Roundo: our new mobile-friendly theme, proposed to be set as default

I switched us from Roboto to the DejaVu Sans font, increased the darkness of most text, and increased by a few pixels the size of most text. Again, choose the "Roundo Light (Staging/Testing)" theme to see these changes. What do folk think? @Max_B in particular, are you tempted back?

Well I can tell you that these changes are a significant improvement, during the daylight on my iphone and ipad the site appears usable now, I still have to check how it appears at night of for extended periods of use. But I still wouldn't use it yet, after just 10 minutes my eyes and head are protesting.

My initial thoughts is that on my mobile devices and PC, there is still not enough contrast for me, the greys are all still too pale for me (and the low contrast blue colour for links, titles etc is still an uncomfortable strain for me), text size could also be a slightly larger for comfort on my iphone only, the font choice though seems good. All those greys are going to have to get significantly stronger, (towards the charcoal end, more a greyish black, than a greyish white) for me to consider changing. But I do like they way the changes are going...

[Laird]

I can tell you that these changes are a significant improvement

Great to hear.

the low contrast blue colour for links, titles etc is still an uncomfortable strain for me

Have just changed that from #3f5efb to #082dff. Better? Would raw blue #00f be even better?

Will hopefully get on to your other requests soon.

Great to hear.


Have just changed that from #3f5efb to #082dff. Better? Would raw blue #00f be even better?

Will hopefully get on to your other requests soon.

The fully saturated version of #3f5efb seems to be [approximately] #0029fb - if you want to keep the colour scheme? Although I think the red in it is half the problem.

[Laird]

Have changed to #0029fb, although the difference from #082dff is too subtle for me to make out.

Some text in #0029fb
Some text in #082dff

Even on sequential lines I can't distinguish the two.

Have changed to #0029fb, although the difference from #082dff is too subtle for me to make out.

Some text in #0029fb
Some text in #082dff

Even on sequential lines I can't distinguish the two.

couple of extra things I noticed...

on the original design, clicking the green arrow to the left of threads would take you to the latest post that you had not yet read. The responsive design has a an empty (or full) speech bubble on the left which I guess is supposed to do the same, but does nothing for me when clicking on it.

There seems no way to reply to threads without quoting, on the old design there was also a separate reply button on the right after the end of the last post that started with an empty reply box.

[Laird]

on the original design, clicking the green arrow to the left of threads would take you to the latest post that you had not yet read.

Ah, yep, @Typoz had the same difficulty as you. In this Roundo theme, the green arrow is replaced by a blue rounded rectangle with the text "New" inside it.

The responsive design has a an empty (or full) speech bubble on the left which I guess is supposed to do the same, but does nothing for me when clicking on it.

No, that's unrelated. It's the thread icon, which indicates whether the thread is "hot" or normal, and, in the default theme, also changes its appearance based on other factors such as whether the logged in member has posted to it or not - I'm not sure that Roundo supports those different factors, but I haven't investigated carefully.

There seems no way to reply to threads without quoting, on the old design there was also a separate reply button on the right after the end of the last post that started with an empty reply box.

Right, that's a valid criticism - I hadn't noticed the lack of that reply button until you mentioned it, probably because I have Quick Reply enabled so there's always an editor at the bottom of the thread in which I can compose and send new replies without replying to any particular post. I've mentally flagged re-inserting that button as a "to-do" item. (And I still intend to implement the other style features you'd requested. I also have plans to integrate a dark/light mode toggle, but let's focus on getting the light mode up to scratch before venturing into that territory).

Ah, yep, @Typoz had the same difficulty as you. In this Roundo theme, the green arrow is replaced by a blue rounded rectangle with the text "New" inside it.

That does seem ok, possibly the blue rectangle is more visible than the green arrow, i.e. could be a positive.

The responsive design has a an empty (or full) speech bubble on the left which I guess is supposed to do the same, but does nothing for me when clicking on it.

No, that's unrelated. It's the post icon, which indicates whether the thread is "hot" or normal, and, in the default theme, also changes its appearance based on other factors such as whether the logged in member has posted to it or not - I'm not sure that Roundo supports those different factors, but I haven't investigated carefully.

I'm not sure on this empty/filled speech bubble. On the single occasion when I clicked on a 'full' bubble, it seemed to turn to 'empty'. The associated action was that the unread posts in that thread were no longer listed as unread. i.e. it seemed to have the effect of 'mark all posts as read' within that thread. I've not done extensive testing.

What I'm suggesting (have not confirmed) is that the rounded blue rectangle effectively disappears when the filled speech bubble on the left is clicked and the count of unread posts decreases, even though I've not actually opened or viewed any posts. That's an unfortunate outcome, should come with some sort of warning, like (in another context) "Are you sure you want to delete this important file?"

edit: It seems that may be existing behaviour. Probably in all the time I've been on the forum I never noticed or clicked on that before. The current theme has a pop-up title "New Posts" though to be polite it should warn that clicking it will mark all posts as read.

That does seem ok, possibly the blue rectangle is more visible than the green arrow, i.e. could be a positive.


I'm not sure on this empty/filled speech bubble. On the single occasion when I clicked on a 'full' bubble, it seemed to turn to 'empty'. The associated action was that the unread posts in that thread were no longer listed as unread. i.e. it seemed to have the effect of 'mark all posts as read' within that thread. I've not done extensive testing.

What I'm suggesting (have not confirmed) is that the rounded blue rectangle effectively disappears when the filled speech bubble on the left is clicked and the count of unread posts decreases, even though I've not actually opened or viewed any posts. That's an unfortunate outcome, should come with some sort of warning, like (in another context) "Are you sure you want to delete this important file?"

edit: It seems that may be existing behaviour. Probably in all the time I've been on the forum I never noticed or clicked on that before. The current theme has a pop-up title "New Posts" though to be polite it should warn that clicking it will mark all posts as read.

Yep, I didn't see that blue 'new' button before... but now I do :-) And I'll stop clicking on the speech bubble... because the blue 'new' appears at the end of the title, it varies its position based on the title length, so it's not so easy to scan for as the green arrow was. As I'm getting more familer with it, I realise now I can reproduce how I used to use the old site, by clicking 'Active Threads' in the drop down in the top header to get threads ordered with the most recent posts at the top, then look for the blue 'new'.

[Laird]

I'm not sure on this empty/filled speech bubble. On the single occasion when I clicked on a 'full' bubble, it seemed to turn to 'empty'. The associated action was that the unread posts in that thread were no longer listed as unread. i.e. it seemed to have the effect of 'mark all posts as read' within that thread. I've not done extensive testing.

Hmm. I can't reproduce this behaviour, and I can't see how in theory it could even be the case, because the bubbles aren't hyperlinks and don't seem to have any "onclick" event associated with them either.

[Laird]

I realise now I can reproduce how I used to use the old site, by clicking 'Active Threads' in the drop down in the top header to get threads ordered with the most recent posts at the top, then look for the blue 'new'.

Just an FYI: I've modded the home page shown by this theme so that by default it displays threads in descending order of those with most recent posts, so this might be more convenient than using Active Threads, since it includes all threads (via the page numbering) by default, whereas Active Threads is limited in the period of time it shows.

And if you just want to see your unread threads, you can click on "Unread Posts ([unread count])" in the top menu.