Feature: Setting to toggle the classic UI

[mrusme]

First of all thank you for the great work and all the efforts that went into Glider. I truly enjoyed using it so far.

Having that said though, I sort of got used to the old, minimal and very simplistic UI. I understand that probably many people were looking forward to the new meta info for posts, but personally my eyes don't feel comfortable with the new UI unfortunately.

Long story short, I would like to add a feature request for a setting that allows bringing back the classic, minimal UI, so that long term users like myself, that got accustomed to that look, can keep enjoying it.

[Mosc]

Unfortunately, maintaining two completely different UIs is simply not feasible for me. If you strongly prefer the older interface I can only recommend you to stay on an older version of Glider that you can still grab from F-Droid.

If, however, you have a very specific part of the UI that you're not comfortable with, I can at least consider making that part configurable as a setting.

Let me know.

[mrusme]

@Mosc thank you kindly for the reply! I guess my main gripe with the new UI is the overview, which is a little too much on my eyes. I have just installed Hacki and found out that it features a similar stories overview as Glider did previous to the update.

If there was a way for at least the overview page to look like before (by offering a setting to disable the thumbnails and emojis/icons) I believe that it would already help a lot.

As for the new filters on the second row (underneath the top bar) and the additional bottom bar, I find that they take away a lot of screen estate on smaller phones (Pixel 6a here). However, I understand that making those configurable would probably be quite a lot of effort.

Maybe let's just wait and see if other people share my experience in regards to the UI, to see if it is even worth considering this feature in first place. :-)

[akirk]

I'd chime in to the ask for bringing back options to hide some “visual clutter" such as profile images and favicons. In 2.1.0, when you turn off large titles, the clickable area becomes quite small and it's easy to tap the username by mistake which has a very large target area due to the profile picture. That felt better balanced in the previous version.

[manueltarouca]

Installed v1.18.1 from F-Droid. @Mosc is this version ever going to be removed from the store?
If the Hacker News API changes I may end up creating a fork, can be a good project to learn a new language.

[naiyerasif]

I concur on an option to reduce the visual clutter. More specifically, options to

• disable favicons (both on Favorites and Comments sections)
• disable "new comment" snackbar (when I reload the comments)
• disable overlay buttons at bottom right in comment section
• hide "Catch up" and "Favorites" menu items from the bottom bar (I never hit those sections, and would prefer them in the hamburger menu)
• hide the bottom bar altogether
• bold font for story titles. Large font is a poor substitute for emphasizing an element such as story title. Bold font is a much more semantic choice here.

@Mosc please do let me know if all these would be a better fit in separate issues.

[Mosc]

Thanks for the suggestions, everyone. Some initial thoughts:

• Setting to disable favicons sounds reasonable.
• Setting to disable user avatars sounds reasonable. However, don't expect it to impact the tap target area much. The button that contains the username is basically the smallest that I can possibly make a button, already violating accessibility guidelines, but at least it's better than the previous even smaller tap area around the username to open the user's page, which had significant discoverability issues as well.
• I realize the bottom navigation bar takes up a decent amount of space, which is why I made sure that it scrolls out of your way as soon as you start swiping down. But I'm sympathetic to the idea of having a setting to hide it entirely. It would just need a good implementation in terms of both code and UX. (No, a hamburger menu is not a reasonable alternative. 😄)
• There's already a setting to disable the navigation buttons in comment threads.
• Material 3 does not typically use large font weights for titles. I'm not really sure why that would be more semantic. Having a page filled for two-thirds with bold text sounds pretty awful.

[Mosc]

Installed v1.18.1 from F-Droid. @Mosc is this version ever going to be removed from the store? If the Hacker News API changes I may end up creating a fork, can be a good project to learn a new language.

I have no plans on removing anything, anyone's welcome to continue using v1.x for as long as they'd like! However, I'm not sure how many versions F-Droid intends to keep in its archive. It currently only shows three versions for Glider.

Do feel free to create a fork that fits your and others' requirements. This repository contains the code of the app at any point in time and will continue to do so.

[akirk]

Setting to disable user avatars sounds reasonable. However, don't expect it to impact the tap target area much. The button that contains the username is basically the smallest that I can possibly make a button, already violating accessibility guidelines, but at least it's better than the previous even smaller tap area around the username to open the user's page, which had significant discoverability issues as well.

What if we distinguished between places where usernames appear:

• On frontpage-type lists
• In the headers of discussion pages
• On comments

My concerns regarding the tappable area are exclusive to the first item. I'd argue that in that list you don't need to navigate to all the submission of the user and it'd be reasonable to first go to the discussion page to then click the author to find out about their other submissions or comments. Thus, would it be an option to style them differently and/or even make them not tappable on the frontpage?

Setting to disable favicons sounds reasonable.

Thank you, that would be great. While I've learnt to visually mostly ignore them in the past days, I personally haven't been able to extract a lot of value from them. I can see them making nicer screenshots but I somewhat like the fact that I am not making decisions on which discussion I'd like to read based on the favicon.

[naiyerasif]

Material 3 does not typically use large font weights for titles. I'm not really sure why that would be more semantic. Having a page filled for two-thirds with bold text sounds pretty awful.

@Mosc Bold fonts are semantic compared to larger fonts in the sense that text-to-speech (TTS) puts more emphasis on them. For titles, I presume that large font option is there to emphasize them from rest of the content. If this assumption is incorrect and if Material 3 doesn't enable doing this properly, then you can ignore my suggestion on this.

[Mosc]

What if we distinguished between places where usernames appear:

* On frontpage-type lists

* In the headers of discussion pages

* On comments

My concerns regarding the tappable area are exclusive to the first item. I'd argue that in that list you don't need to navigate to all the submission of the user and it'd be reasonable to first go to the discussion page to then click the author to find out about their other submissions or comments. Thus, would it be an option to style them differently and/or even make them not tappable on the frontpage?

There are already differences between the way stories are displayed based on where they appear, but I do try to keep those differences to a minimum for maintainability reasons. I remain unconvinced that the username deserves such a special treatment. The username button honestly takes quite a small amount of space compared to the total tappable area of a story, rarely more than 10%.

Setting to disable favicons sounds reasonable.

Thank you, that would be great. While I've learnt to visually mostly ignore them in the past days, I personally haven't been able to extract a lot of value from them. I can see them making nicer screenshots but I somewhat like the fact that I am not making decisions on which discussion I'd like to read based on the favicon.

Settings for toggling both favicons and user avatars has been added in 61d883c! I recommend setting the theme variant to monochrome for an optimally boring look. 😄

[Mosc]

@Mosc Bold fonts are semantic compared to larger fonts in the sense that text-to-speech (TTS) puts more emphasis on them. For titles, I presume that large font option is there to emphasize them from rest of the content. If this assumption is incorrect and if Material 3 doesn't enable doing this properly, then you can ignore my suggestion on this.

I still have to do proper accessibility testing, but I kind of hope that defining specific text elements with their style type, which Glider does (title/body/label styles from Material typography are used), has a larger effect on TTS than just making something bold.

[akirk]

There are already differences between the way stories are displayed based on where they appear, but I do try to keep those differences to a minimum for maintainability reasons. I remain unconvinced that the username deserves such a special treatment. The username button honestly takes quite a small amount of space compared to the total tappable area of a story, rarely more than 10%.

Right, vertically it might be a third but I have to admit that I was able train myself to just avoid tapping in that area. I was more coming from the perspective that for me it is just undesireable to go to a user page from the story overview. But I understand that consistency is also important to you.

[akirk]

Settings for toggling both favicons and user avatars has been added in 61d883c! I recommend setting the theme variant to monochrome for an optimally boring look. 😄

Thank you! Looking forward to the next release!

[xusiai]

The APK for 1.18 seem to have disappeared from F-Droid and Git releases. If someone still have the old version of Glider could you please upload it somewhere?

As for input on the new version - other than what has been stated about the size of the bottom bar - I loved the monochrome / pure black color of the entire application in the old version and wish the pure option still covered this rather than maintaining the two tone material you theme. However as this is a minor issue for most people I am content with using the old version should I be able to find the apk somewhere.

[Mosc]

The APK for 1.18 seem to have disappeared from F-Droid and Git releases. If someone still have the old version of Glider could you please upload it somewhere?

I've created a GitHub release with an APK for the last pre-v2 version: https://github.com/Mosc/Glider/releases/tag/v1.18.1.

As for input on the new version - other than what has been stated about the size of the bottom bar - I loved the monochrome / pure black color of the entire application in the old version and wish the pure option still covered this rather than maintaining the two tone material you theme. However as this is a minor issue for most people I am content with using the old version should I be able to find the apk somewhere.

That's a good point. I've made the app bar and navigation bar respect the pure background setting more in 53ef45c and 4084909.

[xusiai]

@Mosc Thank you!

[levid0s]

I prefer the old UI, too. I tried turning off all settings available, but I still reverted to the old version (thanks for making the apk available on Github).

The oversized buttons at the bottom, and the buttons on the top, take up so much space when 99% of the time these are not used. Would be great if they could be hidden.

There's also a few pixels of extra spacing between articles in the old client that makes all the difference; and different font sizes for article title vs metadata. In the new UI everything just flows together like a wall of text.

The background highlighting of the username takes the attention from the article title, I find it too forward. The old client used a different foreground colour on the same background (on a smaller font size and darker colour), that made it obvious enough that it's a tappable element, without becoming distracting.

[Mosc]

The oversized buttons at the bottom, and the buttons on the top, take up so much space when 99% of the time these are not used. Would be great if they could be hidden.

As some may have noticed, a setting was added in v2.8.0 to switch from a navigation bar (or rail) to a navigation drawer. I stand by the opinion that it's really bad for feature discovery, but it undeniably frees up some space in the unscrolled state.

I'm also exploring incorporating the story type selection (top/new/etc.) into the app bar rather than its own vertical section. To be continued.

There's also a few pixels of extra spacing between articles in the old client that makes all the difference; and different font sizes for article title vs metadata. In the new UI everything just flows together like a wall of text.

In the same update, padding was reduced slightly between story title and metadata, which helps grouping related text visually. I doubt it addresses all your concerns related to this, but it might alleviate the "wall of text" complaint a bit.