mrandre

It's a very very small boat with only nerds in it.

Please direct me to a common reading experience that does not happen on a computer screen that does not use pagination.

FWIW, your G2 is not running the Chrome browser. There is almost no relation between Chrome browser and the Android browser, save WebKit. This is puzzling, but true. And unfortunately, the Android browser just isn't up to snuff yet.

I don't know how to begin to think about knowing how to answer this question. :)

Go to "layout" and try something like the Overview skin. Is that more what you're looking for?

Cool. Consider it considered. :)

Bookmarking a page should work. If it isn't, that's a bug. You can bookmark sections and articles quite Well. It's a little hairy if the article gets a little old, but a solution is in the works.

It's a possibility.

I can't tell you specifics, other than that Skimmer has longer sessions per visit than the rest of the site, and more page views per user.

In the part of the past where books were scrolls, almost nobody could read, and most of what was written was data. Interestingly, relatively soon after the arrival of paginated books, public reading becomes commonplace.

Scrolls are for scribes.

Andre Behrens, creator of the app here.

My inbox has been flooded over the years with effusive messages about how much people like the way this works. The only people I've ever seen complain about usability are on hacker news.

Skimmer makes extensive use of standard javascript, css3, and HTML5 technologies. So I'm not sure what standards I've broken.

I think the meaning of the Gawker debacle might be open to interpretation without further data. For one thing, you should know that users with JS disabled make up a vanishingly small part of nytimes.com's readership.

And since Skimmer has enjoyed a largely enthusiastic response from readers, it stands to reason that most users are just fine with a js-heavy app. Most of our readers, anyway.

That said, if you hate this way of doing things, the entirety of nytimes.com is there for your classic web design enjoyment, and I certainly have no problem with your continuing to use it.

I would say maybe try the app for a while before you decide. Try the different layouts. Use the arrow keys. Try it on an iPad.

Hi, Andre Behrens, creator of the app.

I would argue it is the web itself that is broken. At the very least, it's an infinite web, and there's room for an awful lot of stuff in there, even the parts you don't like or understand.

The advantage of moving sideways is that that's how every reading experience a user has ever experienced works, outside their computer. More importantly for us, it's how a newspaper works. The fact that this thing works a lot like a newspaper and they love it is something our customers literally won't shut up about.

The simple truth is, the only people I've ever heard complain about the navigation scheme, scrolling, javascript, etc are on Hacker News.

For instance, what you are calling lag is the animation. Most people find computer navigation hostile because things move around and they don't know where they are going.

Animations give their brain time to process that things are changing. Research over the years suggests that most people think animated transitions are faster, even if they are technically slower.

In the case of scrolling, I find scrolling long documents a hostile user interface. It requires a great deal of user interaction and minute control over position. Pagination simply requires "next", "next", "next". I don't think every web site should work this way. But for long form content, it works a treat.

And for the record, I didn't use JS just because I could. I used it because it helped me solve my design goals.

I haven't looked into this, but it's definitely a possibility, provided the events are sane.

Hi! Andre Behrens, creator of the app here.

You can't scroll because I happen to think scrolling for reading is broken. Scrolling is a mechanism for micro-managing the position of content at a pixel level. As a creative producer, when I'm producing creative, I like this a lot. When I'm reading, I find it borderline exhausting; Scroll, re find position, think about when it's time to scroll again, do so, re find position. Did I scroll to far? So Skimmer uses pages whenever it can. You just activate "next", and there's more to read. "Next." "Next." "Next."

This wouldn't work at all for editing a photo. But if you haven't tried it for reading longform content, you really ought to try it.

Of course, if you really do like the classic web scrolling approach, you can just use nytimes.com, and neither I, nor anyone else at the Times would complain.

I think one can safely assume that any article containing the phrase "could kill x by changing only y" is worthless drivel. The author has hit correctly on the fundamental difference between the service, but veers into crazy town suggesting that changing one service kills another. I think humans have a replacement bias, assuming that new thing x will replace old thing y, a bias rarely borne by fact. Did planes replace trains? Where's my paperless office? Tools have affordances. If facebook didn't work the way it does, it wouldn't be facebook, and the same for twitter.

More importantly, why, exactly, does facebook want/need to kill twitter?