Other people already posted different annoyances, but my issues with that page were:
The animations are choppy to a distracting level on Chrome 22 running on a reasonably beefy desktop machine.
The font size is unreadably small, and due to the three column layout it doesn't degrade well when zoomed. It'd be merely crappy if zooming required vertical scrolling. It's disabling all methods of vertical scrolling entirely that really make this design special.
It replaces normal page navigation with a custom version, which is already bad. They then compound that error by mapping that custom navigation to the wrong keys. An example: maybe you'd like to check one of the footnotes they have. In a sensible design those would be hyperlinks, but for whatever reason that wasn't done. Ok, so I guess you need to go to the end of the document to see the footnotes. Wouldn't still be too bad, but they forgot to map the "End" key. So the only way to get to the end of the document is with the slider. And after doing that, how do you return to the original position? Well, I'd expect to be able to do Alt-Left for that. Except that this keybinding has been overridden too, and you need to instead click on the back button.
Doing this kind of stuff might be just about acceptable in a web app. But this isn't an app. It's a document. And they've managed to break the only two things that matter for a document. I need to be able to read it, and I need to be able to navigate it.
FYI, the animations look great to me in Chrome 22 on a year-old Dell laptop. The font size is smaller than I would have used, but I wouldn't describe it as "unreadable".
There are some other big problems, though. They've obviously never heard of Unobtrusive Javascript[1]. Try opening the site without Javascript. And the HTML/CSS is garbage. What a joke.
My vision isn't very good. The text becomes comfortable to read at around 175%-200% zoom level. The default size is so far outside that range that I have no qualms about describing it as unreadable, even if it's not literally true and I could read it with sufficient concentration.
Just to be clear, I don't think the problem is the tiny font size as such. It's the tiny size combined with gratuitously unscrollable and unscalable layout. It's a similar problem to many default themes for blogs disabling zooming on mobile browsers for no good reason. This got so bad that the Android browser sprouted an accessibility option to force zooming to always be enabled.
I'm using Chrome 22 on a 2 year-old MBP, and it works fine. The only complaint I have is that it breaks the back button, which Google is usually pretty good about. All told, it's a slick bit of CSS/JS that looks like a native PP slide deck, but with more functionality.
It looks, feels and reads like someone used a PowerPoint to HTML5 converter to make that site,and as others pointed out, seems to have issues supporting browsers.
Goog does a good job illustrating just how "different" mobile is.
In our experience at ConversionVoodoo.com over the past couple of years a properly mobile optimized site for a direct-response style business is a difference of 2x, for traditional ecommerce it's 1.5x, for content it's as much as 3x!
In other words make absolutely, positively sure that mobile optimization becomes an organizational priority if you're seeing more than 15% mobile traffic.
Honestly this is exactly the type of site design we should be moving away from. Fully scripted, so can't be search engine indexed or read without scripting, doesn't even work on many browsers, takes longer to load because of the way the pages are designed, multiple columns so hard to zoom in if the text is too small on your screen, breaks the back button, and so on. This is nothing but a text based presentation, why not keep the page simple, without any extras, and let me read it like a normal web page?
Read something really simple, informative, and beautiful created by Google. Go to Hacker News to read people bitch about how they'd have done it differently and better.
The information was displayed and curated extremely well and the UI was perfect to me. Like reading a book: nothing to mess around with, just turn the pages.
On some browsers was it messy? That's web dev y'all. We always assume everything large companies publish will be perfect and cross-everything optimized, but being big doesn't mean the process for creating creative work is any different.
Fine with the bitching, good to see the issues people have (best kind of education) but can't we all at least be happy with having all these great statistics in one highly credible place?
It's not simple, it's so absurdly overcomplicated and obsessed with one of many possible renderings that they've made the content inaccessible to most browsers we've ever had, apparently including the default browser on most Android phones (ICS didn't bundle Chrome). Their own search engine can't preview or cache it properly. They should regard widespread authoring like this as an existential threat to the web of openly interoperable hypertext and discourage it however they can.
It's beautiful but I can't stand the page transition animation. It's too slow to the point of annoying - I had to force my eyes to look away from the transition, away from the screen, as otherwise my eyes would try to focus on the blurry moving text which 1) hurts my brain to focus at, 2) disrupts my train of thought as it disturbs my focus (both mentally and physically).
How I wish that tablets provides a way to do the same thing that page up/page down does with just a tap. I found swiping up/down for jumping to the next/previous page distracting for exactly the reason I stated above that I put a bookmarklet on my tablet browser to do the page up/page down when I single tap on a non-html-linkified entity.
A tip for anyone trying to view this on a smartphone:
If I load the page on my Android phone with the stock gingerbread browser in portrait, I get what I can only guess is the desktop page. If I load it in landscape, I get the tablet page asking me to rotate to landscape. If you then rotate back to portrait and refresh, you may be lucky enough to get the mobile phone page. It may also be completely random.
Ironic how difficult it is to load this content on a mobile device.
The android browser is, in general, terrible. Google has partially redeemed themselves by shipping chrome as the default on JB, but right now android is the thing holding back the mobile web.
Unfortunately, Jelly Bean doesn't use Chrome for internal webviews. I'm playing around with a Phonegap wrapped HTML5 app and I'm blown away by how much better iOS Safari is. I though Google were supposed to be the web guys?
In the Fireside chat at I/O they said that the JB webview was entirely Chromium based and at parity with Chrome at the time, but would not be updated on Chrome's release cycle.
I'm not sure how it's going to blow safari away. Safari is roughly equivalent to the current state of the art in desktop browsers (the only glaring omission I can think of is indexedDB). If BB10 goes beyond that, it's going to be unusable anyways because it's all going to be BB specific.
Safari could be doing more in allowing webapps to function like native ones- it has the full screen, add to home functionality, but it's not well understood or known. There's no way to register protocols to launch a full screen web app, and a series of hacks are required to stop the entire app doing the elastic "bounce" when you scroll the wrong way.
Safari is good, but it could be a lot better. But I'd expect Google to be leading this charge, not Apple. But Android has basically zero integration options for webapps.
It doesn't matter. This presentation not for devs, but for managers to convince them to invest into mobile technology and yet Google do not tries to do that just right there. That what was surprising for me.
On the main page (viewed from PC) they advertise a nice-looking tablet version, yet on my ASUS tablet with Android 4.1 and Chrome as a browser, I get the crappy mobile version of the site. Interesting.
LOL. People have been using The ____ Playbook for years.
Checking the USPTO web site, it shows the "Blackberry Playbook" and "Playbook" applications as being "status: suspended". Did they even manage to get the US trademark on that?
Their mobile site tester[1] is doesn't do much. All is does is show one page of the website you entered in a mobile browser then it asks you if it showed up correctly. The report is pretty much some canned messages about how to improve a mobile website. Maybe I'm expecting too much but after the effort that they put into the presentation I hoped for a little bit more out the mobile site "tester."
It won't load without JS enabled. Plus it is very buggy when it does load on up to date browsers. Google's JS has been getting buggy this past few months. Even Gmail, which was rock solid.
Now on an ipad3 it's slightly laggy. Transitions are slightly slow, and every interface element feels a bit "almost there" in term of responsivness.
Then, downloading the pdf and viewing the same content in a native viewer is liberatingly smooth, fast, responsive, albeit without the animations and custom controls.
This demo seems very apropriate to experience the gap between "html5 and JS everything" and "single purposed and optimised" presentation formats.
I first followed the link to this presentation on my iPad 3rd generation. It actually provided a pretty decent experience in that form factor. That said using this site in Google Chrome 22 does suck. Apparently the app designers don't yet understand responsive design / progressive enhancement. Yes it's hard, but I'd expect a presentation such as this to show how to do all the right things.
It doesn't block page transitions on all of the assets on the next page loading. I click the next button and get to wait 30 seconds while all the images show up.
>We noticed that you're using an unsupported browser. But have no fear, you can view themobileplaybook.com from the latest versions of Chrome, Internet Explorer, Firefox, or Safari. Please update your browser and come back to visit us.
>Alternatively, we suggest checking out the site from your tablet if you have one
or from your smartphone device.
What galls me about these messages is the insinuation to the Opera users that their browser is somehow outdated and that we need to update or upgrade it. If you can't be assed to test on Opera at least change the message to asking to use a different browser, not to "upgrade" to one.
Oh, that's hilarious. https://www.google.com/search?q=themobileplaybook.com shows that same "greeting" as a preview, and the cached version is completely blank (because there's no content in their markup, just scripted crap). It just goes to show that if such anti-semantic authoring were the norm, Google's search engine wouldn't even exist. Talk about pulling the ladder up behind you....
Look, if you use Opera then that's awesome. You have your reasons. It's got a lot of users, and that's also great.
But developers reasonably make decisions about which browsers to optimize for and which ones NOT to optimize for. They're not insulting you for your browser choice: they're just being reasonable about how they spend their time.
We should always be open to new things so I won't sit here and say "you should just use Chrome because it's awesome and incredibly fast", and if they're differentiated enough they'll become standards everyone supports. Opera is not. And you're not a martyr.
First, it's Google we're talking about here, not some cash starved startup.
Second, you seem to have not completely read my post. It was more about the "update" and "upgrade" language. How would people on Linux feel if they tried to download a program and and it told them to "upgrade" to Windows to get it working?
>"We should always be open to new things so I won't sit here and say "you should just use Chrome because it's awesome and incredibly fast"
You should try Opera, it is awesome and incredibly fast :)
>and if they're differentiated enough they'll become standards everyone supports. Opera is not.
What is not differentiated enough and Opera is not what?
Opera is pretty good at following standards, it's no IE for sure.
Again, it's okay if web developers don't have the time to test and support Opera, just don't tell its users to update or upgrade to other browsers. Even "Best viewed in Internet Explorer" is less condescending We didn't get rid of that and Flash to end up back again in this browser sniffing mess.
I suggest the community downvote comments like this. I'd like to see a published community guideline encouraging people to not make meta comments. The vast majority of readers don't use Opera, and a personal quest to see Opera treated as a first class browser doesn't belong in this thread.
We're here to either discuss the site design or the content. Seeing as the content is marketing speak apparently targeted at executives I think we're here to discuss the design. A design that excludes Opera is an interesting topic because we're supposed to be living in a standards compliant paradise nowadays.
This is incorrect in Asia - the fastest growing mobile market in the world. Opera is very, very big in India - it also comes preinstalled in many dumbphones.
On a personal note, I do want to mention that your comment leans a bit too much towards dogma. I dont want to start a flamewar (and go offtopic), but please have a downvote cookie.
Returning to on-topic, I am able to use the site fine with Opera Mobile on Gingerbread.
Opera is by far one of the best browsers for Android in my opinion. Firefox frustrated me considerably as every time I horizontally scrolled I would open a side bar for managing favourites sites / tabs. This may have been changed in newer versions of firefox for the Android unfortunately I can't run it as Firefox consistently crashes on CM10 (not sure if this is a bug on Firefox's behalf or CM 10)
(edit)I have a feeling quite a few people probably use Opera browser on their handsets...
Other commenters have said this as well, but I think this Mobile Playbook site is amazingly cool and kudos to the developers who put this together. Disappointed that the top HN comment right now is a complaint about Opera not being supported.
Hilarious - I just noticed the same issue, and then found this thread... Opera has been the best for power browsers since before I remember... some people just don't get it!
edit. After additional reading, I see the larger issue... Opera users are more like behind-the-scenes admins - we aren't really in the consumer/end-user category, and for this we just need to deal with some hardships like not being included in browser compatibility lists for all sites... that's a fact I'm OK with now. Cheers!
The PS Vita browser is an oldish Webkit build with JS 1.7, half-implemented HTML5, and a handful of features disabled. Its user agent is something like "Mozilla/5.0 (Playstation Vita 1.50) AppleWebKit/531.22.8 (KHTML, like Gecko) Silk/3.2", and it probably advertises a feature set close to Chrome builds from about a year ago.
I'm not too surprised that it doesn't support this gimmicky site, nor that it slipped through the feature/agent sniffing.
