Trade a Plane got a face lift too

I don't think it's ugly, but it's certainly not responsive; and apparently they've either done away with their mobile version (it redirects back to the desktop version) or perhaps they're still working on it. So right now it appears that they have nothing even remotely mobile-friendly.

Rich
 
The advanced search functionality is better. The UI is pretty busy though
 
I'm not sure why, but it reminds me of the old acukwik website.
 
Not sure I'm a big fan of the new look.
 
It's always loaded very slow no matter what for me. Never liked it. Also hate that controller watermarks pictures. That's just annoying.
 
The first few times I was on it was slower than a cub with a roached out engine.
 
SixPapaCharlie said:
No Barnstormers has the worst UI in the history of the web.
I want to browse their site but I always give up
Click to expand...


I can go search "Saratoga" on Barnstormers and get 6 hits. Then go click on Piper, then PA32 and get 30 ads with Saratoga in the header. I just don't understand.....
 
RJM62 said:
I don't think it's ugly, but it's certainly not responsive; and apparently they've either done away with their mobile version (it redirects back to the desktop version) or perhaps they're still working on it. So right now it appears that they have nothing even remotely mobile-friendly.

Rich
Click to expand...

Sounds like a good start to me for the web in general.
 
GeorgeC said:
Sounds like a good start to me for the web in general.
Click to expand...

I resisted responsive design for a long time until CSS3 became the standard. Before CSS3 and widespread support for "@media", I would design separate mobile versions. They would draw their content from the same source (either a common directory or a database), but their stylesheets would arrange it as appropriate for the viewport.

Nowadays, using "@media" allows for essentially the same approach, but using a single stylesheet and without the need for an "m" subdomain or subdirectory. I consider it basically the same thing that I've been doing all along, but implemented in a different way. It combines both sets of style rules into one stylesheet set and uses viewport size rather than user selection to determine how to arrange and scale the elements. Same end. Different route.

I have no opinion about which approach is "better." It can work either way, and which way works best depends on the site, its purpose, and the target users. Sometimes responsive design makes more sense, and sometimes an "m" subdomain makes more sense. But to redesign a site in such a way as to have no mobile-friendly version makes no sense at all.

Rich
 
I don't see a huge difference. It seems like the same layout and same content with same picture controls. Did they maybe change colors?
 
I'm a huge fan of the new Trade-A-Plane. I might have it take over as my primary searcher vs Controller
 
I liked the simplicity of the old site. Controller doesn't allow you to use the back button to flip between pages. Clunky.

This rev of TaP? Eh, I guess I'll get used to it.
 
DFH65 said:
The first few times I was on it was slower than a cub with a roached out engine.
Click to expand...
RJM62 said:
I don't think it's ugly, but it's certainly not responsive; and apparently they've either done away with their mobile version (it redirects back to the desktop version) or perhaps they're still working on it. So right now it appears that they have nothing even remotely mobile-friendly.

Rich
Click to expand...
I am using their new mobile so you may need to do a page refresh. Ctrl - F5. Hope this helps!
 
Mobile is the future. Actually, I'd tend to believe more people are using the web from their smartphone or tablet vs. sitting behind a desktop/laptop computer at home. Personally, I like the new TaP site and it no longer appears to be a relic from the 90s...selling relics from the 60s...to relics in their 70s. ;)
 
josephbelt01 said:
Mobile is the future. Actually, I'd tend to believe more people are using the web from their smartphone or tablet vs. sitting behind a desktop/laptop computer at home. Personally, I like the new TaP site and it no longer appears to be a relic from the 90s...selling relics from the 60s...to relics in their 70s. ;)
Click to expand...

One out of three, ain't bad. ;):)
 
josephbelt01 said:
Mobile is the future. Actually, I'd tend to believe more people are using the web from their smartphone or tablet vs. sitting behind a desktop/laptop computer at home.
Click to expand...

I suspect that you're right, but I also think it's a symptom of mass insanity. Why people would rather squint at a postage stamp-sized screen when a perfectly-good computer with a nice, wide-screen monitor is within reach is a mystery to me.

For me, mobile Internet is something that I use only when I don't have access to a computer, and I absolutely must look up some fact or respond to some piece of email. To use it preferentially makes as much sense to me as ****ting in the woods and wiping with pine needles when a perfectly good bathroom is available.

But sometimes you just have to shrug, go with the flow, and give the users what they want, even if it makes no sense to you.

josephbelt01 said:
Personally, I like the new TaP site and it no longer appears to be a relic from the 90s...selling relics from the 60s...to relics in their 70s. ;)
Click to expand...

I've seen worse. (In fact, I've built worse.) It's a bit busier than I personally like, but I don't think it's ugly.

Rich
 
RJM62 said:
I suspect that you're right, but I also think it's a symptom of mass insanity. Why people would rather squint at a postage stamp-sized screen when a perfectly-good computer with a nice, wide-screen monitor is within reach is a mystery to me.
Click to expand...

Because there isn't enough room in my office for a sofa nor a recliner in front of the computer. Plus the big monitors are a little bulky to drag down the hall when I go to get coffee even when I am in there.

I did finally put an old TV in there though, so I can compute with something mindless on in the background or pop it on to catch the weather forecast at "news" time.

Not that it isn't news time 24/7 on the Net, and weather is one URL away, but I still like seeing if someone trips and falls in front of the green screen on occasion. Haha.

And then I'm never in there. I went in the home office once last week to grab the real honest to goodness solar powered business calculator to drag it to the pile of paper on the kitchen table otherwise known as the annual pile of paperwork I'd love to light on fire with gasoline and watch it burn, known as "gathering crap for the tax guy".

Believing the current employer that I could possibly work from home as much as I did at the last employer was the first mistake... The office was actually useful and comfortable for that.

Oh wait. I went in there this morning when work called and said the "sales" menu on the phone system was hanging up on people. Ha. Easier to fix on the big monitor. RDP on the phone still leaves a bit to be desired, but it can be done... painfully. Everything else, all I need is an SSH session but the phone voice mail and menu stuff stuff is graphical.

One of our devs was funny today Rich. He's another Linux geek. Older former DoD coder. His new laptop was doing stupid video card games under a new load of Unbuntu and he yelled at it, "I just need a damned terminal!" and punched ALT-F1, dropped to a console, and went on with whatever he was working on. Haha.

He reloaded the Ubuntu with a newer version later in the day and switched to Kbuntu after reading somewhere what the Radeon card in his laptop and Unbuntu's default desktop may not quite get along.

Just need a terminal baby! Who needs all this mousetrap stuff with clicky clicky clicky?

I mention it because my two big monitors mostly do this when I'm working: Left monitor is iTerm full screen. Right monitor alternates between email client, slack/chat window, and RDP if I must for some Windows box.

And I'm slowly picking up enough PowerShell that I don't even really have to have the RDP other than to get to a Windows box that's on the domain so I can pop up an Admin PowerShell and get some other command line goodness done with domain admin credentials. :)

We did move our internal VMs to Hyper-V off of Xenserver. A long and boring budgetary take that goes like this, "Hey, XenServer is ticking me off and wasting my time. We can't get anyone to buy VMware. Don't we already have some spare Windows Server 2012 R2 licenses sitting here? Sweet!"

PowerShell tools to muck with Hyper-V VMs are actually quite good. I was more than a little surprised. Heck Hyper-V is quite good. Miles better than XenServer.

Coworker wrote a little PowerShell thing that pops a GUI up for moving VMs around the cluster in like 30 minutes from scratch while reading docs on the commands. As close to "easy button" as you can get in that stuff. Somewhat impressed and I loathe Microsoft for stuff they're doing in Win10. But Server 2012R2? Not too shabby, amazingly enough. Especially driving it with PowerShell.
 
I'm an IT guy and with Rich much like a pistol is a gun meant to fight back to your rifle, mobile is a device used when you can't get to a laptop or PC. There are many times when an email response requires more than a quick three work response I just wait. I think this is why phones are getting bigger and bigger people like the real estate. Pretty much every mobile site I have been to I come away feeling cheated a little. Guess I am old school.
 
RJM62 said:
I resisted responsive design for a long time until CSS3 became the standard. Before CSS3 and widespread support for "@media", I would design separate mobile versions. They would draw their content from the same source (either a common directory or a database), but their stylesheets would arrange it as appropriate for the viewport.

Nowadays, using "@media" allows for essentially the same approach, but using a single stylesheet and without the need for an "m" subdomain or subdirectory. I consider it basically the same thing that I've been doing all along, but implemented in a different way. It combines both sets of style rules into one stylesheet set and uses viewport size rather than user selection to determine how to arrange and scale the elements. Same end. Different route.

I have no opinion about which approach is "better." It can work either way, and which way works best depends on the site, its purpose, and the target users. Sometimes responsive design makes more sense, and sometimes an "m" subdomain makes more sense. But to redesign a site in such a way as to have no mobile-friendly version makes no sense at all.

Rich
Click to expand...

I haven't done anything on the implementation side since dinosaurs roamed the earth, but when the end result is a qualitatively different experience (that is, not only a different interface, but missing functionality) when you move from desktop to mobile, I can't help but feel that we took a wrong turn. I hate having to explain to my parents why their favorite site works on desktop but not on mobile, or vice versa, and don't have the heart to tell them that the real answer lies between "Sorry, you are not the customer" and "Perhaps you think you are being treated unfairly?"

I am increasingly inclined to relegate the tablet entirely to my preschooler. In related news, ThinkPad 11e's are pretty cheap...
 
DFH65 said:
I'm an IT guy and with Rich much like a pistol is a gun meant to fight back to your rifle, mobile is a device used when you can't get to a laptop or PC. There are many times when an email response requires more than a quick three work response I just wait. I think this is why phones are getting bigger and bigger people like the real estate. Pretty much every mobile site I have been to I come away feeling cheated a little. Guess I am old school.
Click to expand...

GeorgeC said:
I haven't done anything on the implementation side since dinosaurs roamed the earth, but when the end result is a qualitatively different experience (that is, not only a different interface, but missing functionality) when you move from desktop to mobile, I can't help but feel that we took a wrong turn. I hate having to explain to my parents why their favorite site works on desktop but not on mobile, or vice versa, and don't have the heart to tell them that the real answer lies between "Sorry, you are not the customer" and "Perhaps you think you are being treated unfairly?"

I am increasingly inclined to relegate the tablet entirely to my preschooler. In related news, ThinkPad 11e's are pretty cheap...
Click to expand...

There's really no need to eliminate functionality anymore. Even in the early days of the mobile Web the limitations were more due to slow mobile throughput, device memory limitations, browser limitations, and device display limitations, than viewport size limitations per se. It's always been possible to scale content items to fit mobile displays. We couldn't always do it on the fly, but we could do it before upload.

The problems were that even reduced in size, some elements would still take forever to load because of the slow throughput, might not render properly (or at all) on some older mobile displays, might exceed some devices' available memory, and in any case would hog the users' bandwidth.

Hence the stripped-down experience using sites optimized to older WAP standards and pre-3G wireless Internet. Visual elements were resized both for dimension and file size before being uploaded and visual design was kept sparse because the devices and connections were limited in what they could handle.

There's really no reason to do any of that any more. Nowadays, the only thing most phones (or touchscreen devices in general) can't handle are "hover" effects, and usually these can be implemented as "active" effects on touchscreen devices. There's no need for eliminating any functionality, and there's usually no need for a separate mobile site. Devices, throughput, CSS, and HTML have evolved to the point that in most cases, there's no reason to have more than one version.

There is, of course, a trade-off in terms of bandwidth usage. Most responsive sites send the same content regardless of the device that's requesting it. The reformatting / scaling / resizing / etc. all happen client-side in the browser, usually moderated by CSS. So if a picture is 1200 x 900 px and 150k on a desktop, a phone with a 320x240 px browser is still going to download that 150k picture, even though it's incapable of rendering it within the confines of its viewport.

It's possible to sniff the browser / viewport and send smaller files, but it's not terribly reliable. It also can cause rendering problems when a device is rotated, and it sometimes causes problems when users actually want the larger file for whatever reason (to steal save, to zoom in on and examine more closely, etc.). So most designers don't bother sniffing anymore. The same page is sent regardless of the device requesting it.

Most complaints I hear from mobile users nowadays about what I consider to be well-done responsive sites (my own or otherwise) are irrational ones, in my opinion. The most common is the vague complaint that "it looks different." Well, of course it does. How could it not look different without making the text unreadable and the images so tiny that you wouldn't know what they were?

Some users also complain that the collapsing menus common on mobile-formatted pages fill up the entire screens on mobile devices, especially when they include nested submenus. But if the menus are broken down into separate submenu pages, then they complain that they have to tap too many times and wait for the submenu pages to load.

The most bizarre complaint of all is when users complain that a page with a lot of text requires too much vertical scrolling to read on a viewport with a narrow horizontal resolution. Well, of course it does. Fewer columns mean more rows. Some designers try to address this with JS / jQuery that stops rendering when the bottom of the viewport is reached and requires the user to tap a "Show More" link to see the rest. That strikes me as pretty pointless because it adds at least one more click or tap (which users also complain about); and in most cases it only affects the rendering, not the download. (And if it does affect the download by only calling the rest of the content when tapped / clicked, it results in another delay, which users also complain about; and in any case, if it's only text, the bandwidth savings are trivial in any event.)

One very valid complaint of mobile users is that the intrusive scripts inviting users to take a survey / sign up for a newsletter / chat with an agent / enter their ZIP code for customized content / etc. are even more annoying and intrusive on mobile than they are on a desktop, and in some cases cannot be closed because the "X" is off the viewport. I avoid those sort of scripts in any case. I see no point in placing an obstacle in the path of a user who's already on my client's site ready to spend money. I liken it to being blocked in your path by a burly guy who demands your email address before you're allowed to walk into a brick-and-mortar store. It just makes no sense to repel your potential customers.

Another valid complaint of mobile users is that the stupid "Social" buttons take up too much of the screen on mobile (which they do). But if we omit the social buttons on mobile, users complain about that, too. They even complain if we include the social buttons but offer the option to hide them because it adds an extra tap to do so.

Other users complain that sites are less attractive in mobile because things like backgrounds and ornamental borders are stripped out or reduced in size to take up less of the viewport. But that's done to maximize the portion of the viewport that's allocated to content. If we used wider margins to show more of the background, users would complain that we're wasting space -- and they would be right. So we try to maximize allocation to content. That may mean that the site is less pretty.

What it comes down to in the end is that you can't please everyone. We now have the ability to fairly easily make sites work well on all devices, with no loss of functionality, and no truncation of content. But we can't do that without scaling, resizing, and juggling content, and there's no way around that. If the content is to be readable, it has to be rearranged. So as a designer, you have to just do the best you can to make sure that all the functionality and content is there, that it's readable, and that it's as attractive as possible. That's really all you can do.

The other thing that I tell myself when I get these complaints is that I am not the one telling the user to view the site on a postage stamp-sized screen. If they want to see the full layout in all its glory, they can use a computer. If they want to view it on a BlackBerry Curve, that's their choice; and the best I can do is make sure that all the content and functionality is there, that it's readable, and that it's not downright ugly.

Finally, there are a few cases in which stripped-down mobile versions still make a lot of sense. One example would be sites for auto repair shops, towing companies, locksmiths, urgent care centers, and other services that people might want or need to access while traveling, especially in rural areas. There are still places in American where EDGE mobile Internet is the best you're going to get; so companies targeting people who may need those sorts of urgent services along some stretch of rural road where the Internet is slow would be well-advised to keep their mobile sites lightweight.

The same would be true of aviation sites that include information that pilots may want to access "on the fly," as it were, rather than at their leisure. Mobile Internet at many rural airfields is less-than-wonderful; so unless you want to write off those locations, a lightweight mobile version would be a good choice.

Rich
 
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