Nice little touch in the new Blogger templates

Google's Blogger service added a new templating system today. This may not sound like much, but, you know, it's Blogger; they never, ever change it. This is probably the biggest change in about two years.

So, bored with my existing template, I used one of the new fancy adjustable ones. You can see it here now; I think it's rather nice.

Now, I've an iPhone 3G. In case you don't know, iPhoneOS device speeds go as follows. iPhone, iPhone 3G - slow. iPod Touch 1st gen - faster. iPod Touch 2nd gen - faster again. iPhone 3GS, iPod touch 3rd gen - very fast. iPad - fastest (one assumes). So, it can often take a few second to render larger web pages. With the old template, the background appeared almost instantly, and the rest of the blog after about five seconds. With the new template, though, this happens almost instantly:

And then the sidebar and comment box and so forth appears after a bit. I initially actually thought that it was a special cut-down mobile-optimised view, but it's just very graceful loading under difficult circumstance. Perfectly usable while still loading. Very clever, Google, and hopefully it's a design technique that we'll see more people employing as smartphones become more mainstream.