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!"
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?
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.
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
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.
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!
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"And may your days be long upon the earth."
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.
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.
Android browsers normally have a settable user agent. But the setting depends on the device. On my Galaxy SII you go to about:useragent to access it. Google it up.
Non-Linux Penguins ?
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.
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?
Nerds don't need JavaScript because more often than not it's used for dumb, shiny and annoying features and ads which together just slow down the loading and viewing of the website.
Unfortunately, there's an increasing number of websites where basic features like search don't even work anymore without JavaScript. Graceful degradation seems to be a thing from the past.
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.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
But does it have support for UTF-8? :)
You don't get it, do you? Graceful degradation is part of the WWW's design. Using broken HTML and using JavaScript to add the functionality that was left out is ridiculous. It's like crippling functionality that used to work and then applying a weird patch.