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A web developer made that page, but it wasn't his decision to put it there. I am going to go out on a very short limb here and say the web developer was on the

A web developer made that page, but it wasn't his decision to put it there. I am going to go out on a very short limb here and say the web developer was on the few people advocating against blocking tablet users from using the normal website, since they actually understand how the web works. In fact, when presented with the mandate that they needed a mobile app, the web developer probably just wanted to create a nice HTML5 site that could be served up in any tablet or mobile browser without the need to install a special app for their particular device. Know why? Because that is what web developers do.

Andrenid 15y ago
As a web developer who has to implement stupid stuff like the OP's link every single day, for a large corporation that refuses to listen to anything the IT team says... I tend to agree with you.
mcrider 15y ago
Web developers aren't always altruistic and some even have some business sense. Not that I agree with the what the 60 minutes site did (at least provide a link to go to the full site!), but pushing a mobile app will give them the opportunity to make money off of app fees (or app subscription services, or ads, or better data, or whatever).
- marshray 15y ago
  ... and slurp up your address book.
dmethvin 15y ago
I completely agree that web sites should be accessible to all visitors. The problem seems to be that the developers on many sites have infrastructure that is half a decade old and they are only making minor tweaks. It's easier for them to create a new dev group to build an app than to disturb their delicate website house of cards. Then there is the issue of privileges available to apps vs. web sites; until the browser supports webkitUploadAddressBook({ stealthy: true }) there will be a strong incentive to develop an app.
ramblerman 15y ago
so web developers are bad at convincing/advising their peers? You know, since we're over generalizing to empty statements anyways.
ArbitraryLimits 15y ago
I have a friend who was an accountant, found that he liked writing VBA scripts in Excel, and eventually wound up at a company big enough to need an IT department but small enough not to afford a big one, and now he's basically got a dual CFO/CIO role. Every six months or so he tells me about the new mobile app he's got in development for the salesmen to place orders, or for manufacturing line inspectors to check inventory, or something. I always point out that it would be cheaper, faster, and more general to just build a wep application, and he always rolls his eyes and tells me I don't understand the marketing power of mobile apps. Which is true, I don't. But it got me thinking about all the "browser is the new OS" and "the Internet is OS-agnostic" and "this is the end of Microsoft" talk from the late 90s. Anyone else remember those days? Because Steve Jobs and the IPhone pretty much undid it all. It's 15 years later and everyone cares about the OS again. Weird.
- Legion 15y ago
  > Because Steve Jobs and the IPhone pretty much undid it all. It's funny that you pin it on Jobs, who didn't want apps in the first place. Indeed, in 2007, Apple was telling developers to make web apps - http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2007/06/11iPhone-to-Support-Third-Party-Web-2-0-Applications.html http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2007/06/11iPhone-to-Support-... It was user demand that drove the creation of third party native app development.
  - wmf 15y ago
    Jobs didn't want apps or Jobs said he didn't want apps? If the native SDK wasn't ready yet, I would have been promoting Web apps, too.
    - Joeri 15y ago
      He really didn't want apps: http://www.nbclosangeles.com/blogs/press-here/Steve-Jobs-Didnt-Want-Apps-on-the-iPhone-in-the-Beginning-132334378.html http://www.nbclosangeles.com/blogs/press-here/Steve-Jobs-Did...
      - 15y ago
Silhouette 15y ago
> In fact, when presented with the mandate that they needed a mobile app, the web developer probably just wanted to create a nice HTML5 site that could be served up in any tablet or mobile browser without the need to install a special app for their particular device. Know why? Because that is what web developers do. That's what we did, the first time. We carefully constructed a responsive design that would scale to an iPad resolution and make good use of the screen space, and that would scale again to a smartphone, taking into account single-handed use, UI guidelines for the size of controls so they could be tapped reliably on a high-res screen, and all that jazz. And we learned in the process how many different ways Apple deliberately break the web browsers in their mobile devices. They pretend they're on a different size of screen that has no relationship to physical reality, and scale your page accordingly. I'm sure that's great if you really want to see an entire web site squeezed into a few square inches with text too small to read, but it completely breaks the usual CSS tools for building a responsive design. You can fix that by forcing the viewport size. However, if you do then as soon as the user rotates their iPad the browser zooms the page to show the same content at a different scale instead of actually letting the responsive design do its work by reflowing the layout to take advantage of the new page dimensions while keeping everything at the same size. You can fix that by setting a maximum zoom level, and a lot of developers stop here, but if you do then you'll sacrifice accessibility for users who genuinely want to zoom because they have imperfect vision and have difficulty enjoying a site at a size that is aimed at a typical visitor. You can fix that by setting the default zoom instead, detecting an orientation change event, and resetting your overrides each time the page rotates, as long as you can get all the proprietary hooks right and you don't mind either browser sniffing on your server or shoving the extra code to all your users even though most won't benefit. And so on, and so on. If Apple want usability for web sites on their iOS devices, they need to stop making it actively difficult for web developers to support their users. A single, simple option that says "make 1px = 1 physical pixel" would be sufficient to fix almost everything they get wrong as far as responsive design goes. Is that really so much to ask? <cynic> But maybe they don't, because after all they take a hefty cut of the profits on anything you make via an app, so they have a vested interest in pretending to support web standards but actually screwing them up to make app development more attractive. </cynic> If users don't like the experience they get as a result, there is an easy solution: don't buy Apple products that are shiny but broken, buy something else that works instead. There's no shortage of either good smartphones or good tablets from other sources today. (Edit: FAOD, the "we" above refers to my team and me, developing our own products. We're not connected to the site linked at the top of this discussion.)

Andrenid 15y ago

As a web developer who has to implement stupid stuff like the OP's link every single day, for a large corporation that refuses to listen to anything the IT team says... I tend to agree with you.

mcrider 15y ago

Web developers aren't always altruistic and some even have some business sense. Not that I agree with the what the 60 minutes site did (at least provide a link to go to the full site!), but pushing a mobile app will give them the opportunity to make money off of app fees (or app subscription services, or ads, or better data, or whatever).

marshray 15y ago
... and slurp up your address book.

dmethvin 15y ago

I completely agree that web sites should be accessible to all visitors. The problem seems to be that the developers on many sites have infrastructure that is half a decade old and they are only making minor tweaks. It's easier for them to create a new dev group to build an app than to disturb their delicate website house of cards. Then there is the issue of privileges available to apps vs. web sites; until the browser supports webkitUploadAddressBook({ stealthy: true }) there will be a strong incentive to develop an app.

ramblerman 15y ago

so web developers are bad at convincing/advising their peers? You know, since we're over generalizing to empty statements anyways.

ArbitraryLimits 15y ago

I have a friend who was an accountant, found that he liked writing VBA scripts in Excel, and eventually wound up at a company big enough to need an IT department but small enough not to afford a big one, and now he's basically got a dual CFO/CIO role. Every six months or so he tells me about the new mobile app he's got in development for the salesmen to place orders, or for manufacturing line inspectors to check inventory, or something. I always point out that it would be cheaper, faster, and more general to just build a wep application, and he always rolls his eyes and tells me I don't understand the marketing power of mobile apps. Which is true, I don't. But it got me thinking about all the "browser is the new OS" and "the Internet is OS-agnostic" and "this is the end of Microsoft" talk from the late 90s. Anyone else remember those days? Because Steve Jobs and the IPhone pretty much undid it all. It's 15 years later and everyone cares about the OS again. Weird.

Legion 15y ago
> Because Steve Jobs and the IPhone pretty much undid it all. It's funny that you pin it on Jobs, who didn't want apps in the first place. Indeed, in 2007, Apple was telling developers to make web apps - http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2007/06/11iPhone-to-Support-Third-Party-Web-2-0-Applications.html http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2007/06/11iPhone-to-Support-... It was user demand that drove the creation of third party native app development.
- wmf 15y ago
  Jobs didn't want apps or Jobs said he didn't want apps? If the native SDK wasn't ready yet, I would have been promoting Web apps, too.
  - Joeri 15y ago
    He really didn't want apps: http://www.nbclosangeles.com/blogs/press-here/Steve-Jobs-Didnt-Want-Apps-on-the-iPhone-in-the-Beginning-132334378.html http://www.nbclosangeles.com/blogs/press-here/Steve-Jobs-Did...
    - 15y ago

Silhouette 15y ago

> In fact, when presented with the mandate that they needed a mobile app, the web developer probably just wanted to create a nice HTML5 site that could be served up in any tablet or mobile browser without the need to install a special app for their particular device. Know why? Because that is what web developers do. That's what we did, the first time. We carefully constructed a responsive design that would scale to an iPad resolution and make good use of the screen space, and that would scale again to a smartphone, taking into account single-handed use, UI guidelines for the size of controls so they could be tapped reliably on a high-res screen, and all that jazz. And we learned in the process how many different ways Apple deliberately break the web browsers in their mobile devices. They pretend they're on a different size of screen that has no relationship to physical reality, and scale your page accordingly. I'm sure that's great if you really want to see an entire web site squeezed into a few square inches with text too small to read, but it completely breaks the usual CSS tools for building a responsive design. You can fix that by forcing the viewport size. However, if you do then as soon as the user rotates their iPad the browser zooms the page to show the same content at a different scale instead of actually letting the responsive design do its work by reflowing the layout to take advantage of the new page dimensions while keeping everything at the same size. You can fix that by setting a maximum zoom level, and a lot of developers stop here, but if you do then you'll sacrifice accessibility for users who genuinely want to zoom because they have imperfect vision and have difficulty enjoying a site at a size that is aimed at a typical visitor. You can fix that by setting the default zoom instead, detecting an orientation change event, and resetting your overrides each time the page rotates, as long as you can get all the proprietary hooks right and you don't mind either browser sniffing on your server or shoving the extra code to all your users even though most won't benefit. And so on, and so on. If Apple want usability for web sites on their iOS devices, they need to stop making it actively difficult for web developers to support their users. A single, simple option that says "make 1px = 1 physical pixel" would be sufficient to fix almost everything they get wrong as far as responsive design goes. Is that really so much to ask? <cynic> But maybe they don't, because after all they take a hefty cut of the profits on anything you make via an app, so they have a vested interest in pretending to support web standards but actually screwing them up to make app development more attractive. </cynic> If users don't like the experience they get as a result, there is an easy solution: don't buy Apple products that are shiny but broken, buy something else that works instead. There's no shortage of either good smartphones or good tablets from other sources today. (Edit: FAOD, the "we" above refers to my team and me, developing our own products. We're not connected to the site linked at the top of this discussion.)