I think part of my impression was just a bad choice of book to link- I was checking it out as a reader, and so, to read a book which opens with installation instructions... yeah, i'm going to flip through that quite quickly! That probably hurt your animation performance- do you, like, render the next page to a canvas for the pagination animation, so when I was flipping through quickly, scanning it, the rendering couldn't keep up- going through it more slowly, does seem to drop less frames, though it does occasionally stutter- not nearly as problematic, though.
The hijacking I referred to...
Okay, I get linked from HN, read a few pages. I press back- it goes back a page. In the book. After tens of back button presses, I got irritated, and just searched my browser history for your comment.
I think the issue I ran into is mostly that you have made a PWA eBook reader, and I expected a book as a website. When I read 20 3-paragraph chunks of text, I very much do not want to press Back 20 times.
Now, if I bought a book, and installed this as a native app- probably helping performance too- I'd be alright with this- if the perf and screen space issues were fixed, I would be happy.
But as a website to read text on, it's not great in its current form, at least on mobile.
If you want to show other folks this, I might suggest linking to the home page and letting them select a book. This might get them in the mindset of "I am opening a book in an app", and not "I am visiting a link to a website with a book on it.". And please make sure the book itself opens in a new tab- so that, if they read a few dozen pages, they don't need to press the back button dozens of times to return to the page that linked them to the web app!
The settings for animations, etc- again, going to find settings is something i'd do in the context of an eBook reader app, but not something I'd really consider for a website.
Sorry for being so harsh- I just had a really terrible experience, likely largely because of my incorrect expectations (perf and whitespace aside), and wanted to make sure that came across properly. I assume most of the interesting stuff you've done has been on the "how do I lay out a book for (such and such a device and context), with diagrams, code blocks, inline images, etc, get reflow working nicely..." and not "having laid out a book into pages, how do I let a user flip through those pages"- but the latter has to be at least alright for me to be able to pay attention to the former!
The hijacking I referred to...
Okay, I get linked from HN, read a few pages. I press back- it goes back a page. In the book. After tens of back button presses, I got irritated, and just searched my browser history for your comment.
I think the issue I ran into is mostly that you have made a PWA eBook reader, and I expected a book as a website. When I read 20 3-paragraph chunks of text, I very much do not want to press Back 20 times.
Now, if I bought a book, and installed this as a native app- probably helping performance too- I'd be alright with this- if the perf and screen space issues were fixed, I would be happy.
But as a website to read text on, it's not great in its current form, at least on mobile.
If you want to show other folks this, I might suggest linking to the home page and letting them select a book. This might get them in the mindset of "I am opening a book in an app", and not "I am visiting a link to a website with a book on it.". And please make sure the book itself opens in a new tab- so that, if they read a few dozen pages, they don't need to press the back button dozens of times to return to the page that linked them to the web app!
The settings for animations, etc- again, going to find settings is something i'd do in the context of an eBook reader app, but not something I'd really consider for a website.
Sorry for being so harsh- I just had a really terrible experience, likely largely because of my incorrect expectations (perf and whitespace aside), and wanted to make sure that came across properly. I assume most of the interesting stuff you've done has been on the "how do I lay out a book for (such and such a device and context), with diagrams, code blocks, inline images, etc, get reflow working nicely..." and not "having laid out a book into pages, how do I let a user flip through those pages"- but the latter has to be at least alright for me to be able to pay attention to the former!