I just want bigger buttons on mobile devices. I do most of my reading on a tablet and almost never vote because the effort of zooming in to make the buttons targetable is just too much. Even dealing with typing in this tiny entry box is highly obnoxious.
The apps normally make reading comments much more difficult by a) enforcing a very large font size and/or b) only showing a single level of comments at a time. AFAIK news:yc does both of these things.
Awesome! When it first came out it certainly did not ;P. (The main developer works with me on Cydia, and I complained bitterly about the font and comments issues; I'm surprised he didn't tell me he changed the behavior.)
(edit: Tried it out, and it still isn't as usable as the website. It still has larger fonts and only shows three short lines from each comment at a time. The list of articles also has variable sized rows that often overflow onto multiple lines with other text at the same level: difficult to skim the titles quickly. I'd much prefer a subtle change to the mobile HN website to fix the buttons ;P.)
I actually like Hacker News' condensed retro web look. It has a very lightweight bare metal feel to it. I am not really a fan of designs that have "foofy" margins which make the noise to signal ratio higher.
I'm surprised you think that margins decrease the signal-to-noise ratio. I find generous margins make text easier to read - which is why print magazines and newspapers will split text into columns even when the entirety of a page is taken up by one story.
You seemed to be suggesting that it had something to do with margins, which is actually a different issue than column width. In a newspaper, you can have a lot of columns with small margins, for example.
You also seemed to be suggesting that it had something to do with separating different stories on the same page.
When you have one column of text, as in the frontpage of HN, large margins implies a narrow column of text.
My point about separate stories is that it is independent of them. Magazines and newspapers layout their stories in columns. I was anticipating someone saying "Yes, but they also show multiple stories on one page." But magazines and newspapers still use narrow columns of text even when they have a single story on the page.
If I set my browser window to a reasonable width I can have legibility without foofy margins and I can use the rest of my 1280 pixels for something else. Window systems - they rock
I created this two months ago as an experiment to see if I could improve the readability of the site. Every month someone creates one of these but I've never been happy with them so I wanted to see if I could do better myself.
I then applied it and let it sit for two months to give myself some time to try it out. I decided I like it, so I've kept it, and now it's time to share it and see if you like it and what improvements you'd want to see.
I've seen a few of those and I think you've done a fantastic job in making a style that's better looking and more readable without taking away from the functionality. Most of the others I've seen tend to make type HUGE, and tend to lose the clear sense of hierarchy and the scanability of the home page.
Props. That's what real design is, not just making it pretty.
I came here to yell at you that you didn't include a screenshot. But since no one else was complaining about it, I looked again and read all the text in the README and found the small normal paragraph that says I should open the screenshot.png file in the repo.
Can't you just include that in the README? github supports any markup format you want in READMEs.
The designer inside of me is loving this. Thank you.
While I also love the retro feel of the regular HN, this is just so much easier on the eyes. And when considering how long I spend on HN these days, this is probably a good idea... My eyes will thank me in the future :)
And here is a version that is a greasemonkey script so that you don't have to install an extra plugin (for Chrome anyways). Just download in Chrome or drag and drop onto Chrome.
It seems like a lot of people maintain code for these stylesheets on github (so it's easy for the developer to maintain), and then publish to stylebot or stylish (so it's easy for the user to update and maintain). I've always wondered why there's not better integration between the two. It seems like it should be pretty easy to create a service like stylebot that pulls stylesheets from github repos (just from master, of course).
Looks good, but the textured background definitely doesn't help readability. The lighter grey on the visited text is fairly difficult to read against it.
Could this be made to also eliminate articles regarding certain topics or from certain sources? I really hate the proliferation of gadgety religious flamewars, and the enabling of bloggers whose modus operandi is just to stoke the fires of these ridiculous squabbles.
Absoloutely love the theme. I use http://hn.gethifi.com/ on my phone for Hacker News, so this theme makes the desktop experience a lot more consistent with my mobile experience
You should also mention that it adds vi-style keybindings for the main page, which is at least as awesome as the killfile. I use RES on Reddit mainly for its keybinds, and I've been looking for something similar for HN for ages. Thanks!
Ouch, font rendering on Windows/Linux is quite bad. I think that might be also why your headers looks unbalanced. Here's what it looks like on my computer; a lot better.
I once tried reddit's default look, its old mobile look and its new beta mobile look on my psp. All 3 looked terrible so I was very surprised that HN looked perfect on both. It doesn't need any fixing.
