UKC

Hi everyone,

We're due to release a new Digital Feature very soon, like the Alison & Tom Hargreaves one in March, and we've rewritten the back-end code for it from scratch. This version should be a lot more friendly to devices with limited processing power, as mobiles and tablets in particular struggled a bit with the last version.

The new version is here:
http://www.ukclimbing.com/articles/page.php?id=7210

If people wouldn't mind having a quick look through and posting any problems together with the OS and web browser you're it would be most appreciated.

PS. Users on IE8 and below can't view these.

In reply to Paul Phillips - UKC and UKH:

I'm probably alone on this one, but would be nice to be able to navigate with pageup & pagedown keys...

In reply to humptydumpty:
You can use the left/right arrow keys. I'll add the binding to pageup/down keys too though.

Edit: That's in

In reply to Paul Phillips - UKC and UKH:


Should read :
PS. Users on IE8 and below don't deserve to view these.

In reply to Paul Phillips - UKC and UKH:

Nice, thanks

In reply to Paul Phillips - UKC and UKH:
Hi, just had a look.

The pictures were resizing when you scroll up and down. Android 4.4, running chrome, it was fine with Firefox.
Also the back button (softkey and menu option) didn't work most of the time (both browsers).

Mike

In reply to Paul Phillips - UKC and UKH:

Good effort, but one scenario you need to avoid is the combination of multi-column text layout and vertical scroll bars. That's not a good combination. Also some window sizes end up with the text hard up against the bottom of the window (no scroll bars). Readable, but not 'nice'. Good luck!

Oh, and fully justified titles are usually a bad idea.

Finally, you should also consider what you are trying to achieve. The pseudo-page approach works well in some cases, but then mixing it up scrolling within in a page sort of defeats the object? You may as well make it one long page (with dynamic content loading) and just scroll through it. Use one interaction model or the other, but not both.

In reply to Paul Phillips - UKC and UKH:

Left and right navigation arrows hard / impossible to see against dark background. iPad 3.

In reply to Paul Phillips - UKC and UKH:

Ukclimbing.com link takes me to digital features rather than home page if this site.

In reply to Paul Phillips - UKC and UKH:
As a punter I liked it: I watched on iPad. Only one minor suggestion. The forward backward arrows might be better placed below the pictures when this is possible so as not to spoil the visual effect.

Thanks for the feedback everyone.

@MikeSP - I have also noticed this issue. Its caused by the browser navigation bar being hidden out of view when you scroll down the page. The browser's screen space then becomes larger and the images adjust to this new size. Slightly annoying. I'm going to look into fixing this.

@Marek - Its possible in the future we may do some dynamic manipulation of the pages to avoid any scrolling. Its on the todo list.

In reply to Paul Phillips - UKC and UKH:

Nice bit of programming. Definite improvement, especially in terms of speed.

I can scroll up and down the right hand side of my touchpad (mouse scrollwheel equivalent) and it flips thought the pages nicely, until it hits a video page. Scroll stops and I have to use L or R key or arrow on screen to move on.

If I am viewing the 'Digital feature' in full screen, then click to put the video in full screen. Clicking escape take the whole thing out of fullscreen, rather than just the video.

Also, once you start playing a video you lose the ability to move Left or Right to the next page of the feature with the arrow keys, even if the video is paused. The video player hooks the L & R keys to scroll you though the video. Slightly confusing user experience.

Minor stuff, but fixable.

Linux Debian Jessie. Iceweasel 31.8

In reply to Paul Phillips - UKC and UKH:

Seems to work fine with Windows 10 and Edge.

In reply to UKC Articles:

Just a small bug report: the videos will not play on a secondary portrait format monitor (Windows 7 Enterprise SP1, Chrome v44.0.2403.125 m). OK on primary landscape format monitor.

In reply to Marek:

Thanks for alerting us Marek. I'll check it out.

In reply to Marek:

Does it work if it's initially loaded in that monitor?
Did you load it it your main monitor then move it over to the thinner monitor?

In reply to Paul Phillips - UKC and UKH:


I use the portrait format monitor for the browser by default, so no it didn't work.
I pulled the window onto the other (landscape) monitor and it ran OK (no reload).
If I put it on on the landscape monitor but shrink the window so the window is portrait it also doesn't work. In fact if the window is landscape, but smallish it doesn't work. There seems to be a minimum window width - I'd guess about 1600px - below which it stops working. However, if it's really small (mobile mode?) the normal controls are replaced with a single play 'button' and then it works fine.

Oh and your title is still fully justified (obvious in mobile mode)

Hope that helps,
M

In reply to Marek:

I've moved these messages over to this thread as it's more relevant.

I can't quite reproduce the behaviour you're describing though.

Are you using the standard zoom level? Ctrl+0 should reset it to 100%.

Cheers for the feedback.

In reply to Paul Phillips - UKC and UKH:

Hmm. I can reproduce it on my home PC (single landscape monitor) as well as the dual setup at work. Yep, zoom 100%. Just shrunk the window to half the width of my desktop and bingo, the play/pause button no longer changes colour under the mouse.

In reply to Marek:

I've reproduced this and know what the issue is. A fix will be in shortly.

In reply to Martin McKenna - Rockfax:

Works nicely on my iPad running the latest iOS. The only thing I've noticed is that I can't swipe the pages containing video to move forwards or backwards.

In reply to Paul Phillips - UKC and UKH:

Works well except it won't let me use my back button (it loops back to the same page)

Android using chrome browser on a hudl2

In reply to LJC:

There's no easy way around this I'm afraid.

The scripts loaded from the Vimeo window override the swipe controls we've added to the pages.

In reply to balmybaldwin:


Fixed that, cheers.

In reply to Paul Phillips - UKC and UKH:

At a window width where the videos fill the full width the navigate left button overlays the video play button.

In reply to Paul Phillips - UKC and UKH:

Worked fine in Chrome, though I'm wondering what are the point of these features?

I'd happily read this stuff in a standard news article. Does it takes significantly longer to write an article in this format? I'd rather have two news articles in standard format than one that looks fancy if the timing was the same. Maybe I'm a bit boring.

In reply to wilkinscl:
@wilkinscl - Thanks for reporting that. This should now be fixed.

@cha1n - Creating these features doesn't take much time at all. We have created a tool that generates them for us. The majority of the work is in the filming, editing and writing (this takes time).

In reply to Martin McKenna - Rockfax:

Out of interest would it be difficult to have two versions - one digital and one ordinary format so we could choose?

In reply to Martin McKenna - Rockfax:
The difficulty here is that you are developing a new (?) reading paradigm, but then you don't implement it completely - arguably because it's quite hard to do. The trad method (long scrollable page) work fine and a pseudo page based 'digital' method work fine too. What doesn't work is when the reader has to do both because there's too much content on a page. It's even worse (unforgivable?) if that page also has multiple text columns which means you have to scroll up and down several times (e.g., page 15 in the Bullock article).

My recommendation would be either do it properly - and that means detecting the window and pixel size in the client and reformatting the content-page distribution appropriately - or let sleeping dogs lie (scrollable single page). The current 'digital' format (why 'digital' - surely we're past thinking that anything 'digital' is cool) is a valiant effort, but not really production ready.

In reply to cha1n:

Hi Cha1n, thanks for the feedback. The primary point of these is to let the editors do what they're good at and bring something to the table that's a bit out of the ordinary and is, fingers crossed, of interest to people.

The secondary point is money (I'm afraid it makes the world go round). The latest of these was sponsored by Mountain Equipment and the funding from them as well as other advertisers helps us to continue to offer UKC as a free resource for the climbing/mountaineering community.

In reply to Marek:

Thanks for the feedback. We will continue to improve the reading experience wherever possible.

These features are always going to generate a lot of content and wherever possible we've tried to fit each page on one browser window to avoid vertical scrolling. The previous system we used did a lot of page re-flowing in the browser to get the content to display nicely and it was simply too much processing for smaller hand-held devices to handle and ended up crashing mobile browsers a lot of the time... not ideal. The small amount of vertical scrolling in the new system is certainly better than that!

I think most readers will appreciate that there's a lot of content in these pieces, that it's taken quite some time to get the information together and the best method to take in this amount of content in is via a desktop or an iPad sized device. There shouldn't be any need to scroll vertically in these cases.

You certainly can't please everyone 100% of the time though

In reply to Paul Phillips - UKC and UKH:

I certainly appreciate how hard it is to do it perfectly. I tried myself on another website and ended up giving up and going for a responsive-but-scrolling page design (I'm not a pro web designer). I think you'd need to do the pagination server-side rather than in the browser and that's a whole new ball game.

Desktop and iPad? Are they really more common that a phone today? On my phone just about every page has to be scrolled. By the way, should I be able to 'side-swipe' to go page-to-page? If so, it doesn't work on my Android phone (Chrome). If not, then pity - it would be consistent UI with a vertical swipe for scrolling.

At the end of the day, content is more important than style (IMHO) and I think you're doing OK there