Pull to refresh

[jcaudle]

I don't know anything about the library used on this project, but it would be nice to get the pull to refresh idiom going on this web app. I know it's possible in the Mobile Safari browser (Gmail has a nice implementation for it). If its possible with these libraries, I'll happily get going on putting it in place if there's interest in the feature.

[cheeaun]

Yeah, that's in the plans 😄

[jcaudle]

Just forked the repo. I'll take a look into it soon!

[jcaudle]

Do you think this is something that might be better in tappable?

[cheeaun]

I think it's better be a separate piece of code. The rough idea I had in mind is a touchmove event to grab the scrollTop values and animate the rotation of arrow, and touchend to detect if scrollTop reaches a certain threshold then begin refreshing.

[jcaudle]

So, still thinking of doing this? I didn't realize there was a patent on this when I suggested it... Now, according to the IPA, Twitter won't do anything, but I'm just wondering if you were still hoping to implement this...

[cheeaun]

Yeah, I think it's okay for now on the patent stuff. Before I try to implement this, I did some research and read this on Quora: http://www.quora.com/What-are-some-reasons-to-not-implement-Pull-to-refresh-UIs-and-actions-into-an-iPhone-app

Among the reasons, one that doesn't work for hnmobile is that the list of stories is not a timeline. Frontpage stories are sorted not by time but by upvotes + time + magic, so when doing pull-to-refresh, new items are not prepended to the list, the whole list just change. The feature may be cool, but not intuitive in this context, so I'm holding off till there's a better solution or a new paradigm appears. Also keeping this issue open as a reminder for myself 😄

If you're curious if pull-to-refresh may work at all in a -webkit-overflow-scrolling: touch container, here's another project that manage to implement it, which is worth reading the code: https://github.com/Harrison/Messenger

[jcaudle]

I think you are right on about the UX here. Perhaps shake to refresh would be better, but a browser based app might make that un-workable... and there's this: https://speakerdeck.com/u/mccasal/p/the-ux-of-shake-to-refresh-on-iphone-dark-side-of-ux 😄

Thanks for the tip to the Messenger app.

[cheeaun]

Hah! It is possible with shake.js https://github.com/alexgibson/shake.js/ 😃

[jcaudle]

Well, it might make more sense with the whole idiom of HN shaking things up with a refresh, but I don't know if that's necessarily the best idea to go with... 😉