worse because the story switching is so horribly slow, and has no "loading..." or other user feedback.
Basically, go work on this for another month or so then let us know when it's fixed.
Going to mbeta.slashdot.org on my Nokia N900 results in a blank page. The regular site works well when browsing with Midori and Firefox. What am I missing here?
Time is what keeps everything from happening all at once.
nothing different on iPad compared to the regular site... except, the OBNOXIOUS pop-up banner ad thing at the bottom.
Seriously? Thanks for that.
Beware of the Leopard.
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?
It's already there and has been for quite a long time. Go turn it on in your settings.
So why not just log in under a new tab? Your browser session will then transfer over to the other tab. Or am I missing something?
Please add blackberry playbook to the devices that are supported. It's the same webkit browser everyone else is using (though with better compliance scores in many cases), and it works just fine when I click 'let me in anyway'.
Parent is spam, copying comments and adding a link: original comment
There really is no need to replace the perfectly functional "back" button on mobile Safari with your own version that takes up 20% of the screen.
The mobile site has a dramatically different style than the Slashdot website. It doesn't have the same color scheme, fonts, layout, or any stylistic element in common that I can find. I realize this is a beta and this is Slashdot, but I thought it was pretty standard to start working on the look of a website before beta stage?
In most respects the mobile interface is great, but one thing kills it for me. I simply cannot scroll on the front (story list) page. Every attempt to scroll gets interpreted as a click. Very annoying, almost unusable. I'm using a Samsung S3, Android 4.1.1.
I haven no trouble with the main site on my tablet, so you must be pandering to those people who bought sub standard tablets with low resolution screens who think that all tablets are the 'same'. /sarcasm
There was an unknown error in the submission.
Everything I ever needed to do can be done on a tablet!
Good leaders run toward problems, bad leaders hide from them.
The mobile site is god awful slow and laggy where by a dedicated app would probably solve this much like XDA's portal application to access their forums. /. could have or should have had one by now....
Beware the Lollipop of Mediocrity, Lick it once and you suck forever.
Great. Another web site dumbing down the internet.
Please make it optional. My iOS client can view regular web site just fine thank you. And I can zoom into it as required.
Geez.
Might as well go back to the WAP days...
Posting from Nexus 7 and here is what it looks like in portrait mode. Basically more than half the screen stays empty. What tablets did you test it with, besides iPad?
Screenshot
What's under yellowstone?
Slashdot is by far the most difficult website to read and comment on.
You need to go look at the Gawker Media sites. Those are designed by retorted baboons with a penchant for pain.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
But does it have support for UTF-8? :)
No go on my Nokia N900.
I am still on the old commenting style, with none of the JS crap, and /. was a pain on mobile till now. This is a fantastic effort guys. Really love the UI and as a product manager, impressed by the placement of ads. Really good.
http://monkeynesianeconomics.blogspot.com/
First I used the normal slashdot from my PC.
Then I wanted to be cool and modern and shit like everyone else so I upgraded my AMPS brick phone to one of those new models with a retardedly high resolution...
Now whenever I go to a site that dares give me a paired down mobile version automatically without asking it makes me sad..sometimes I even want to frown.
Occasionally it is nice to just sit fads out and wait for technology to go full circle instead of wasting time caring about useless short term problems like WAP and HTML browsers with ridiculously underpowered hardware and low res displays.
At least I have solace in the fact when it comes to necessary long term technology changes slashdot has got my back with its fully IPv4 enabled website.
On my Nexus 7 tablet, I *never* want the mobile version of a Web site. Best solution to this is to use Firefox and the Phony extension (set to be the desktop Firefox agent string) and your surfing will be exactly like your desktop browsing is.
I browse topics through Google reader on my phone and on my pc. Is there a way for the site to detect the browser and launch the right version? I dint want to have to have two feeds for the same site.
Ascii artist &
Now I can read ./ on the toilet...
It doesn't detect my Palm Pre or Touchpad properly. Those both use the same webkit rendering engine as everyone else. Looks great, though! Please add WebOS to your detection.
Hey there. The mobile flow is designed so that anything you interact with that requires sign in - will return you back to you where you started. Are you seeing an area where you're performing a signed-in action, and after you sign in, you're not being returned to the starting point?