Scale your expectations. A humble request to web designers from a mobile user to not restrict user scalability

I browse the web. 

Extensively. 

Both while I'm at work (for work purposes, of course), and when not (which means I'm researching something or reading up on what I should be working on next). In this endeavor, I employ any web capable device I can lay my paws on, be it a desktop (Linux, Windows, Mac), a laptop (MacBook Pro, Macbook Air, Ideapad Yoga, Satellite), a tablet (iPad Air, iPad 2, iPad Mini with Retina display), a smart phone (iPhone), or an e-reader (Kindle e-Ink, word!). And if I'm really, really, really desperate, through the embedded web browser on my TV. 

All of which means, that I experience the web in about as many ways as one possibly can (sorry Lynx hasn't gotten any love in a long, long, long time), and often have to contend with websites not necessarily designed with every browser in mind. I'm normally quite considerate to the web-site designer, especially if I'm using a device that probably isn't very widely adopted (e.g. kindle e-ink or TV browser); it is a special situation created by my choice of non-popular device, and so the onus of consumption is on me. On the other hand, quite often, my medium of consumption is an iPad or iPhone, and I'll land on a website that is "mobile friendly", and yet is infuriatingly ill fit to be browsed on a mobile screen. These are the ones I take strong exception too.

While mobile device capabilities have increased astronomically since the days of the hand-held monochrome LCD "video" games, mobile devices still often remain constrained in their screen real-estate (some necessarily due to their functionality: I can't imagine favoring a device the size of iPad Air as my phone for any length of time over a better sized hand-held). There is a fair number of websites that are still not "mobile friendly", i.e. which were designed with the facilities of a desktop browser and desktop sized screen in mind, and consequently browsing these on a hand-held requires constant panning and zooming. I don't take exception to these.

I don't begrudge these web sites and authors because the non-mobile websites were probably created before the mobile phenomenon, and haven't been updated since (either due to passivity of the original authors, or the lack of funds etc.).

The websites of late where I do take exception, are the ones that profess to be mobile "friendly", and in their efforts to be mobile compatible, go a little too far. I'm talking about the websites that recognize the mobile browser and prevent viewport scaling. What this means is that the user is UNABLE to pinch-zoom and pan to read the material.

I find this decision by web-designers increasingly frustrating. A humble and sincere request to all web-designers and web-masters of the world: PLEASE, PLEASE PLEASE, (emphasis and stress to indicate pleading and not yelling), do NOT limit the scaling, unless there is very good justification for why you need to solidly fix the web-site layout. If the text size isn't big enough, it makes for an incredibly infuriating experience for the reader. 

Just as law makers cannot know all the ramifications of their regulations on the society at large. web-designers too cannot ascertain how their users would prefer to consume their material. Unnecessary and ill-designed restrictions only lead to frustration in the populace.

I understand that not all content creators might be aware their template has this restriction built in. So here's a tip on what "causes" this particular frustration, and how to resolve it.

Website scaling is typically restricted with a meta content tag as below:


meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width; initial-scale=1.0; maximum-scale=1.0; user-scalable=no"

notice the maximum-scale and user-scalable fields. 

If a web site does not have a very strong functional need to stay fixed, please consider dropping the maximum-scale property and setting the user-scalable to yes (user-scalable=yes). 

Your mobile users will thank you. I certainly will. 

Thanks in advance.

references:

• http://www.ehow.com/how_10007344_html-tutorial-viewport.html
• https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Mobile/Viewport_meta_tag?redirectlocale=en-US&redirectslug=Mobile%2FViewport_meta_tag

Living with Windows 8 and Lenono Yoga 13, part 2

I just returned the device back to the Microsoft Store. I was quite disappointed because I had really wanted to like and use the machine.

I really liked:

1. that you could stand it up so that you could watch media handsfree, e.g. when cooking
2. the screen resolution. The 1600x900 display was crisp and made images pop. Bing home page, particularly, looked awesome each day
3. how easily and without a fuss it integrated with my existing printer / scanner. No fuss what so ever.
4. UPnP discovery and display capability. It discovered my SonyTV right off the bat!
5. the general snappiness of Windows 8
6. Office 2013 ran like a charm

What bothered me:

1. to log in to windows, I needed wifi. Seriously. Windows 8 during the signup process asked for a Windows / Microsoft email id to be created / used. I did use one. And then I created a couple of other non-admin (local) users as well. However, without a network connection, it would only allow the last used account to log in. If this happened to be the admin account, then any other local user essentially is completely locked out. EVEN THOUGH THEY HAVE LOG-IN PRIVILEGES to their own local account. I found this product decision baffling.
2. undiscoverable gestures. I wrote about this the last time.
3. on-screen keyboard is flaky, particularly with Metro IE. Multiple account users were unable to type in Facebook. Not being able to post in Facebook in the tablet mode, or the stand mode, or the tent mode, was a huge downer. This is not acceptable for a $1000 machine. There were several posts about it online as well. Main issue seemed to be updates. I did update mine several times to no-avail. http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/windows_8-tms/windows-8-touch-keyboard-keeps-disappearing-as/8449af91-84da-4013-9d6d-cbc97b3a7aec.
4. high contrast mode was iffy. Kudos to Microsoft for trying to make high-contrast mode work intelligently. I typically use this mode in the night to reduce eye-strain since it changes the typical bright white background to black, and the makes the text white. This reduces the total light intensity hitting your retinas causing your pupils to stop having to compensate by tightening, thus easing the strain on the eyes. iOS devices achieve this by a chainsaw technique of simply inverting all colors. It's not perfect, but it works well, e.g. the pictures are ghostly and one needs to switch back and forth between the modes. Microsoft's approach was to intelligently change the color scheme for each app. This had the pleasant surprise of making pictures look right while inverting the text. It was a beautiful experience. However, it just didn't work right because on some website, entire swaths of information would be missing. Particularly on financial websites important charts and text sections would just be absent in the high-contrast mode. I couldn't figure out why. With the iOS approach, yes, you still had the inconvenience of having to switch back and forth, but you knew that a section of the page had information that might interest you, and gave you (perhaps only coincidentally) the choice of reverting back to see the data in the original light. And, it also made the switch easy by allowing the action to be programmed in a simple action (triple click of the home button). No such luck in Windows 8. I really, really would prefer the Windows8 inverted mode experience if they fixed the missing content issue since it obviates the need to deal with ghostly pictures (when they are visible).
5. pages would randomly increase or decrease in size. This happened not just in tablet mode (possibly due to inadvertent dual point touches on the screen, though one could argue that the software should intelligently detect and compensate for these), but also in laptop mode. Even with palm detection on the touchpad turned to the max.
6. a side effect of e) above was that during editing, the mouse/ cursor would jump to an unrelated area of the text, munging your editing. this was quite disturbing, especially when using excel since the result wasn't limited to easily identifiable spelling errors; unintended numerical typos have a tendency to cascade through computations without being easily identified.
7. constrained diskspace. the device came with 128GB of disk-space. True, I could've coughed up ~$400 more for an i7 version with  256GB of space. But, the fact remains that out of 128GB, with barely the OS, Office and anti-virus installed, I only had about 90GB left. That might be ok for most folks but given the volume of data generated in my household (photos, software, documents), it seemed a little constraining.

On the plus side, I really liked with Microsoft Store experience. They took back the device with nary a fuss. They did ask me what was wrong with it and offered to help address the issue, but when they saw it, they took it back. They also offered the Microsoft Store bag back to me. Makes a good recyclable grocery store bag!

That said, I might go back to the Windows 8 / Yoga combination again. I do believe it is by far the best combination out there. It's just that it needs a little more baking. Hope MS / Lenovo reps scour the interwebs, find this page (and many others like it) and make the needed changes. It would then be a solid offering!