OnSwipe iPad Interface “Is So Bad!” – You Talked & We Listened

Synthtopia ipad interfaceFor the last couple of days, we’ve been testing out Onswipe – a custom set of page templates that are supposed to be an ‘insanely easy way to make your site look great on tablet web browsers.’

Synthtopia iPad users aren’t buying the Onswipe hype.

Here’s a taste of the feedback we got in just one day on the ‘insanely easy’ Onswipe interface:

  • “Not really liking the new mobile site,” commented Rich Wildman. “It is very buggy, with stories sometimes not appearing, graphics not appearing and so forth. Please provide an option to use the regular site – especially for iPad user.”
  • Reader Robin Parry said “It doesn’t work on iPad, it’s r-e-a-l-l-y s-l-o-w , it looks awful – bad Sunday supplement! Again WHY?”
  • Tim Webb said “Your CMS seems to have switched on something for making a newspaper/magazine style interface for iPad viewers. It is bad. It is so bad! Please consider turning that off!”
  • “Website update on iPad borked!” adds Grant.

Rich, Robin, Tim, Grant & everybody else that commented – we appreciate you letting us know right away on this. The Onswipe experiment was a failure. You just want the regular site to work well on the iPad!

Try it again on your iPad and let us know what you think.

And, as always, keep the feedback coming. We’ll do what we can.

PS: We made body links easer to read, too!

19 thoughts on “OnSwipe iPad Interface “Is So Bad!” – You Talked & We Listened

  1. Hey There,

    Really sorry about this. It seems you were using a way older version of our plugin. Quite frankly it deserves the comments above. You should check out the platform available via onswipe.com. It’s a completely different product and great partners like Slate and Calculated Risk use it. Let me know if I can be of help.

    1. Thanks for the comment. We used the version that’s in the official plugin repository. Maybe that should be updated if it’s not your latest version? Or deprecated?

    2. No offense, but Slate runs like crap on my original iPad. This trend toward trying to make the web browser run like an app is just not working well for me. Give me a quick loading page with simple links.

    3. No. Onswipe is complete garbage. The user experience is terrible compared to just plain text on a page. Instead of getting plain text on a page which loads in tenths of a second, you have to wait for some crappy app to load up in your browser that’s slow, looks like someone set the Kindle settings to “Suck” and changes the base interaction from scrolling down to swiping sideways.

      There is nothing redeemable about Onswipe at this point and everything spent on it is time lost on a failure.

  2. Oh god thank you for changing it back.

    I was worried I would have to suffer through that layout for some time to come. I echo what others have noted-> Keep the site working well on the ipad. Onswipe is unusable in landscape mode and difficult to read in portrait.

    Onsite, making webpages you love shitty.

  3. Theres usually a option to switch to full page view, but Synthtopia didn’t have that option. Glad the test is over. That swipe look was not a good one.

    1. Looks like that may have been a cacheing issue. I tried this in Chrome on OS X today and it looks OK.

      Thanks for bringing that to my attention – and let me know if you’re still having problems.

  4. Much better, without the OnSwipe plugin. The experiment was a good one and I hope that OnSwipe’s latest version will work better. However, I would also hope that you test on a production server prior to rolling something like this out to the rest of the world.

  5. Wow this is too funny, it even ranked an article! If you’d like to do future experiments I’m sure you’ll find plenty of us who would help on a test page. Myself included!

  6. While you at it ocould you start actually embedding YouTube videos so that they don’t jump to the YouTube app? I know it can be done….

  7. A cleanly coded web site without flash and tons of custom widget hoohaws is always a better experience on any platform. Thank you for not using some 3rd party “solution” that just makes things more complex than they need to be.

    As Edward Tufte says, “good content celebrates itself”. There is no need to “celebrate” the delivery mechanism, which in fact, should be invisible.

  8. Memo to Jason Baptiste: you have a product that people hate. Hype it all you like. Cruise the web looking for negative comments and try to turn them around. None of it will help. It is just a bad idea.

  9. I tried out onswipe for the first time yesterday…and quickly ‘uninstalled’ it a few minutes later. Two main reasons. One, it gets rid of paragraphing. Two, if one was to bookmark the site, the icon that i put up is replaced with an icon with the picture of the website.

    It’s really unfortunate since the templates are really nice, work very well and smoothly, and certainly enhances the reading experience except for the major paragraphing flaw i mentioned above. And i don’t think i can give up my customised website ipad bookmark icon no matter how good onswipe is.

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