I love playing on an iPad, and the site’s design is very good.
However, navigating through a game is not convenient: on the iPad, tapping repeatedly on the next/previous move arrows often triggers the screen zooming of the browser. A great solution, from a user’s perspective, would be to have a slider instead, like in SmartGo Kifu. It could replace the whole set of navigation buttons.
This feature would be especially great (at least for a tablet version of the web site) for correspondance games, where users have plenty of time to navigate in the game (I do this for reflecting on the game so far).
I was thinking just the opposite. Using a slider bar would be annoying because I can’t easily control how many moves back or forward I go. I like the buttons.
The Nexus 7 doesn’t zoom on multiple taps, so I don’t have the problem you talk about on the iPad. I can see where that would be annoying for you, but I don’t think it’s easily generalizeable for tablet users.
Having both the arrows and a slider might be best, then. However, I also like having a lot of screen real estate for what matters, so let me ask you a question, @archpaladin1.
I find that a slider does allow you to “control how many moves back or forward you go”, for instance by still having the move number being constantly displayed, as is the case now (this is how it behaves in SmartGo Kifu, for instance). So, just out of curiosity, can you explain why you feel that a slider would actually not provide this “control” capability? I am not sure if you can have access to a program that uses such a slider (like SmartGo on OS X), but it would be nice if you could try.
I unfortunately do not have access to SmartGo, but generally I disagree. I can base this on trying to use sliders in other webapps.
Looking at the screenshots for SmartGo, I do see move numbers present and a slider bar showing moves at the bottom of the board. Let’s say that I want to go back to move 55 in some game, so I press back to around where I think that is and I get to move 53.
How I am to control moving to move 55? If I try and roll my finger without lifting up any pressure the tablet often doesn’t respond. If I lift up my finger and press again I often get an entirely different move and I have the same problem. If I try to slide my finger then the amount of moves I traverse is highly variable and depends on the scale of the slider. Sliders like this do not work well on tablets. Well, let me at least say that sliders do not work well for me. Please keep some kind of arrow buttons.
Incidentally, in looking at the same screenshot it appears that there are back & forth move arrow buttons further down at the bottom of the app. So I think even in SmartGo the developers realize that they need to work with people who use interfaces differently.
A slider works well on iPads: it responds so well that I forgot that they were arrows beside the slider.
Very good point, about SmartGo having back and forward arrows on the side of the slider (it also has an “autoplay” button).
So, my dream interface would be like in SmartGo: a slider for fast scrolling, and two small arrows on the side for single-move back and forward (with an autoplay button, if needed).
The current beginning/end/fast movement arrows are way less convenient, I find. The single-move (and autoplay) arrows do what they are supposed to do very well (and better than a slider), so I think that they should indeed be kept.
This would allow me to finally feel that I can really look at a game easily on OGS. Compared to SmartGo, I currently feel very much restrained, with not much of a global vision of the game so far.
