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Experience the New Slashdot Mobile Site
After many months of effort, today we've brought the new mobile site out of beta. Featuring an interface optimized for touch devices, we think it's a huge improvement over the old mobile interface. You'll find comments easier to navigate, the most popular stories highlighted at the top of the page, and a surprisingly pleasant interface for navigating old polls. We've also spiffed up user profiles, resurrecting and improving the friend/foe system in the process. And that's not all: we're pleased to announce that you can login to Slashdot in general using various social media accounts, so if you use Facebook or Google+ there's no excuse not to enjoy the benefits of being a registered user, without the hassle of creating yet another account. Our weblog has a few more details. As always, if you encounter any issues let us know by mailing feedback@slashdot.org.
No thanks. It's pretty terrible. Can you also stop the chooser popup please? I want to use the classic site without constantly bombardment with a popup.
Every time I have tried the new mobile site my experience was not good.
I can't even scroll down easily and when I do it jumps into an article that I didn't select.
And it doesn't look good.
Maybe it's opera mobile's fault. Maybe you need to think on this some more.
The alternative to limited government is unlimited government.
"we're pleased to announce that you can login to Slashdot in general using various social media accounts,"
Why would I want to do this? On Slashdot, of all the sites on the internet, people value their privacy. Perhaps we don't want the data-miners at Facebook to monitor our slashdot usernames, cross-correlate post times against estimated work hours and calculate our estimated slacking-off coefficient to better target advertisments? I'm entirely happy to have lots of seperate accounts - it beats 'One Account to Rule them All.'
You guys did something wrong. In mobile Safari when I try to scroll down the page, it often detects my touch as a click and opens a story I don't want to read. This isn't a problem with the browser because it doesn't happen on any other mobile site. It seems to be a problem with the size of your click-able regions. I'm not sure what kind of beta testing was done, but it obviously wasn't enough.
And yet Slashdot is still incapable of handling nonASCII characters. Unicode is over 20 years old, guys.
Is there any reason why this was done as a separate site and not with a responsive design? Separate mobile sites are the old-fashioned way of doing things.
Bogtha Bogtha Bogtha
I jused the (new) mobile site for the first time on an iPhone 4S and had no issues whatsoever. Although I like the overall look and feel of the site I don't think a redesign was all that necessary. Sorry, devs :) But don't listen to the haters, they wouldn't like it no matter how it had turned out!
The new site is terrible. I really tried to use it for a couple weeks but had to go back (iPhone 4).
The new site is significantly slower first of all, which essentially kills it right off the bat. Speed should be your #1 feature. If you can't make it faster on mobile, don't bother with the redesign just tweak the existing layout.
It's also very glitchy as others have pointed out.
- Scrolling down often results in a click.
- After the page loads it jumps to the top again if you scroll down too fast
- transitions are glitchy and slow. Don't use them they don't add anything.
As for the announcement it is just full of fail.
>> We've built this new mobile interface optimized exclusively for your touch smartphones and tablets.
Why? The revolutionary part of the iPhone was that it could handle regular desktop sites and we could do away with WAP. Now we suddenly need a special site again? Just make sure that the layout scales well and you're done for mobile on a site that is purely about content. It's a different story if you're something like an online retailer where people want quick access to a few key functions (search, store locator, inventory, my account, etc).
>> Read comments and stories in a mobile-friendly view (no more squinting!)
Never had to squint on the old site. what's the problem?
>> Most popular stories shown right at the top
If I passed by a story earlier in the day what makes you think I want to see it again?
>> See beautiful achievement badges
I have no words. This is so stupid.
>> Show off your latest Gravatar
Yep, that's why I'm here.
>> We built this app using the latest technologies and frameworks such as Backbone, Zepto, Underscore, Hamstache, Jasmine, and Sass.
So you jumped on the bandwagon of stupidly named frameworks and used all of them because that's the thing to do these days. Surprise surprise, the end result is too heavy.
>> Since there are so many mobile devices and capabilities, we targeted webkit browsers, and Android versions above 2.3.
Sounds like browser support got worse then. Say it like it is.
>> We didn't start sketching the blueprints based on what we thought a mobile experience should be - we asked YOU.
Ah, that's the problem then. Design by committee and it shows.
I still use the Classic Discussion System (D1) and have my Threshold set to 2 (sometimes I reset to 3 or 4 as well). How can I have the mobile site honor that preference?
I'm using it right now (though posting from my desktop). Honestly, it's a lot faster than the old site, and navigation is more friendly to touch devices. Most importantly, comments load better than before. With that said, two things bother me about it:
1. The aesthetic is completely different from the desktop site, to the point that I wouldn't know it's Slashdot if it didn't say so at the top. This isn't a huge deal, but brand recognition is important.
2. The article summaries are shortened on the front page, and you have to tap the headline in order to load the whole thing along with contents. This breaks up the site's flow and makes it harder just to peruse articles. Take, for instance, the following excerpt:
Two economists at the St. Louis Federal Reserve have published a paper arguing that the American patent system...
The shortened summary offers nothing of value to me; the headline is actually much more informative. What I think needs to happen is either enable full, unshortened summaries, or write a summary of the summary for mobile devices. One of those options is silly, the other is reasonable.
If you can't convince them, convict them.
Posting from my phone. Works ok with android!
Your code is broken, then.
I'm confused why anyone - especially a technology-driven site like Slashdot - would create a "separate but equal" website just for mobile devices. It doesn't make sense these days. What's better is to build a responsive web design that scales down appropriately to the device. Then we don't have to visit a separate website with different branding to get to the same content on a mobile device.
In a responsive web design, you might still choose to detect a mobile browser, and then set the comment browsing level to "5" or maybe "4". That's arguably the only thing you'd need to do that requires knowing the type of the client device.
I know this doesn't help you, but I have none of those problems here. I'm running Mobile Safari/Chrome on an iPhone 5.
If you can't convince them, convict them.
Hi, I see a lot of you are having trouble with scrolls in the app being detected as clicks on stories. The team here has been trying to reproduce this, but failing. Here's a list of device / browser combinations I've tested:
The concern here is that there's some kind of common scrolling motion we aren't doing that's causing them to get interpreted as clicks. Are you holding your finger down longer? Pausing somewhere in the scroll? Is there horizontal motion in there? Is your scroll more of a flick? We've tried all those things and haven't seen it, so if some of you experiencing the problem would be kind enough to record a video of yourself making it happen (preferably on one of the above devices so we can reproduce it too), that would be great. There is no Slashdot Mobile QA team and our dev team is tiny.
Dude, Thanks for fixing this. Awesome effort!