[guardian-dev] scrolling while reading on mobile devices

Hans-Christoph Steiner hans at guardianproject.info
Wed Jun 10 11:28:36 EDT 2015


I'm a long time reader on digital devices (Palm!) and the scrolling in Android
just sucks on almost all apps.  A good reading app provides a dead simple way
to turn "pages".  Manually scrolling is a terrible experience because it
requires focusing on a tricky physical task.  It requires much more focus than
turning a book page (maybe that's because I'm 41 and grew up reading books ;).

Both Kindle and Google Books on Android provide a simple double-tap to turn
the page, for example.  That is pretty good, but it still requires aiming on a
small target on the screen.  I'm a big fan of Courier's side scrolling, it
just takes a simple flick left or right anywhere on the reading area.
Apparently, some people get confused by the side scrolling.

I just was trying out Al Jazeera Magazine app, and they have found a nice
compromise:  it scrolls vertically, but page by page.  And turning the page is
done with a quick flick up or down.  Quite nice:

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.aljazeera.ajemag.andro

.hc

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