Joe Hewitt’s First Post-Facebook Web Gift: Inertial Scrolling For All

http://techcrunch.com/2011/06/20/joe-hewitt-scrollability/

by sahillavingia • 15 years ago

45 25 15 years ago

techcrunch.com

drivebyacct2• 15 years ago

This has already been covered here and only works in iOS whereas other solutions have worked on more platforms...

cefstat• 15 years ago

Would it be possible to mention some of these other solutions?

masklinn3• 15 years ago

> only works in iOS

For now, he's still planning on extending it to Android when he's done with iOS.

> whereas other solutions have worked on more platforms...

What other solutions?

joehewitt3• 15 years ago

It will work on Android as soon as I get some Android devices to test with. It should currently "work" on Android, but probably not well.

snitko• 15 years ago

I tried it on a Honeycomb tablet, works pretty smoothly, but "not for ios5" notification shows up for some reason.

hpaavola2• 15 years ago

I don't get this. From http://joehewitt.github.com/scrollability/: "Native scrolling for mobile web apps... or at least the closest thing to it!" How does my Android phone lack "native scrolling" and what does that mean?

ZeroGravitas• 15 years ago

On iPhone, scrolling in an app, and a web page/app, are different in terms of speed and inertia. There's been several attempts to emulate the "native" scroll response via javascript so that web apps can more seamlessly replace alternatives.

nupark22• 15 years ago

> ... so that web apps can more seamlessly replace alternatives.

One native feature down (at least until Apple evolves it again), countless pile of more features to go. This is a losing battle.

masklinn3• 15 years ago

1. It's for web applications, with all that implies: the ability to scroll only sections on the screen (not the whole page) while still having the right physics, lazy loading, snapping (the horizontal demo implements "snapping" transitions similar to iOS's springboard)

2. It implements iOS's UITableView physics, which are different (smoother) than Safari's native

hpaavola2• 15 years ago

So by "Native scrolling for mobile web apps" he means better scrolling of iOS Safari in general and especially for elements that have overflow:scroll styling.

kyleslattery• 15 years ago

Joe's photoblog, mentioned in the article as an example of inertial scrolling: http://uponahill.com.

lobster_johnson3• 15 years ago

Not sure why he calls it inertial scrolling. There's no "inertia" here. It's just pinning the background image as long as you are scrolling the text.

Which, incidentally, is a pretty stupid idea. Look at his photoblog -- to scroll past a photo which has a very short text block, you have to scroll until little text block disappears off the page. It's pretty silly, and goes against the idea of the purpose of scrolling, which is to navigate past information that does not fit within the viewable area of your device/window.

For a truly innovative scrolling concept, take a look at http://bloom.io/. (Give it some time to load all its assets. The effect isn't activated until it has everything.)

antimatter152• 15 years ago

Its for iPad/iPhone. The "for all" is a pretty blatant lie.

statictype• 15 years ago

Whatever. I thought the pinning effect was clever. It lets me browse through photos in a natural way by using the scroll wheel and easily read the captions too.

joehewitt3• 15 years ago

The goal here is not to be "truly innovative", but to emulate scrolling behavior which should ideally be performed by mobile WebKit, but isn't. But I must have done a good job since you only notice the background image being pinned, and not the fact that (at least on an iPad) the entire page is being scrolled with JavaScript. Also, try scrolling horizontally.

smickie• 15 years ago

This is how overflow:scroll should have worked on iOS a long time ago.

At the moment you have to mash two fingers in a webpage and scrape the content across that page. (Not sure if this is updated in iOS5?)

antimatter152• 15 years ago

It is. Overflow:scroll works with one finger, but it's often very slow and laggy (like two finger) and has no inertial scroll. Maybe they'll fix it.

RobbieStats• 15 years ago

I've been using iScroll (http://cubiq.org/iscroll) and it works quite well. Works on the desktop too unlike Scrollability.

wolfhumble• 15 years ago

The script has been superseded by iScroll 4: http://cubiq.org/iscroll-4

nupark22• 15 years ago

The animation is glitchy on an iPad 1, and it doesn't feel anything like the native UIScrollView's paging support. It's sort of acceptable enough for a web page, but it's not a replacement for a native UIScrollView.

Joe Hewitt’s First Post-Facebook Web Gift: Inertial Scrolling For All

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