The sound of my laptop fan spinning up for takeoff somewhat detracts from the experience. It did look pretty on my fanless phone, though, until I got stuck in an infinite loop where tapping next cycled between the same three or four pages about the author, content index, and support information. It was like the maze in Zelda.
iPhone 6s. Everything was smooth, as expected, even the translucent page turns. I just got stuck. I’d be at the author page, tap the right edge, and go to contents, then support, then back to author. Never ending. Tapping left edge would go “back” but not necessarily to the page I had just seen. I spent some time flipping around, but it seemed quite “non linear”.
As for my laptop (X1 Carbon), the fan is actually quiet, but it’s normally completely off and it makes a nice puff sound when it starts. Normally that’s just loading Twitter, then it turns off again, but here I noticed for instance the owl with the eyes was pretty taxing.
Now there are a great many problems with Firefox on OpenBSD and it’s hard to know who to blame. But I can’t help but sigh when I recall I could play quake2 super smoothly on hardware with a tenth this power. (Quake2 appears not to run on 64bits or I would be telling you how awesome it is on this very machine.) That was a pretty immersive experience back then. How can it be a struggle to display moving text today?
I’m kinda torn. I generally dislike bloaty sites, but this seems like the perfect demo for what (imho) we should be using html to build. It’s sad that it’s not easy.
For the record, neither my cheap Toshiba Satellite running Ubuntu 14.04 and Fx at home, nor my Lenovo T540p at work with Windows 7 and Fx are getting bad framerates or having the fan spin up when viewing any of those books.
I didn’t play with creating a new book, but a little more feedback on the user experience.
The interaction with the browser history is a little off. If I page back through a book with left arrow, that counts as forward history, and then clicking back in the browser takes me forward through the book. I was interleaving both forms of navigation for a bit, until I tied myself in knots. In particular, there doesn’t seem to be an easy way to put a book down or away. I want to go back to the shelf. But that requires clicking back 50 times. And the first time, I made the mistake of paging back with left arrow 50 times. So it was actually clicking back 100 times to go to the end of the book and then back to the beginning.
@marvindanig: I wouldn’t normally mention this, but since you’re actively seeking feedback…
I am definitely aware that ebooks are occupying a weird space between “the user controls the dimensions”, as we have on the web, and “the author controls the dimensions”, like print. There’s a tradeoff of creative expression vs. accessibility. So, make your own decision about what’s right for this site, but I really can’t overemphasize the importance of font-size controls. I notice that Bubblin goes out of its way to keep font-size constant, even actively preventing me from using Chrome’s zoom feature by re-scaling to counteract it. Happily, since my window is 24 inches wide for precisely this reason (can non-liquid site layouts just go away? …), it seems to have picked a size I find legible, but if it hadn’t, I’d have had no recourse.
Everybody’s vision and neurology is different, so ideally there should be at least a sans-serif font, a serif font, and Comic Sans (really - it’s good for dyslexia, though there are other options). Font size should be adjustable to any arbitrary size. I personally find anything smaller than about 28pt stressful to read; I’ve met people who prefer 72pt. Line spacing should be adjustable separately from font size. Some e-readers allow users to tweak horizontal letter spacing as well, and I know that many do appreciate the ability although I don’t personally use it. Also, a light-on-dark mode is important for some vision conditions. This is off the top of my head… but accessibility issues are easily researched, and important to the people who need them.
The sound of my laptop fan spinning up for takeoff somewhat detracts from the experience. It did look pretty on my fanless phone, though, until I got stuck in an infinite loop where tapping next cycled between the same three or four pages about the author, content index, and support information. It was like the maze in Zelda.
[Comment removed by author]
The first book, the guide.
iPhone 6s. Everything was smooth, as expected, even the translucent page turns. I just got stuck. I’d be at the author page, tap the right edge, and go to contents, then support, then back to author. Never ending. Tapping left edge would go “back” but not necessarily to the page I had just seen. I spent some time flipping around, but it seemed quite “non linear”.
As for my laptop (X1 Carbon), the fan is actually quiet, but it’s normally completely off and it makes a nice puff sound when it starts. Normally that’s just loading Twitter, then it turns off again, but here I noticed for instance the owl with the eyes was pretty taxing.
Now there are a great many problems with Firefox on OpenBSD and it’s hard to know who to blame. But I can’t help but sigh when I recall I could play quake2 super smoothly on hardware with a tenth this power. (Quake2 appears not to run on 64bits or I would be telling you how awesome it is on this very machine.) That was a pretty immersive experience back then. How can it be a struggle to display moving text today?
I’m kinda torn. I generally dislike bloaty sites, but this seems like the perfect demo for what (imho) we should be using html to build. It’s sad that it’s not easy.
For the record, neither my cheap Toshiba Satellite running Ubuntu 14.04 and Fx at home, nor my Lenovo T540p at work with Windows 7 and Fx are getting bad framerates or having the fan spin up when viewing any of those books.
I haven’t tried it on mobile yet, though.
[Comment removed by author]
I didn’t play with creating a new book, but a little more feedback on the user experience.
The interaction with the browser history is a little off. If I page back through a book with left arrow, that counts as forward history, and then clicking back in the browser takes me forward through the book. I was interleaving both forms of navigation for a bit, until I tied myself in knots. In particular, there doesn’t seem to be an easy way to put a book down or away. I want to go back to the shelf. But that requires clicking back 50 times. And the first time, I made the mistake of paging back with left arrow 50 times. So it was actually clicking back 100 times to go to the end of the book and then back to the beginning.
@marvindanig: I wouldn’t normally mention this, but since you’re actively seeking feedback…
I am definitely aware that ebooks are occupying a weird space between “the user controls the dimensions”, as we have on the web, and “the author controls the dimensions”, like print. There’s a tradeoff of creative expression vs. accessibility. So, make your own decision about what’s right for this site, but I really can’t overemphasize the importance of font-size controls. I notice that Bubblin goes out of its way to keep font-size constant, even actively preventing me from using Chrome’s zoom feature by re-scaling to counteract it. Happily, since my window is 24 inches wide for precisely this reason (can non-liquid site layouts just go away? …), it seems to have picked a size I find legible, but if it hadn’t, I’d have had no recourse.
Everybody’s vision and neurology is different, so ideally there should be at least a sans-serif font, a serif font, and Comic Sans (really - it’s good for dyslexia, though there are other options). Font size should be adjustable to any arbitrary size. I personally find anything smaller than about 28pt stressful to read; I’ve met people who prefer 72pt. Line spacing should be adjustable separately from font size. Some e-readers allow users to tweak horizontal letter spacing as well, and I know that many do appreciate the ability although I don’t personally use it. Also, a light-on-dark mode is important for some vision conditions. This is off the top of my head… but accessibility issues are easily researched, and important to the people who need them.