Glider - A minimal, text-focused theme for Wordpress | Hacker News Reader

Glider - A minimal, text-focused theme for Wordpress

tomcreighton.com

85 pointstomcreighton30 comments

I like the simplicity of it, but almost immediately ran into a usability/navigation issue:

- I hit the arrow key to go to the menu, and choose "A Personal API". So far so good.

- I click on the arrow again, it just fades out. Ok... let's try the back button. That removes the hash from the URL, but I'm still on "A Personal API". Pressing Forward adds the hash back, but there are no changes on the page.

The only option I have to keep navigating is to refresh the page.

I'm on Chrome Canary, and I'm not seeing any errors in the console. On my iPhone, the arrow button seems to work to go back to the menu, but the back button is also broken.

I guess I should have pointed out that this is very much a 1.0 release. This is obviously not desired behaviour - thanks for the heads up.

same behavior on firefox 16.0.2 on windows xp.

same on firefox 16.0 in Win7

Nice concept, but I would definitely consider using something like PJAX (https://github.com/defunkt/jquery-pjax) in place of the javascript loading already in place.

Also, text is really tiny on my iPhone.

When clicking on the arrow to see the list of other posts and then clicking on one of those posts, I would expect the URL to change. Instead, of http://tomcreighton.com/2012/09/getting-something-off-my-too... I get this: http://tomcreighton.com/2012/10/chipping-away/#/getting-some...

Other than that, I like it. Good work.

Thanks! Yeah, appending a hash is not ideal, but it got the job done - I'll be updating it with pushState or similar in the future.

Unfortunately that menu slide in animation just doesn't work out well on an iPad 3. I'm not able to checkout the code ATM but I assume you're using jquery for the animation. CSS3 animations generally perform better on iPads. This plugin is great: http://playground.benbarnett.net/jquery-animate-enhanced/

Feedback: I expected the arrow at the right of the screen to take me to the next article, not to a navigation/contents menu.

I did too, but it was pretty quick to work out what was going on when I clicked it the first time. Not "intuitive", but nicely "discoverable" behaviour.

Nice :) I will try to add it to my blog later, it's perfect for me.

Just one thing: it's me, or the theme looks better on Mac than on Windows? The font seems too sharp on Win.

fonts generally look worse in Windows than Mac. OS X does some magic to smooth out those fonts.

> fonts generally look worse in Windows than Mac.

This is subjective.

See: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2007/06/12.html

I prefer the way fonts look on Windows. Other people prefer the way fonts look in MacOS.

> OS X does some magic to smooth out those fonts.

FWIW, it is Windows that is actually doing "magic" (in the sense that it is using a algorithm to fit pixels to grid) whereas MacOS just does a more direct rendering of the actual font curves. Whether or not you like that "magic" is up to you. Until we're using retina-style displays everywhere, I like the Windows "magic".

Eh, I think the consensus is that fonts are generally better on Mac. And this isn't one of those "Windows sucks because..." things, it's just that in general more fonts look better more often on Mac than Windows. You can definitely point to some fonts that render like crap on a Mac and you can definitely find people who think fonts look better on Windows but really, the truth is, nine times out of ten Mac wins when it comes to how good fonts look. I'm sure I'll be hated here for saying that especially since you linked to that HN post about it but HN is representative of a very very small and narrow but of the world of computer users. Go out into the world and ask around and you'll see. I never noticed it until I started using a Mac. Then it became abundantly clear when I had to start using Windows a lot again. I've seen hundreds of fonts on tens of displays on both platforms and Mac has got fonts in the bag most times.

I know there's an element of subjectivity to this but at the same time I don't think it's subjective at all. It's almost like saying the jury is still out on evolution or global warming. That's kinda true but, nah, not really.

Edit: After thinking about it for a moment, I still stand behind what I said but I want to narrow down "fonts" to web fonts only because that's where you see the biggest difference no matter the browser.

> It's almost like saying the jury is still out on evolution or global warming.

No, it is nothing like that at all.

Set up a side-by-side A/B test (such as setting up Safari on Windows to use Mac-rendering) and then ask a bunch of Mac users which they prefer and they will say Mac, ask a bunch of Windows users which they prefer and they will say Windows. There are pros and cons to grid-fitting or not grid-fitting, but ultimately those pros and cons are trumped by what you're used to seeing.

My guess is you're surrounded by a bunch of Mac users and suffering from the same bubble effect you are attributing to "HN".

I know people who use Windows and prefer the way OS X does font rendering, they just hate everything else about the platform.

It's currently using a Google Fonts font, so you could easily swap it out (or use a system font) if you were so inclined.

Very good theme, but should html5 push State when possible, it would make it near-perfect.

pjax would work today on several browsers with graceful degradation.

Great suggestions, thanks. This is very v1.0, I'm going to keep tinkering.

And, btw, you should not provide animation to that browsers not supporting push state at all. You're going to have a bad time if you mix full solid urls and hastag ones. Ask twitter...

Looks nice. But, how about not executing any JS content that is injected by plugins or theme other than what is required(like jQuery etc.)? I am talking about the "Tweet" link. Is that possible?

If a text-focused theme doesn't do justified text align, it looks bad.

Disagree. Justification causes the so called "River" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/River_(typography) that can cause readability problem.

With the relative lack of typographical control on the web right now, it's best to keep text non-justified.

Rivers mean your justification algorithm is broken. It is true that the browser being broken isn't something you can change, but using CSS hyphens and falling back to something like hyphenator.js allows you to have justified text that is basically free of rivers in practice. It's perhaps not as easy as it should be, but it is possible.

This problem is solvable (actually solved by TeX 30 years ago).

Try to read the page on a narrow screen like mobile phone, you will know how bad it is without hyphenation.

The ridiculous leading makes it unreadable for me.

I think the line height looks cool, but IS a bit hard to read on longer posts. Maybe dial it down to 30px?

love it.

Title should be 'Glider'.

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