Show HN: HN Special – A visual theme and Chrome extension for Hacker News | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: HN Special – A visual theme and Chrome extension for Hacker News

gabrielecirulli.github.io

87 pointsterabytest71 comments

Nice, but I find it a bit too hard to read. On my Stylebot style, I reduced the orange to just a highlight colour. I find it pretty pleasurable to use. Feel free to take anything from it that you want: http://stylebot.me/styles/2800

Some of the selectors in the CSS are very contrived. I found it was the only way to select what I wanted in a document made of tables within tables with barely any classes.

Also, I totally feel you on this! The underlying HTML for HN is absolutely terrible.

Oh yeah, I see. I think I'm going to try and implement a low contrast theme, with grey links and easier to read text. Thanks for the link, I'll have a look at it!

High contrast! Let me see the website not squint and guess!

I added a bit more font weight to everything[1]. Repo[2] for anyone that wants to try it out. It's a bit hacky though, I just modified the generated css rather than the styl input.

http://i.imgur.com/4W6aZEZ.png

https://github.com/reidHoruff/hn-special

Great work, though it's a shame it's a browser extension. You can't use it on Firefox or mobile.

There's a site, tomodo.com, that allows you to modify webpages much like a greasemonkey script or a browser extension and then publish it as a native website. I'd suggest you'll look into that.

Wow. Thanks for sharing. That's going to become my goto site now!

Looks like there is a Hacker News mod already.

http://hnews.tomodo.me

That doesn't look safe at all.

Here[1] is a theme I made for HN that can be installed on Firefox using Greasemonkey, or on Chrome using Tampermonkey.

[1] https://github.com/dparpyani/HackerNews-Dark-Theme

I always use http://hckrnews.com/ and not the normal frontpage. Many small gems without many upvotes get lost on news.ycombinator.com.

Fantastic, thanks for posting. I understand the design aspects of these skin extensions, but I don't want to scroll more than I already do to see the same content.

Amazing. I loved the hour/date marks.

Lately I've realized that most of new extensions and applications are specifically designed for Chrome.

I stay loyal to Firefox, but it looks like it has fallen a bit behind.

Same here. There are quite some extension I find attractive but can't use because I remain celibate to Firefox.

It's nice, but thin fonts are very hard to read (screenshot: http://uk.omg.li/QPvZ)

Oh, damn that's a mess. What OS is that?

Chrome 28 on Mountain Lion http://uk.omg.li/QP02

That's very strange, I'm running the same setup as well. Have you installed any system tweaks that change the way fonts are rendered?

Yes, but a font-weight of 100 is never a good or useful thing, it's terribly unreadable

Probably Windows. Chrome uses GDI on Windows instead of DirectWrite for some unfathomable reason: https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=25541

Nope, it's Chrome 28 on Mountain Lion http://uk.omg.li/QP02

Many thanks to everyone for the feedback! I'll try implementing the ideas you've given me (easier to read colors and other tweaks).

For those who've installed the extension, it should auto-update when new features come up and you should be notified of the presence of new modules and the low-contrast theme.

Good job on the extension. I did have a couple of suggestions:

1. Have an alternate "dark" theme version for those of us who like dark backgrounds as opposed to bright eye-popping colors.

2. Similar to the "Open links in new tabs" option, would it be possible to add a "Open comments in new tabs" option?

Thanks!

I'll try implementing a low-contrast version with less harsh colors soon! About the "Open comments in new tabs" option, yes, that's a very good idea. I'll do that as well!

Here's a dark theme I created in Stylish. Code: http://pastebin.com/BhZTuwJV Screenshot: http://i.imgur.com/cnrYGdR.png

Collapsible comments are my top priority for a hacker news extension. It looks really neat though.

I just installed it and really like it however when I scroll (quite slowly) down the main page though the text and background blur together so that I can't see anything. I'm not sure if it's because of the thin fonts of the font colours (the headlines seems to blur the most) but it's quite annoying. I'd normally scroll at that speed and be able to skim the headlines. It's impossible to do with the blurring.

I've just installed it and I'm liking it. The links are a bit hard to read on the home-page (they are a bit faded) but otherwise it looks good. Thanks!

I'm glad you like it!

I like it also. My Special Eyes have trouble with default HN. For me, like orf, the faded colors are a bit of a strain.

Also, if I don't open a story in a new tab, but go out and back, I sometimes have trouble finding the entry I just used (and its comments). A color for "just visited" would be nice.

I agree. The faded orange needs to be a few % less gray/white.

Very cool, I like the borderless body area. I agree with Orf on the hard to read (perhaps a little darker links/textbox font?). The other thing is that endless scroll doesn't seem to be working for me.

I really like it. To be honest, I prefer it more than Georgify [1].

[1] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/georgify/ofjfdfale...

The only problem I have with it is that after opening comment section, the design pops-out and overwrites the original design.

How do you mean? Are comments hard to read?

Technically speaking, old design for comments are loaded and then, using JavaScript, it's replaced with the new design.

I'm just say that the colour contrast is atrocious. I've got pretty good eye sight and the text on that screenshot looks blurry. Both the unvisited and visited link states fail at AA colour contrast accessibility levels.

[edit] - It took me a while to find the install link. I thought it was a heading. Why don't you use an underline for links?

I usually like my news sites to have a darker theme, so I quickly threw this together in the Stylish Plugin, to work with your HN Special Extension http://pastebin.com/BhZTuwJV . Just added the style to work with URL's on the domain "ycombinator.com"

here's a screenshot for those who just want an easy comparison http://i.imgur.com/cnrYGdR.png

I really love the infinite scrolling. I think there should be a bit more contrast. It is hard to read the light colored orange on white. Also the visited (light light orange) is a pain. And maybe highlighting the points a thread has would be a nice feature too. Maybe another darker color for that.

Infinite scrolling is good, until you want to use the search box!

Yep. I would suggest to add a position: fixed to the header. And place the searchbox there of course.

I was thinking about maybe adding a "Low contrast" option to the menu or something like that, which enables a version of the theme with easier to read colors.

What do you mean about highlighting the points in a thread? Making the count below the title more visible?

I like the overall design but the links are too light orange which make it hard to read. Design's number one goal is to 'get out the way of the user'. Change the link color to something with more contrast against the white background. Then I'll really like it.

I like it. It's about time someone do something about it or I was planning to do something like that myself. It would be awesome one could customize the color and fonts and stuffs like that.

The active hyperlink is too fade to read. Please change that.

Did you test it on a MBPr ? The screenshot looks really blurry here. EDIT: it's just the screenshot, the actual extension works fine. A bit more contrast would be appreciated though. Maybe a different background color for links ?

Glad it's working fine for you!

Very cool! I just forked it, thinking of implementing collapsible comments.

Nice one.

BUT!, it's strange, maybe because I'm SOO used to HN (like I'm soo used to Google), I had to change back. Is it just a case of "you'll get used to it"?

I think so. Maybe try it out for a day or so. If anything's wrong, please let me know what you think!

Oh, by the way: even if you like the features but not the theme, you can easily disable the theme only from the settings menu at the top (the gear icon in the header)!

What you're probably missing is the change in information density. Most HN redesigns jack up the font size and the padding between links.

Fantastic! I've only one suggestion. I'm using a Macbook Pro (Retina), and the up-arrow icons are extremely blurry. Other than that, everything looks amazing. :)

Thank God for the new interface. Despite the bright orange, I will never go back to original Hacker News. Please implement it for HN India too :)

Too much orange. Difficult to read fonts. If only it had some more soothing colors, I would use it daily! Nice though!

It looks so crisp and nice, but the upvote arrows are soooooo bad. If you could replace those it would be amazing.

Oh yeah, I'll try replacing those soon.

Ow...that visual theme hurts my eyes.

Just installed it and think it's superb. I hope HN takes some influence from your extension.

Please, make it 100% width ! PLEASE!

Good idea!

Excellent work!

HN is like Craigslist in a UI/UX sense, very conservative (or they don't care at all).

Yet both work perfectly.

Other example is the Slackware website: http://www.slackware.com/

Slackware will always be slackware! Its been awhile since I visited their site (like early 2000's). It still looks the same!

It's really nice, but not a regular Chrome user. Somebody loves the OS X Mavericks theme!

Am I the only one that can't read the visited links without some serious eye strain?

Is the color too light?

It does need some more contrast. Also, while I do appreciate the elegance overall (I'm a UI designer as well), the vertical space could be tightened up a bit to get some more comments on a scree. Perhaps adding some options to the extension to allow toggling between a "Tight" and "Airy" stylesheet?

It doesn't bother me -that- much, they're visited after all.

This is lovely. Thank you!

Would it be possible to port this as a Safari extension? Thanks again.

Probably, yeah. I'm not sure how development for Safari works, but I could give it a try soon.

Please,please,please implement the Firefox version..

I love it!

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