Space Invaders true form revealed:

12 years ago

Also:

Tags: conspiracies, mutants, robots, space, toys

4 Responses:

1. 205guy says:

   12 years ago at 1:34 pm

   Can somebody please explain why the people who make websites (or software to make websites) that detect browsers on mobile phones (you know, the kind with small screens but really cool UI for zooming) specifically remove the ability to zoom. Sure, I can rotate my phone, but that's usually not enough, and it still doesn't let me zoom.

   This wordpress theme detects my mobile and does not allow zooming, and more surprisingly, flickr does the same thing. So I cannot zoom in on the details in an image, even though I have a device that went to some length to implement a really useful zooming UI.

   WTF ever happened to "one Internet, many browsers?"

   • jwz says:

     12 years ago at 5:54 pm

     I also find the disabling of zoom annoying and puzzling.

   • Jason says:

     12 years ago at 12:12 pm

     Do you mean lack of zoom on a mobile-designed site? Because in my (brief, not-at-all-thorough) experiments with mobile-sized designs I had to specifically shut off zooming to make the site start out full size.

     I then learned that on one of the mobile browsers (I think it was the iPhone's but I'm not 100% sure, it's been a few months) that allowing a user to enlarge an image to be bigger than the screen resolution via Javascript force-shrunk the page even though zoom had been disabled -- zooming in on an image became a two-step process. Once to enlarge the image, twice to double-tap- or pinch-zoom.

     My sincere hope is that I'm missing some mobile-specific meta tag or something similar. If enlarging a mobile-friendly layout is truly that retarded I can understand why a designer would just say to hell with it. It sure sucks for the user, though.

     • jwz says:

       12 years ago at 12:52 pm

       You do not have to shut off zooming to make pages auto-size properly on small devices. You just need a completely fluid layout and viewport width=device-width. For example, DNA Lounge, specifically any of the flyers or photo galleries.