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Mobile Playbook by Google
- jsnell 14y agoI can't decide which part of that site is more hideous. The actively hostile user interface or the buzzword-laden "content".
- watty 14y agoCan you expand on the "actively hostile" comment? I thought it was a technically and aesthetically impressive implementation but I'm no designer.
- jsnell 14y agoOther people already posted different annoyances, but my issues with that page were: The animations are choppy to a distracting level on Chrome 22 running on a reasonably beefy desktop machine. The font size is unreadably small, and due to the three column layout it doesn't degrade well when zoomed. It'd be merely crappy if zooming required vertical scrolling. It's disabling all methods of vertical scrolling entirely that really make this design special. It replaces normal page navigation with a custom version, which is already bad. They then compound that error by mapping that custom navigation to the wrong keys. An example: maybe you'd like to check one of the footnotes they have. In a sensible design those would be hyperlinks, but for whatever reason that wasn't done. Ok, so I guess you need to go to the end of the document to see the footnotes. Wouldn't still be too bad, but they forgot to map the "End" key. So the only way to get to the end of the document is with the slider. And after doing that, how do you return to the original position? Well, I'd expect to be able to do Alt-Left for that. Except that this keybinding has been overridden too, and you need to instead click on the back button. Doing this kind of stuff might be just about acceptable in a web app. But this isn't an app. It's a document. And they've managed to break the only two things that matter for a document. I need to be able to read it, and I need to be able to navigate it.
- halefx 14y agoFYI, the animations look great to me in Chrome 22 on a year-old Dell laptop. The font size is smaller than I would have used, but I wouldn't describe it as "unreadable". There are some other big problems, though. They've obviously never heard of Unobtrusive Javascript[1]. Try opening the site without Javascript. And the HTML/CSS is garbage. What a joke. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unobtrusive_JavaScript https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unobtrusive_JavaScript
- jsnell 14y agoMy vision isn't very good. The text becomes comfortable to read at around 175%-200% zoom level. The default size is so far outside that range that I have no qualms about describing it as unreadable, even if it's not literally true and I could read it with sufficient concentration. Just to be clear, I don't think the problem is the tiny font size as such. It's the tiny size combined with gratuitously unscrollable and unscalable layout. It's a similar problem to many default themes for blogs disabling zooming on mobile browsers for no good reason. This got so bad that the Android browser sprouted an accessibility option to force zooming to always be enabled.
- redthrowaway 14y agoI'm using Chrome 22 on a 2 year-old MBP, and it works fine. The only complaint I have is that it breaks the back button, which Google is usually pretty good about. All told, it's a slick bit of CSS/JS that looks like a native PP slide deck, but with more functionality.
- cooldeal 14y agoIt looks, feels and reads like someone used a PowerPoint to HTML5 converter to make that site,and as others pointed out, seems to have issues supporting browsers.
- thalecress 14y agoWhen I try to read the text in the upper left, I keep getting distracted by animated numbers falling into the bottom right.
- recursive 14y ago"Please update your browser and come back to visit us."
- MaysonL 14y agoTry selecting some text. :)
- paganel 14y ago> the buzzword-laden "content". People who use "embrace" for more than 2 times in the first 4-5 slides should be sent to shoveling coal. The same goes for "value proposition".
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- yummies 14y agoA tip for anyone trying to view this on a smartphone: If I load the page on my Android phone with the stock gingerbread browser in portrait, I get what I can only guess is the desktop page. If I load it in landscape, I get the tablet page asking me to rotate to landscape. If you then rotate back to portrait and refresh, you may be lucky enough to get the mobile phone page. It may also be completely random. Ironic how difficult it is to load this content on a mobile device.
- magicalist 14y agoWeird. The phone version looks fine in the Android browser or Chrome here, but my phone is on ICS.
- recoiledsnake 14y agoGet this message on the latest version of Opera. >Greetings, Mobile Champion! >We noticed that you're using an unsupported browser. But have no fear, you can view themobileplaybook.com from the latest versions of Chrome, Internet Explorer, Firefox, or Safari. Please update your browser and come back to visit us. >Alternatively, we suggest checking out the site from your tablet if you have one or from your smartphone device. What galls me about these messages is the insinuation to the Opera users that their browser is somehow outdated and that we need to update or upgrade it. If you can't be assed to test on Opera at least change the message to asking to use a different browser, not to "upgrade" to one.
- prodigal_erik 14y agoOh, that's hilarious. https://www.google.com/search?q=themobileplaybook.com https://www.google.com/search?q=themobileplaybook.com shows that same "greeting" as a preview, and the cached version is completely blank (because there's no content in their markup, just scripted crap). It just goes to show that if such anti-semantic authoring were the norm, Google's search engine wouldn't even exist. Talk about pulling the ladder up behind you....
- kalleboo 14y agoWhat's even funnier is that it doesn't block the PS Vita browser like that, but then the actual page it loads is completely broken.
- jrajav 14y agoThe PS Vita browser is an oldish Webkit build with JS 1.7, half-implemented HTML5, and a handful of features disabled. Its user agent is something like "Mozilla/5.0 (Playstation Vita 1.50) AppleWebKit/531.22.8 (KHTML, like Gecko) Silk/3.2", and it probably advertises a feature set close to Chrome builds from about a year ago. I'm not too surprised that it doesn't support this gimmicky site, nor that it slipped through the feature/agent sniffing.
- senthil_rajasek 14y agoI don't use Opera. But based on your C&P of the message, I don't see the word "upgrade" used anywhere. The message reads please update your browser.
- dsuriano 14y agoInteresting that the tablet on the lower left is an iPad.
- unreal37 14y agoUh, no it isn't. I guess you buy into the belief that Apple has trademarked the black square with a screen tablet.
- namzo 14y agoActually, it's not just any tablet.. It's actually an iPad with safari browser open. Look at the image without the overlay (http://www.themobileplaybook.com/assets/images/cover_tablet.png http://www.themobileplaybook.com/assets/images/cover_tablet....)
- dmix 14y agoThe page transition is jarring in Chrome.
- simonster 14y agoThis would appear to infringe on RIM's Playbook trademark: http://tess2.uspto.gov/bin/showfield?f=doc&state=4001:25e2gp.2.27 http://tess2.uspto.gov/bin/showfield?f=doc&state=4001:25...
- unreal37 14y agoLOL. People have been using The ____ Playbook for years. Checking the USPTO web site, it shows the "Blackberry Playbook" and "Playbook" applications as being "status: suspended". Did they even manage to get the US trademark on that?
- hippich 14y agoAnd yet their presentation do not work on standard ICS browser :)) Getting "Greetings, Mobile Champion!...." message.
- notatoad 14y agoThe android browser is, in general, terrible. Google has partially redeemed themselves by shipping chrome as the default on JB, but right now android is the thing holding back the mobile web.
- untog 14y agoUnfortunately, Jelly Bean doesn't use Chrome for internal webviews. I'm playing around with a Phonegap wrapped HTML5 app and I'm blown away by how much better iOS Safari is. I though Google were supposed to be the web guys?
- HorizonXP 14y agoApparently, BlackBerry 10's browser for HTML5 based apps is going to blow both of them away.
- notatoad 14y agoI'm not sure how it's going to blow safari away. Safari is roughly equivalent to the current state of the art in desktop browsers (the only glaring omission I can think of is indexedDB). If BB10 goes beyond that, it's going to be unusable anyways because it's all going to be BB specific.
- orangethirty 14y agoIt won't load without JS enabled. Plus it is very buggy when it does load on up to date browsers. Google's JS has been getting buggy this past few months. Even Gmail, which was rock solid.
- aresant 14y agoGoog does a good job illustrating just how "different" mobile is. In our experience at ConversionVoodoo.com over the past couple of years a properly mobile optimized site for a direct-response style business is a difference of 2x, for traditional ecommerce it's 1.5x, for content it's as much as 3x! In other words make absolutely, positively sure that mobile optimization becomes an organizational priority if you're seeing more than 15% mobile traffic.
- error54 14y agoTheir mobile site tester[1] is doesn't do much. All is does is show one page of the website you entered in a mobile browser then it asks you if it showed up correctly. The report is pretty much some canned messages about how to improve a mobile website. Maybe I'm expecting too much but after the effort that they put into the presentation I hoped for a little bit more out the mobile site "tester." 1 - http://www.howtogomo.com/en/d/test-your-site/ http://www.howtogomo.com/en/d/test-your-site/
- error54 14y agoJust because I was curious, I looked up some mobile site testers. These do a much better job than the Google one: http://validator.w3.org/mobile/ http://validator.w3.org/mobile/ http://mobiready.com http://mobiready.com
- sidcool 14y agoAn excellent campaign from the champion Google. If I were an entrepreneur, I would suck it all up.
- phmagic 14y agohilarious.
- ahsteele 14y agoI first followed the link to this presentation on my iPad 3rd generation. It actually provided a pretty decent experience in that form factor. That said using this site in Google Chrome 22 does suck. Apparently the app designers don't yet understand responsive design / progressive enhancement. Yes it's hard, but I'd expect a presentation such as this to show how to do all the right things.
- tomasien 14y agoRead something really simple, informative, and beautiful created by Google. Go to Hacker News to read people bitch about how they'd have done it differently and better.
- prodigal_erik 14y agoIt's not simple, it's so absurdly overcomplicated and obsessed with one of many possible renderings that they've made the content inaccessible to most browsers we've ever had, apparently including the default browser on most Android phones (ICS didn't bundle Chrome). Their own search engine can't preview or cache it properly. They should regard widespread authoring like this as an existential threat to the web of openly interoperable hypertext and discourage it however they can.
- tomasien 14y ago"Inaccessible to most browsers we've ever had" does not move me. What about most browsers the likely readers are using now? That's what moves me.
- tomasien 14y agoThe information was displayed and curated extremely well and the UI was perfect to me. Like reading a book: nothing to mess around with, just turn the pages. On some browsers was it messy? That's web dev y'all. We always assume everything large companies publish will be perfect and cross-everything optimized, but being big doesn't mean the process for creating creative work is any different. Fine with the bitching, good to see the issues people have (best kind of education) but can't we all at least be happy with having all these great statistics in one highly credible place?
- nazri1 14y agoIt's beautiful but I can't stand the page transition animation. It's too slow to the point of annoying - I had to force my eyes to look away from the transition, away from the screen, as otherwise my eyes would try to focus on the blurry moving text which 1) hurts my brain to focus at, 2) disrupts my train of thought as it disturbs my focus (both mentally and physically). How I wish that tablets provides a way to do the same thing that page up/page down does with just a tap. I found swiping up/down for jumping to the next/previous page distracting for exactly the reason I stated above that I put a bookmarklet on my tablet browser to do the page up/page down when I single tap on a non-html-linkified entity.
- rabidsnail 14y agoIt doesn't block page transitions on all of the assets on the next page loading. I click the next button and get to wait 30 seconds while all the images show up.
- dendory 14y agoHonestly this is exactly the type of site design we should be moving away from. Fully scripted, so can't be search engine indexed or read without scripting, doesn't even work on many browsers, takes longer to load because of the way the pages are designed, multiple columns so hard to zoom in if the text is too small on your screen, breaks the back button, and so on. This is nothing but a text based presentation, why not keep the page simple, without any extras, and let me read it like a normal web page?
- xentronium 14y agoI opened the source, and whole text is there, so at least it can be indexed.
- CubicleNinjas 14y agoThey are targeting this at enterprise level folks who own these devices and encourage them to use them. This is the point, at least from my point of view: mobile is so great that it is different from traditional experiences. To make a traditional site only reinforces the "sameness" and doesn't encourage immediate action.
- TeMPOraL 14y agoOn the main page (viewed from PC) they advertise a nice-looking tablet version, yet on my ASUS tablet with Android 4.1 and Chrome as a browser, I get the crappy mobile version of the site. Interesting.
- hrktb 14y agoIt's nice and pretty. Now on an ipad3 it's slightly laggy. Transitions are slightly slow, and every interface element feels a bit "almost there" in term of responsivness. Then, downloading the pdf and viewing the same content in a native viewer is liberatingly smooth, fast, responsive, albeit without the animations and custom controls. This demo seems very apropriate to experience the gap between "html5 and JS everything" and "single purposed and optimised" presentation formats.
- mgcross 14y agoNice. From the browser detection script: if (isNexus7 == true) { istablet = false; }