

Glider - A minimal, text-focused theme for Wordpress - tomcreighton
http://tomcreighton.com/2012/10/glider-theme/

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callmevlad
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.

~~~
tomcreighton
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.

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pwenzel
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.

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Casseres
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...](http://tomcreighton.com/2012/09/getting-something-off-my-toolchest/) I
get this: [http://tomcreighton.com/2012/10/chipping-away/#/getting-
some...](http://tomcreighton.com/2012/10/chipping-away/#/getting-something-
off-my-toolchest)

Other than that, I like it. Good work.

~~~
tomcreighton
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.

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navs
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/>

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

~~~
bigiain
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.

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gjulianm
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.

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

~~~
georgemcbay
> 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".

~~~
bpatrianakos
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.

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georgemcbay
> 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".

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

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

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ckluis
pjax would work today on several browsers with graceful degradation.

~~~
yuchi
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...

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gprasanth
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?

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

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hfz
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.

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hdevalence
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.

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halo
The ridiculous leading makes it unreadable for me.

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

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capex
love it.

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rkudeshi
Title should be 'Glider'.

