Tag Archives: ui

Safari on iPad: Bleh

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However, power-users will quickly bump into a kink in their workflow. The lack of tabs. If you’re anything like me, when you visit a news site you skim the front page and open any interesting article in a new tab.

The iPad’s Dirty Secret

Thankfully, someone wrote something on this, enough to get my blood boiling long enough to write this post.

I bought the iPad, not for the “Apps”, but for the 10 hour browsing experience. I was much more interested in how touch would change webapps.

I dislike Safari on the Mac, but oh man I hate it largely because of how much potential it has, and I hate waiting for the improvements to occur. The iPad browsing experience is better than a desktop experience in some ways, but in most ways it’s still not.

The post above sums up a couple of issues I have, one being the lack of a quick way to get at the tabs. I hate the Expose tabs button’s location and existence.

At first glance this appears to be a fair compromise, but as time goes on, it has proven to be a grinding experience. Having to touch a button to view your open windows is the equivalent of having to right click on a computer, pull up a contextual menu, and then selecting the window that you would like to switch to.

Sure, it looks nice, flush with all the other buttons, but it not entirely useful.

The Wishlist

  • Silent removal of tabs: This exists on both the iPhone and the iPad, but I hadn’t run into it until I used the iPad. I never used Safari on the iPhone long enough to open up more than a few tabs within one session. But on the iPad? I live in Safari from time to time, grazing the Internetz. How amazingly annoying it was to find this out by experience…

  • No history? I can’t undo closing tabs. (Shakes iPad. Nope, that would be too magical.)

  • Open pages in the background: “Middle Click” equivalent gesture would be awesome.

  • Gesture for Expose view of all pages opened: A nice three or four finger fan out would be nice.

  • A Home Screen’d app should not add to the tab count.

    • This infuriates me to this day: I have Gmail as one of the Dock icons, and to go to my browser, I instinctively hit the Home button, then hit Safari, just to realize I was in Safari already. Oh, and that it just ate up one of my nine tabs.

    • Really, Home Screen’d apps should behave like a separate app, much like how Fluid does it. When I quit it, actually quit it like a normal app.

  • Scroll To Bottom: Yes, webpages get long. And two fingering it doesn’t really work for me. (Flicking alternate index fingers. It’s fast, but not pretty.)

  • Find. Freaking FIND.

I’m hoping for Opera Mini to come to the iPad soon (it wasn’t pretty on the iPhone… but maybe on the iPad?), but I would be much more interested if Chrome came to the iPad ever. Fennec would be nice, too.

While writing this post, iPad Safari has crashed for the first time. The page is greyed out and completely unresponsive to any touch on the page. I had to shut it down. For the first time.

I think I angered some human deity somewhere.

Notes About The iPod Shuffle During Lunch

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  • So when I first saw it on apple.com, I was amazed. Sweet, so we have touch/gesture controls now? NOPE. Instead, in-line controls.
  • The larger in-line controls… I wonder how much heavier they are.
  • And if you think that I would replace my headphones for those earbuds… you’re crazy. I’m sure a third-party solution is going to come, but I’m probably not going to like it.
  • The song info/playlist creation seems like it’s just enough: I love the simplicity of the iPod Shuffle. I’ll have to play with one to make up my mind.
  • $79, eh? Up from $49? I think I’m going to keep my used 1st Gen that a friend gifted to me, thanks. Sorry, economy, I already helped out with my Kindle.

Drilling down…

I was completely stoked when I saw the shuffle this morning. It looked like it was about half the size… and screw buttons, there was none (minus the 3-way toggle switch). Then I poked around a bit… what? More in-line controls on the earbuds? Freaking.

In my opinion, not showing the in-line controls in the same image as the Shuffle borders on false advertising.

I would have bought it immediately… if the UI was on the Shuffle itself. If I could slide my finger across the Shuffle. If I squeeze the Shuffle. If I could… shake the Shuffle.

Sorry, Apple

This fanboy isn’t all that amazed. Even VoiceOver, because it just seems like this should have happened when I bought my iPhone. I said it, from day one, that when there was an incoming call while I was listening to music, it should tell me who was calling.

Whatever, it’s not like I can change any of this. End rant.

Two Blog User Interface Issues

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Two. Two big issues that I see rarely, but often enough to write a post about it.

Previous/Next vs Older/Newer

NEVER EVER use “Previous”/”Next” when paginating. EVER.

The vast majority of the use case of the Internet: Googling information. What happens when you pop into a blog with hive page and is faced with two options: “Previous” and “Next”. Does “Next” correspond to chronologically later or earlier posts?

A better pair of words that should be used here are “Older” and “Newer”. Since blogs are almost always, by default, ordered chronologically, it makes a whole lot of sense to use this pair of words.

The place where I feel like there is actually a little leeway is the positioning of “Older” and “Next”. I’m on the side (pun? hardly) that puts “Older” on the left, as if the person reading is flipping through the book from page one to the last written page. In this case, the blog becomes a sort of a never-ending story.

But regardless, as long as it saves me the trouble of guessing, hitting the wrong one, swearing inside, hitting back, and then getting to the right page, I’ll be a happier person inside.

Not having pagination at all (Yes, Blogger, I’m looking at you)

What is wrong with you?

I really do need to test this out, but I seriously hope that Blogger doesn’t default to not having any sort of Previous/Next or Older/Newer links.

Let’s go through an example: http://buzz.blogger.com/

Go all the way to the bottom. Where are the pagination links? Who knows. Scroll back up. WOW The months are in backwards order than I expected (I mean, the posts that are just left of it go chronologically newer to older… why should the archives link follow that logic, too?).

The real fun starts when you want to go to the post made just before the oldest story on the main page. You have to remember what month when the story was posted (Feb 2008, while I write this), click on that month’s archive (grumble again how the month order is backwards), scroll down until you see that oldest post on the main page, then go down one more to start continuing the stream of blog posts.

Horrible.

This isn’t just for Blogger, though. I’m sure there are other blogs or other web applications that get this wrong. Please fix it.

Facebook Interface Update: Doesn't look good…

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At first, I thought my browser wasn’t fully rendering the page.

Then I realized… wow, they’re not kidding. This is an update.

Things are broken all over the place, especially the external Facebook applications.

Looks like they’re fixing things live… what’s the deal, Facebook… you’re dropping the ball.

EDIT: Looks like I should have taken a screenshot when I had the chance. Darn.