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by andrew_ 1575 days ago
"Desktop Required"

I hate to doodie in the cereal, but... this is horrible UX. Warn the user, sure. But to block the user? I'm an Android user too; on tablets and phones. And both devices have landscape mode and a handy little checkbox in Brave/Chrome/etc that says "Desktop site."

You had my interest. But you lost it immediately after visiting.
1 comments
Athenodoros 1575 days ago
I definitely get the annoyance. The problem is, a mobile version of this is a very different thing, to the point that it's essentially a completely new app. Displaying a broken interface just to display something isn't helpful, even if I realise it makes it harder on the Show HN audience - I generally check HN on my phone too!

For what it's worth, I'm not looking at user-agents or anything: it's cutting off at the point where the display starts looking awful. If you zoom out enough (plausible on a tablet, less so on a phone), then it will display as intended.

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throw0101a 1575 days ago
> For what it's worth, I'm not looking at user-agents or anything: it's cutting off at the point where the display starts looking awful.

I went to the site on my 27" iMac and got the 'Desktop Required' message.

    Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_15_7) AppleWebKit/605.1.15 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/13.1.3 Safari/605.1.15
Resolution per Panopticlick [0] is 2560x1440x24.

[0] https://panopticlick.eff.org/

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Athenodoros 1575 days ago
It's looking at the width, so that some fixed-width elements don't run into each other and wreck the display - if you expand the window a little it should work as expected.

For what it's worth, I'm also running Firefox on MacOS, so I'd expect that to work given the right window size.

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iamben 1575 days ago
This looks lovely, well done! Regarding the cut off, why not use:

min-width: 1199px; overflow-x: scroll;

on the <body> element, and change the 100vw on the 'css-obv7rs' element to 100%? (And you may need some more tinkering, but you get the general idea.)

You can still put a mobile popup there ("this has been designed for a desktop"), but mobile users can pan around if they wish - degraded experience, but can use if they're desperate.

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Athenodoros 1575 days ago
That's a good idea - hard to believe that I didn't think of "min-width" considering the amount of other CSS that had to go into this, I wish I'd come up with it myself 12 hours ago...

I've just updated it, everyone should be getting an updated version now (clearly there's interest!). Thanks for the thought!

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quickthrower2 1575 days ago
I suggest:

Pop up warning: This will be hard to use on your screen size, continue?

If they click Yes then scale width to screen width (so no scrollbars)

If they click No take them to a description page with screenshots.

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vorejdajo 1575 days ago
I really think the design should be mobile first.

For other mobile users, you can use Firefox+ublock to zap the overlay(Addon>ublock>element zapper> need to zap the entire screen a few times(not just the dialog) until icons are individually zap-able >swipe right twice to exit zap mode). It is designed for desktop and there is some overlap in charts, but looks usable, on first look nonetheless.

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Aeolun 1575 days ago
Whether or not I can zoom out enough on my phone depends on your website. If you set the mobile screen width in your meta tag to 1280 or something, instead of ‘device-width’, then I’ll be able to use the site fine, as long as I’m willing to zoom and pan a bit.
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dananjaya86 1575 days ago
Fair enough. Maybe the mobile version could just showcase the features and such of the « Desktop » version.
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InitialBP 1575 days ago
It's not just an annoyance, it makes your site literally unusable on a mobile device. What if I urgently need to access some details of my account and don't have laptop access. If I check "load desktop site" then load the site and let me deal with the broken UI.

This is a ridiculous "feature" and the fact that you are defending something like this is a major turn off on ever using this product. What other hill would you be "willing to die on" for some seemingly miniscule yet exceptionally annoying feature.

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rapind 1575 days ago
It's open source, not a product. You're coming off as entitled, and he can die on whatever hill he wants to die on. You can fork it, and even submit a PR that would do something like click a button to continue anyways (on a smaller resolution).
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mushyhammer 1575 days ago
Maybe rude but not entitled. Nobody here cares about the product specifically, but it’s shooting itself in the foot and saying it’s a feature; that doesn’t sit well with many.

https://xkcd.com/386/

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monkey_monkey 1575 days ago
Incredibly entitled actually.

> Nobody here cares about the product specifically,

Citation needed.

> but it’s shooting itself in the foot and saying it’s a feature; that doesn’t sit well with many.

That's their problem, no one else's.

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InitialBP 1575 days ago
They don't mean literally nobody cares about the product, just that this conversation isn't necessarily related directly to the product but more about design in general. My original point is just that it's a design that locks people into using the app with a very specific medium and it locks people out of accessing it on another medium with no details about why.

That's a pattern that most people would agree they don't like and my comment is meant to be a criticism of that.

> That's their problem, no one else's.

It was posted in a public forum for discussion, is it really wrong to critique or praise the product in this setting?

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mushyhammer 1575 days ago
Nah you’re wrong on all counts. If a product makes bad decisions and then the author posts it on HN what do they expect exactly?
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Athenodoros 1575 days ago
I appreciate rapind's point so I won't comment along those lines, but I think it's worth explicitly saying that the UI doesn't work within a certain screen width: it would display nonsensically, and I'd rather display an explanation to someone new to it (and the link to the GitHub ReadMe, which hopefully helps a little) rather than complete garbage. I definitely don't consider this a "feature" - I think it's just the least bad option, given the lack of a proper mobile view. It's also the case that the idea of "urgent access" doesn't work so well without data syncing - I generally wouldn't expect people to copy the export file to their mobile manually, in which case this won't actually have the data from another device.

It's probably true that a summary of features or something would be more helpful for those coming across it anew. In this case though, this is mostly for my own benefit, and it's explicitly out of scope to make money off this: I'd prefer to spend time on additional features for users (ie. me!), rather than implementing something like a product showcase or proper mobile view. Hopefully it's useful/interesting enough when it can be viewed properly, that it's worth coming back to.

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InitialBP 1575 days ago
I can appreciate that solution. Admittedly I didn't know anything about the app since I don't have access to any device to view it.
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