Will You Change Your Web Site For the iPhone? 336
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?"
Conjecture about the iPhone? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Conjecture about the iPhone? (Score:5, Insightful)
In summary: Some web sites are badly designed, and if we try really hard we can tangentially relate this to the iPhone.
Re:Conjecture about the iPhone? (Score:5, Insightful)
I wouldn't say that some websites are necessarily badly designed, it's just that there was a specific target demographic that web developers have aimed for when they were designing their websites. It just happens this largely includes websites that were mostly designed to be surfed with a keyboard and mouse, rather than some alternate input device, like a touchscreen
As we see more fancy pants ajax techniques that are driven based on keyboard input, such as that neato google suggest thing that they put out a few years back - while that would be incredibly convenient to a user with a keyboard, it wouldn't necessarily have any impact on user performance when they are using a mobile phone, especially one without some kind if keyboard input. Things like that would be.. obsolete? (hah, for whatever reason obsolete doesn't sound too correct)
IMO a complaint like the author's sure sounds like he's grasping at straws. Sure he could develop a one-size-fits-all site that will be (ideally)wonderful for using with kb/m along with a touchscreen, but all interface designers are keenly aware of the fact that optimizing for one type if interface will ultimately be sacrificing the other. A simple alternative would be to give a url that will redirect the user to an iphone(or similar device) optimized site when the user heads towards there, and another for the standard computer user. Why wouldn't companies that are trying to appeal to both demographics want to do this in the first place? Doesn't make too much sense to me - plus it would prolly be cheaper in the long run instead of trying to retrofit their site to be 'iphone friendly.'
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yes it would. But would it necessarily be _as_ efficient as using a keyboard and mouse? It's always being about being on par with the user-end standard in terms of end efficiency. I use a blackberry at work, and while it's miles more efficient than using a mobile phone in order to write emails, a simple laptop with wifi (or wireless broadband) beats the pants out of it - in terms of work (not necessarily mobility). I mean things like writing emails, or spreadsheets, or a terminal to do some emergency damage
Bingo, correctomundo, affirmative (Score:3, Interesting)
I'm not sure of the numbers, but I believe that the number of phones surpasses the number o
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Hover does work with Wacom digitizers though, because they can sense the pen even when it's half a centimeter or so above the screen.
Re:Conjecture about the iPhone? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Conjecture about the iPhone? (Score:5, Insightful)
And "Ctrl+Touch = hoever" won't work at all. For instance, the touchscreens in my clinics don't have keyboards at all. Requiring multi-touch devices or devices that react on pressure won't work, either, as they are restrictively expensive for many purposes.
And it's not just iPhone users. No touchscreen mobile device supports hovering to my knowledge, including PDAs, smart phones, iPhone, etc. Not to mention that not all users are able to easily hover (keyboard, screen readers, search engines, people with movement disorders/shaking...).
All it requires is a few minutes of planning to ensure all hover operations have an alternative method to them and everyone can be happy.
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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
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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.
Does your site support 14" monitors, or do you require the new fancy 17" devices?
Re:Conjecture about the iPhone? (Score:4, Informative)
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Re:Conjecture about the iPhone? (Score:5, Insightful)
Things that need to pop-up information can have hover-text and when clicked, pop up a javascript floater just like the hover-text.
Really the problem is that almost everyone making a Web2.0 interface is an idiot, and ugly. What user ever asked to have to mouse over a heading, often all of them, to find a sub-option? What user wants non-native UI popping up when merely moved past? If you think this stuff is in demand, you must use MySpace.
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Re:Conjecture about the iPhone? (Score:5, Funny)
Limited "unlimited" service (Score:4, Insightful)
The big problem, of course, is that cellphone companies are greedy and not visionary; they've been making scads of money selling 10-cent text messaging to teenagers and selling old-pager-priced data services to businesses, and they don't want to let go of that mindset just because the technology's changed and the users want something different. And so far it's working for them:-)
To cut them some slack, though, there are two parts to their cost - the underlying internet, for which there's really no excuse not to allow unlimited bandwidth, but also the hardware and operational cost for their radio equipment and spectrum. The per-bit cost for the radio side has come way down with the newer technologies, probably by a couple of orders of magnitude, but the capacity still has limits, and if they offered actually unlimited unlimited service at a cheap price, they'd burn through it pretty fast and their service would start to degrade.
I don't know if they know what the real capacity is, or what the real market is, but we've seen with several other technologies what happens when you offer people "unlimited" service without being prepared for customers having a different idea of what they want to do with the service than you did. I don't mind too much if they aren't willing to go there - but they shouldn't be calling their service "unlimited" when it's actually "very limited".
Re:Conjecture about the iPhone? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Conjecture about the iPhone? (Score:5, Funny)
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I know of one company in Herndon, VA that plans to supply all 100+ of its employees with iPhones. People who belittle this product are not realizing what kind of impact we're going to see from it. And, to their credit, Apple's masterful marketing of the product (especially lately, releasing a few more tidbits every day as we lead up to the release) is a big reason for that.
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Of course people won't be changing their sites for the iPhone. Hovers and mouseovers generally aren't used to direct action, just to highlight the potential for it.
There are a *few* UI mechanisms that may take advantage of the mouseover, but not much.
And if your site has hover-over-drop-down menus, you're already an asshole. Nothing's more annoying than going from the system menu bar down to a link only to have it obscured by a menu you didn't click on.
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My personal website will be redesigned... (Score:5, Funny)
[!-- some CGI crap: if browser == iphone then [size=6]HANG THAT MOTHER FSCKER THE FSCK UP AND DRIVE!!!!![/size] -->
[/html]
Won't be a big deal (Score:5, Informative)
Simple.
For those who don't know, iPhone uses some tricks to detect "zones" or "areas" on web pages that will automatically zoom to fit when double clicked, like a photo with caption, or a story column on a newspaper web page.
This person is overcomplicating things, and overreacting ("pitfalls"? "adjust [...] sites to ensure they work with iPhone"?) No sites need to be changed to work well with the browser (or, at least as well as, and, from all of the demos and appearances, probably quite a bit better than, any other mobile browser). The user wants to zoom in, they zoom in. So what if it's not perfect. Sure, some sites can offer a better "experience" specifically for iPhone if they choose, but they don't need to.
That's why this thing having a real, full browser, able to be viewed in portrait or landscape, is great. It will be nice to have a full browser on a phone that doesn't suck, even if I can't double-click and perfectly zoom to fit on a photo and instead have to zoom on an area of interest manually. Some might say "but it's not consistent!" Well, what do you think it does when you double click? If a special "zone" isn't present, it will probably just zoom as close to where you clicked as it can. If it's not perfect, you can even drag the display around with your finger, or pinch/unpinch to zoom more/less as appropriate.
Disclaimer: yeah, we don't "know" any of this yet, but just look at the demos and how the phone works. And anyone can try it out next Friday. It will probably be a much better browsing experience than on nearly any, if not all, other mobile browsers.
Re:Won't be a big deal (Score:5, Insightful)
For example, if you have a FORM that submits when the mouse "leaves" the drop down box, please explain how that event will be triggered since there
This has nothing to do with rendering, it has to do with interaction.
Focus still shifts (Score:2)
I think you need to adjust the question - why would anyone do a form submit when the CURSOR leaves a form element? I click in a form element to type and move the mouse out of the way, all the time.
What I think you meant to ask is, what about a form element that submits when it looses focus - the answer there is, the keypad has a return key and I assume pressing it means you are done, which in turn would seem to be to tri
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Re:Won't be a big deal (Score:5, Funny)
Porn sites.
Everything on thoose sites seems to submit a form, they're worse than the DMV.
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I write to standards (Score:5, Insightful)
That's the whole damn point of standards. Write to them you don't have to worry if something will work. Use quirks and tricks, and you're going to be dealing with a tone of headaches every time something new comes out.
BTW, "Hey, Microsoft! Fuck you and your shitty standards-ignoring browser!"
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What this person is talking about is the zooming tricks iPhone uses to detect zones or areas on web pages.
But since the user can zoom and unzoom arbitrary amounts, and also drag the page around arbitrarily with their finger, and also have the option of viewing the page in either landscape or portrait, this is just a case of one person overreacting, and doing a poor job of explaining what they're talking about.
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I'm not really concerned about the multi-touch - I don't think it'll be used in websites for anythin
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If the :hover class works based on where your finger is (or if it has a proximity detecting screen...!), so much the better.
It will not. This was pointed out by Steve Jobs in the WWDC keynote address.
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I haven't tried Safari under windows, but it runs fine on my Macbook. Probably just as well as Konqueror does under Linux (as it is based on the Konqueror rendering engine). I'm not up on all m
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Apparently there are Windows-specific bugs in Version 3.0 (beta) of Safari, so that pretty much disproves the idea that every implementation of Safari "is the same actual application" just because it uses the same name. A conservative point of view is that Safari is Apple's browser brand that is implemented slightly differently on each platform.
Re:I write to standards (Score:5, Interesting)
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."
Re:I write to standards (Score:5, Insightful)
If I use the web without a mouse, I can't initiate a mouseover event (assuming I'm not controlling a mouse cursor with the keyboard or something.) What standard am I violating?
There are two golden rules in web design: code to the standards and degrade gracefully. Both are important.
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Nope.
The great thing about standards, is that there are so many to choose from.
Beef
I write to what works (Score:2)
And I serve all my pages in a binary version of Morse code. If it doesn't work on the iPhone, it's not my problem.
What really confuses me is that there are ancient interfaces in the browser that are universally implemented, but never standardized. Meanwhile there are conflicting modern interface "standards" where the vast majority of people are running the evil "standard" that is to be shunned.
I
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What are ya, son, a Communist? ;-)
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I did just learn, though, that user agents (specifically the browser on blackberries) dont't do javascript. Who knew? Not me! It's not like I have one. So, while your pages might work just fine, if you have javascript (you do use AJAX, right?) it won't work. Bummer.
Like you, I am not as concerned how m
Re:I write to standards (Score:4, Interesting)
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 [bookoseadogs.org] 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.
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Agreed about use of javascript, to a point. Javascript is a nicety for validation, but of course you cannot trust it for critical validation. The thing that makes me just LOVE javascript is AJAX. I guess, working on an intr
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do *any* websites work on cell phones? (Score:3, Insightful)
i have downloaded "mobile" versions of gmail and google maps for my cell phone.
i just don't see that this is a big deal. besides, to me, the most attractive thing about the iphone is that it will perfectly sync with my mac -- address book, calendar, itunes, iphoto, etc.
mr c
Comment removed (Score:3, Insightful)
Hang on... (Score:2)
I may as well be designing for the DS... though speaking of the DS, wouldn't it have similar UI issues too?
Yeah, right (Score:5, Funny)
Keep it simple (Score:3, Interesting)
Not for iPhone specifcally (Score:5, Insightful)
Realistically, the normal non-mobile versions of websites are not going to work well on mobile devices, period, because of the small size of their screens and limit forms of input. And the iPhones certainly not going to change that, especially given its lack of true 3G which will make the full versions of most sites horribly slow as well.
Mobile browsing is nothing new - Most major sites that people would frequently access from a mobile device (ie webmail, news/homepages, search engines, etc) already have mobile versions of their sites that work reasonably well. With its pretty high price tag, lack of 3G, and very few third party apps (compared with BB, Windows Mobile, and Palm), I highly doubt that it will spark a "revolution" in web browsing. It may look very slick, but technologically speaking it probably won't be earth-shattering.
Built for Suckcess (Score:3, Insightful)
Then your site will suck on the iPhone compared to other sites. Why do that? Code as normal, make sure it works in safari, and make sure that even without a lot of mouse events the page still works OK (which you do anyway for those of us who like Javascript off by default, right?).
Shrink it down for other mobile phones, fine, but don't degrade my iPhone browsing just because you lump all mobile browsing to
Heard some of that before haven't we? (Score:4, Insightful)
Never has been input-device-specific (Score:2, Insightful)
Applications should respond to requests for action. How that action is performed, on some level, should
maybe if your site sucks... (Score:2, Insightful)
I've been testing with Safari... (Score:2)
I have found that Safari is quite compatible, most stuff works great if it was designed to strict standards. I have had some issues with listbox controls, so I wrote my own which look nic
content (Score:5, Insightful)
This image of webmasters throwing their hands up in the air and running around "We've lost another random passer-by.. noooo!" makes me chuckle. It all comes back to content. If your site has something worthwhile, people will make the effort.
Re:content (Score:4, Insightful)
Smartphones aren't exactly new (Score:3, Insightful)
Mostly it's things like tables and oddball CSS that bugger up smartphones. I can't say that I've ever experienced an "OMG NO MOUSEOVER" moment with my Crackberry.
Shit, Google even has several of its apps specifically released for smartphones, because they realize the AJAX stuff only half works right. Google Maps + Blackberry == invaluable when travelling in another city.
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Apples Site (Score:2)
Look at the trailers page. Pointlessly large and confusing to anyone used to a normal webpage.
Segway (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Segway (Score:4, Funny)
No. (Score:2)
Hype, hype, hype (Score:5, Insightful)
Sorry, but this is just getting to me. It's like there is a certain percentage of the population (and press), that is willing to give Apple a wink and a nod, and pretend that every last freaking thing the iPhone encompasses was just invented by Apple. Wee! It can browse the web (never mind that its display has 1/2 the pixels of a VGA Pocket PC). Wow! It can play MP3s (boy the music sounds extra special somehow on an iPhone). Neat! It has a soft input panel (lets ignore that there is no tactile feedback, thus typing requires visual stimuli to make sure you're pressing the right areas). Yeehaw! What battery life (even though you can't swap batteries, preventing the user from purchasing as many extra batteries as necessary to meet their usage needs).
For every true innovation there's three caveats. Maybe once this thing actually hits the market we can get at least a small dose of reality.
Dan East
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You had a break, but you wasted it commenting (at length) on a story that you seem to be actively disinterested in.
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It Is Time (Score:2)
Please pick up your official "Curmudgeon" hat down at the Elks Lodge. Thanks!
Re:Hype, hype, hype (Score:5, Funny)
Can someone please tell me how Apple pulls this off?
Magic runes, chutzpah and Steve Jobs' third testicle.
I expect that ... (Score:3, Insightful)
And if a site is well-designed, separating the "view" from the "data" using CSS or javascript or whatever, it should not require a massive overhaul of a site to provide an iPhone-friendly view. And it certainly shouldn't require any non-standard web page syntax to do so.
Anyone know what the user-agent string is for the iPhone?
No (Score:3, Insightful)
I don't test my site except with the browsers I use anyway. If your browser is broken, not my problem. Also, my UI is simple. I dislike using JS, and try to minimize it.
As a sidenote, I believe the iPhone will be an overhyped failure (not in sales, but as a product). My coworker disagrees with me. Other than shorting Apple stock, with the expectation that I can buy it back two quarters after the iPhone's arrival (after a long enough period of time that inital sales, which I expect to be extreme, will die down), is there any way you can recommend for the two of us to use for us to put money on it?
Buy a "put" (Score:2)
iPhone is not the only mobile device (Score:3, Insightful)
Why do the majority of iPhone related articles on slashdot ignore the fact that it's nothing new?
Sure there is the zoom stuff, that's one difference, but that has nothing to do with me adapting my website for the iPhone and everything to do with the iPhone adapting itself to be able to view the full-version of websites instead of mobile-versions.
I'd change it (Score:2, Informative)
Well? (Score:3, Insightful)
I am already working on it (Score:2)
Umm... (Score:2)
It's called backwards compatibility. When you have something that is better (at least you say/think it is), you emulate the functionality of the existing, older standards.
Tablet PCs have done this... forever. The mouse cursor moves to and clicks wherever the user touched. The browser will probably do something like this, and as for handling multitouch... use it for zooming or whatever, but for normal cursor operations, ignore it! Problem solved.
With onmouseover/out stuff, they would be triggered imm
Why should we... (Score:2)
Didn't the commercials say it is the full Internet or something in that regards? What is up with this article?
Heck no (Score:4, Insightful)
This reminds me of people complaining about the quality of stuff on the itunes music store. So before videos were not at full dvd resolution. Guess what, the ipod doesn't support that resolution. So what if the songs are at 128k, the majority of people are listening on earbuds anyways, not on a full stereo system.
The point is, the trouble of rewrittign a site for the iPhone is just not worth it unless you are something like CNN or BBC or Google. You are not going to be browsing your church website, pepsi.com or a porn site on your iPhone, are you? (Okay, SOMEONE will, but not the majority of people).
When I was even running highly popular sites, in the days when webtv was popular, with the hundreds of hits I got a day, I may get a hit once every two weeks from a webtv. I spent hours pulling out my hair trying to get it all looking pretty for them, and in the end, the tradeoff just wasn't there. It worked, it just was not optimized before.
I mean, I am sorry, but unless you are running one of the top 20 internet sites, there is just no reason to optimize your site for the iPhone. Its pointless, its a waste of time, and people are not going to want to view your myspace profile from a mobile device, you just are not that popular.
Sure (Score:2)
Apple thinks I shouldn't, so why should I? (Score:5, Insightful)
If Apple thinks their browser is good/robust enough to browse the "real" web, then making my site look fine in Safari (which any web developer should be doing anyway) is all I should have to do.
Care to argue otherwise?
tags: no, hellno, fuckno. (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Shades of WebTV (Score:2)
I know a few folks who spent a fair amount of time tweaking their sites to make them work with WebTV, back in the day. According to some, WebTV was going to someday comprise an appreciable portion of Web viewing, so we were all supposed to craft all sorts of tricky solutions. Of course, WebTV never panned out.
My point is not that we shouldn't be cognizant of how a new device will display websites. But until your logfiles start showing some actual traffic from said device, it's not worth losing sleep over.
Now that you mention it (Score:2)
"Web 2.0" "Web 1.0" (Score:5, Insightful)
You know what the worst is, though? The most useless example of sheep-like trend following?
Go to eBay.com's front page, and mouseover one of the menus at the top. The damn server PERFORMS AN AJAX QUERY to eBay to get the four items in the menu. They should know better.
Please, just wake me up when the "web 2.0" fad is over.
Touchscreens are blunt instruments (Score:2)
Assuming it turns out to be worthwhile to make web pages that work well on Apple's multi-touch screens, there are two big issues. On the one hand, multiple touches are possible. On the other, fingers are blunt instruments and the user can't see through them. Targets have to be big. Look at any touch screen in retail. The buttons there are huge.
Rearranging playlists and changing channels should work fine, but anything that needs real input will be tough.
Target Demographic... (Score:2)
Given relatively few sites take their time to optimize for Safari on the Mac (which has 5% of the desktop market), what are the odds they'd optimize for Safari on an iPhone that has 1% of it?
Even Opera has 1.5% of the web market and, other than its robustness saving it, most web developers don't even bother to check if sites work in it.
Next question: What percentage of users are partially sighted? That dwarfs the 1% of the iPhone. What percentage of sites
"Web 2.0 interface conventions" (Score:4, Insightful)
OMG, support teh iPhone!!! (Score:4, Insightful)
Some stats based upon web client hype as of late:
1. iPhone: 5 million publications of iPhone taking over the world
2. Safari for Win: 3.2 million benchmarks proving Safari is teh greatest Windows browser ever.
3. Firefox: 2.1 million "take the web back" propaganda blog posts.
612. IE6: 1 positive article and 40 million "I hate IE" quotes from IRC Efnet.
And now, let's see the web client stats:
1. IE6: 448 million people
2. IE7: 128 million people
3. Firefox: 96 million people
821. iPhone: 11 people (including Steve Jobs)
Puts things in perspective.
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I (and many other people) use Safari as my primary browser, and almost never encounter any site that has any issues with Safari.
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(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.)
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Re:Websites, if they want to get traffic, will do (Score:2)
To which I simply say "Bullshite". The iPhone is just another problem in search of a solution it needs in order to be a solution in need of a problem.
Mobile web-surfing is, and will for the foreseeable future remain, crap. A pointless waste of time, dedicated solely to those who value being gadget laden over being effective. The iPhone will not
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Simon
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