Kickstrap: Enhancements for Bootstrap | Hacker News Reader

Kickstrap: Enhancements for Bootstrap

ajkochanowicz.github.com

104 pointscoderdude13 comments

It looks like the themes, thus far, are all from bootswatch:

1. With the author's blessing, the themes are indeed from Bootswatch (except for "Sandra")

2. @flixic I hear you about the small size issue.

3. Several asked how this enhances Bootstrap. At the very least, Kickstrap allows devs to start a Bootstrap project without editing the core BS files. So you can continuously upgrade Bootstrap without writing over your project. With this, there are themes, optimized web files (.htaccess, .html, crossdomain.xml), icon fonts, some js plugins, and class-granulated css animations.

4. While I think Thomas did a great job with Bootswatch, I would love to get better themes in here and I'm open to submissions.

@yourwebsitesUX on Twitter.

Some of the themes look really good. Sandra, the one you're using for this site, is not one of them...

Not a very constructive discussion, but I do quite enjoy how the project site looks.

Icon fonts is a cool idea, but they are not "> images".

They don't save additional requests (if you use spritesheets), are not smaller (2 color gif vs. full vector font), and most importantly, and why no decent designer would ever use them in small sizes, is that they absolutely lack any sharpness! Look at the QR code icon on their demo. It's a mess.

On the other hand, image icons can't change color on the fly or be dynamically upscaled, both of which are requirements when you are building a framework that is meant to be themed by users.

You can use png masks to create an icon, and then change the background color of the element below it. You can also use image scaling to make the icon any size you need.

http://www.cssbakery.com/2009/06/background-image.html

SenchaTouch does this for all their button icons.

The downside is that you can't use spritesheets, because each image needs to be inserted with an image tag, not a background image.

This is exactly why we need blend modes (at least multiply+screen) in CSS.

Have you viewed them on a new iPad? Much sharper than PNG/GIF. Even on "standard" res tablets, if an image-based UI element is scaled in any capacity, the smoothing renders it as blurry as an antialiased font or SVG.

Rather than themes with a few color changes, what would be neater would be themes which actually modified the default style of bootstrap. As a developer using bootstrap and without any design skills, that would be far more helpful.

At least for me, none of the addons seem to add anything compelling to the default bootstrap for me to use it.

I like that they added 'chosen'. Wish there was some kind of official Bootstrap 'add-on' or recipes repository.

The themes themselves are very good idea. However the ones that are provided aren't the most attractive ones.

I love the idea but how exactly is this an enhancement? The curated packages included don't make it unique, exactly.

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