From our talk, you can see that the User Interface is optimised for smartphone, tablet, desktop and TV - we believe that there are qualitatively different user interaction patterns in each form that it is important that you optimise for the different experiences, but for the developer experience it is not easy (or possible in some cases) to keep having to build one new app for each category of device that you want to target.
It must be noted, that a lot of tablet based apps work quite well on desktop devices, there are some unique differences that I can see from usage between the two. For example, lots of touch based tablet apps are built with horizontal scrolling as the primary mechanism for finding new content (think the NPR app, where you scroll left and right to find new stories), whilst on the desktop, many users appear to prefer the vertical scrolling of columns of data. This I believe is because it is more natural to swipe left and right with your finger, whilst it is easier to use your mouse scroll wheel on your desktop; this pattern for design was one that I explicitly made in the Desktop version of
IO Reader.
What are your experiences of developing for multiple formfactors? I would love to hear them, and your thoughts on runtime form-factor detection.
I lead the Chrome Developer Relations team at Google.
We want people to have the best experience possible on the web without
having to install a native app or produce content in a walled garden.
Our team tries to make it easier
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I love to learn about what you are building, and how I can help with
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