So for the past several weeks, I have been running my phone almost exclusively in greyscale. This is a tactic that is normally recommended for reducing phone usage, and can be easily done in iOS and Android through accessibility settings. The primary argument is without the colours to grab your attention, the phone looks less enticing.

My experience has been mostly positive, with a few drawbacks. Overall, it has made me use my phone less, although it is not the only change I have done.

Benefits:

• I do find my phone less distracting. It is less appealing.
• Text based content still works great.
• Images are normally readable, although sometimes I miss subtlety in images.
• If needed I can toggle it off, but I rarely do so.

Drawbacks:

• It took me several days to adjust, and it was a hard adjustment period.
• Some apps use colour for organization. The biggest offender in my use case for this is Three Cheers for Tildes. Overall the app is great, but new comments being denoted by an orange line is not readable for me. However, this just at times leads me to wait until I am at a desktop to look at the thread. I do think both on website and in apps Tildes should look at putting new comments with a dotted line, to not rely only on colour for accessibility reasons.

Surprises:

• The biggest surprise for me is how unappealing my phone is in colour, since the use of colour everywhere is jarring. Most people do not realize how bright and colourful even phone menus are, until they run greyscale for an extended period of time. It has become more obvious to me how much app developers (and even OS developers) are using colour to grab our attention and suck us in.

This topic is for the Three Cheers for Tildes mobile app.

I'll summarize the major updates at the start of each similar topic, so people can read the updates and then hit Ignore if they don't care about more frequent updates and user feedback.

Recently:

[Android] Version 1.3.6 (Feb 28, 2025): Fixed minor UI bugs.

[iOS] Version 1.3.1 (Feb 27, 2025): Fixed an annoying scroll bug when typing comments and posts.

[Android] Version 1.3.5 (Feb 19, 2025): Fixed keyboard and animation bugs.

[Android] Version 1.3.4 (Feb 12, 2025): Fixed keyboard and markdown bar bugs.

[Android] Version 1.3.3 (Feb 11, 2025): Fixed keyboard bugs. [Cancelled this release.]

[Android] Version 1.3.2 (Feb 11, 2025): Fixed bugs reported in comments.

Version 1.3.0 (Feb 9, 2025):

This is an Android-focused update. Android 15 makes apps edge-to-edge by default so it's time to move to edge-to-edge. I've enabled it on Android 11 and higher.

Edge-to-edge mostly means turning the system bars translucent, so you can see the content all the way to the edge, instead of a blank area. In practice, we still need to keep some translucent bars there, so status bar icons and the clock can still be distinguished from app content and not become a jumbled mess.

Implementing this was a gigantic pain (which is why Google received pushback from so many developers and added an opt-out). I had to redo many layouts and re-test every screen in the app multiple times, on different Android versions and different settings (portrait, landscape, single pane, dual pane). Hope it's well received by Three Cheers users! Personally it took me a day to get accustomed to it, but I've ended up liking the edge-to-edge style more. I probably won't add a setting to turn it off.

Screenshots of what it looks like on an Android 14 device as of v1.3.1:

• 3-button nav, edge-to-edge (new): https://postimg.cc/1nnc2rWG
• 3-button nav, old: https://postimg.cc/Hcq4g8Kf
• gesture nav, edge-to-edge (new): https://postimg.cc/ctf744G6
• gesture nav, edge-to-edge (v1.3.2): https://postimg.cc/TpwHPDYB
• gesture nav, old: https://postimg.cc/PNDQMKvh

Three Cheers for iOS v1.3.0 is only minor bugfixes. iPhone apps are already edge-to-edge, and this change is Google's way of copying/catching up to Apple.

Previous topic: November 2024

Where to get it

Android version on Google Play Store: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.talklittle.android.tildes

Or sideloadable APK at https://www.talklittle.com/three-cheers/

iOS version on the App Store: https://apps.apple.com/app/three-cheers-for-tildes/id6470950557

Join TestFlight for iOS beta testing: https://testflight.apple.com/join/mpVk1qIy

It would be convenient not to have to open a topic to click the "ignore" link.

Being forced to open a topic to click the "ignore" link isn't going to make me give the topic a second chance. :-).

Thanks.

Historically companies I've been at have had someone on staff, but we're a small startup and looking to get some UX/UI support. All of my googling has lead me to "gig" websites like Upwork or Fiver and talking to friends in industry (granted salaried UX/UI folks) have lead me to Linkedin or Indeed. Neither feels like the right place for what we're looking for. Does anyone have an suggestions for finding freelance designers we could work with iteratively? Thanks!

Context: Our company is rolling our a new platform out to beta users and are looking to refine some of our platform's interface. Mainly we're hoping to polish up some of the more amateur design elements across the platform and get help designing layout for tools/data presentation. We have done a good amount customer research on what folks are looking for, will be getting active feedback after pushing the changes, and are hoping to iterate with said feedback.

Since I know quite a few tilderinos use Kagi (far higher percentage than the standard population) I figured this might interest some of you.

Kagi pushed out a new Dark theme that is not dark. It's possibly even worse than Googles non-dark official Dark mode.

Here is a CSS fix you can throw in your custom css section in settings that I whipped up for some people in the Discord, should be useful.

    :root {  
  --custom-bg-color: #090c10;

  --search-result-gap: 20px;
  --search-result-gap-mobile: 10px;
  --app-bg: var(--custom-bg-color);
  --search-result-title: #fff;
  --primary-visited: #aaa;
  /*! --quick-search-bg: #000; */
  --color-search-input: var(--custom-bg-color);
  --result-item-title-border: rgba(255,255,255,0.25);
  --search-result-date-bg: rgba(255,255,255,0.15);
}

.__sri-time {
  font-size: 12px;
  border-radius: 2px;
  margin-right: 3px
}

.__sri-desc {
  padding-top: 3px;
}

.__sri-title {
  margin-bottom: 5px;
}

.__sri-url .__sri_url_path_box {
  margin-top: 0px;
}

@media screen and (max-width: 1300px) {
  .search-result, .sri-group {
    padding-top: 0px !important;
    padding-bottom: 0px !important;
    margin-bottom: var(--search-result-gap-mobile) !important;
  }
}  

This fixes the colors, padding, and some other general weirdness they introduced. They also don't follow their own variable specs so I introduced two new ones in there so you can modify to your liking (namely padding between links on mobile and desktop).

Hi everyone, first of all, thank you for creating and maintaining this site - I don't think I've ever seen a more constructive and friendly general-purpose community online. :)

In the last few weeks, after getting access to tildes, I stumbled multiple times over an interesting article that I thought that would fit on Tildes. But I didn't see a button to post it on here. I assumed it has to be something related to rating or account age. I was wondering how long it would take. Maybe a month?

The volume of posts here is pretty low, so I never saw a reason to visit one of the groups - I only visited the front page. Only now I found out, that the button to post something is only visible if the user is currently on the page of a group.

I don't know if this happened to someone else, but I personally find it really unintuitive that there isn't a button on the front page to post a topic. Reddit, Lemmy, Discourse etc. all have it like that.

Did anyone have a similar experience? Or was this a concious choice?

When viewing the desktop version of the website, there is a little orange notification to the left of my name when there are replies to my messages.

When viewing the website in mobile, there is no such indication, and I have to open up the sidebar to see if I have any new replies.

Could we get a simple, orange "dot" indicator to the left the Sidebar link in mobile to let us know when we have unread messages?

I apologize in advance for the imgur link, but it could look something like this: Example

I've not fully considered the design decision and may be missing important aspects of it, but I wonder if the votes button on posts might be better situated on the left. This would make its placing more consistent with the comments' vote button location.

I ask because I notice that I tend to often forget to vote upon a post in a way I don't with comments. I think this is because on a widescreen the button is in a part of the screen where one's focus is not drawn, far from the rest of the relevant content.

I've noticed we've gotten in the habit of using the author.[name] tagging convention on articles and blogs and I think this is a great idea. But to me it just seems more important than having to see it as just a tag amidst all the other tags. Right now we put the site name and favicon in a prominent spot whenever we post a link, and I get that this is much easier to extract reliably from just scraping the page than the bylines tend to be. But I wonder if any author.[name] tag could get promoted to a special spot in the "Article: X words" element?

Of course this does leave the question of what to do about multiple authors, but I think the usual convention in academia is to list the first author who appears on the list as the primary author.

I assume this has been discussed before, but when I tried searching for it the abundance of topics with "author" tags made it so I couldn't find anything. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I have been a product designer and experience architect since before “UX” even meant anything.

I’ve never wanted for work, and I’ve always been confident in my skills as a leader both on the product and business strategy side.

But especially recently, I’ve started to feel some tremors I’ve never felt before:

1. A massive amount of young talent has flooded the industry via UX programs and boot camps - and much of them are quite talented!
2. Layoffs have further upped the available workers
3. AI and Automation have made good designers even more efficient, and even inexperienced designers can now move at the speed of light.

I also have some personal situations at play:

1. I took the last few years to launch and grow my own product business - scaling that eventually to an exit. So I’ve been out of the “product designer” game a bit - as I’ve been immersed in everything that comes with being a founder and startup growth.
2. I now have a family - I can’t grind as hard as I used to.

All this gives me some qualms about the ability to find work in the future.

With an industry now flooded in talent, and AI that commodifies and democratizes UI design - making it easier than ever to spit out good design - is there job security for product designers the next few years?

What does that look like? How will pay be affected? Where will the opportunity be?

The vast majority of free and open source software available is well known for being clunky, having very unintuitive UI/UX and being very inaccessible to non-nerds.

We can see this in Linux distros, tools, programs and even fediverse sites.

I understand that a lot of it is because "it's free", but I also feel like a lot of people who make and use FOSS don't actually value user-friendliness at all. I feel like some of it is in order to gatekeep the less tech savvy out, and some of it is "it's good enough for me".

What are the best theories for why this is the case?

EDIT: A lot of replies I've been getting are focusing on the developers. I'm asking more why the users seem okay with it, rather than why the developers make it that way.

I found myself wishing the website had a sticky navbar on desktop, so I made a Tampermonkey script to do just that. Sharing this in case anyone else was looking for something similar.

To use, just open this link with Tampermonkey installed, and you should be prompted to install it.
https://ewp.fyi/tilde-tweaks/sticky-navbar.user.js

I noticed this while sending out lots of PMs for my game giveaway thread. It's not a huge issue at all and doesn't really have any meaningful effect on the site's usability, but I thought I would mention it anyway.

Also, it might already be in the Gitlab, but I looked around and didn't see anything. I don't have an account there, so could someone (maybe @cfabbro?) add it for me if needed?

Issue: Within a PM conversation, there is no indication of the person who is being PMed unless they have responded.

Steps to recreate: send a user a PM, then click on that message from sent messages. If the person has not responded, you will only see your username and message. If the person responds, you can then see their username on their response, but that's currently the only way to know who the conversation is with from within the conversation itself.

If anyone wants to recreate this for themselves, feel free to send me a PM referencing this thread and I will not respond.

Suppose you want to participate in an old post with hundreds of comments. You made your fresh new comment, injecting your thoughts and effort into it and hit the post button with hopes and dreams.

The post is bumped to the top under Activity. Other tilders saw the old post on the top, they are intrigued, perhaps as much as you are and wonder what you can add to the discussion, but they couldn't find your comment.

Why is that?

You replied to a thread with a very old top-level comment.

As Tildes is still relatively new, this isn't much of a issue now, but one that I feel needed to be addressed eventually as the site grows. It is certainly a low priority issue for the time being.

Sort by new only sorts comments by the time when top-level comment is posted, which is an inherent characteristic of comment threads. If my last years of memeing on redditting has taught me anything, it is that a new post gathers the most views in the first few minutes when it was posted (This might be a few days on Tildes).

Bumping helps extend the longevity of a given post if the thread gathers enough attention and discussion value to warrant a comment, but that alone would not alleviate the fact that new comments is seen by less and less people as the post gets older (as indicated by votes). If we want to make high-quality comments seen by more people, we need to make comment age a less limiting factor.

Tildes needs to help its users to discover new comments.

A few solutions come to my mind.

1. By presenting comments in a linear fashion like the good old bulletin board does without any hierarchy such that sort by new would truly be sort by new.

2. By highlighting ( or whichever other means ) comments that meet certain criteria (Comments that are among the latest 10 or comments that were posted within the last hour, this can vary depending on the activities of the comments)

3. I would like to propose a novel solution to this problem by compacting the comment threads to a forest of trees with navigable nodes. This sounds totally outlandish, it might very well be, but its an idea that I think worth sharing.

The editing is rudimentary but I hope the idea is communicated well.

Cheers!

I'm fairly sure it's either a Reddit or RES feature, but whenever I select text in a comment and then click Reply, it'll copy that text to the comment box and add a > in front so it'll turn into a quote. It makes it a little quicker to respond to a specific part of someone's message.

I'm no IT bird and as such I don't know if this is something that can be implemented easily(if at all). It'd also require more JS, not sure if that's an issue as well.

In any case, let me know what you think.

Edit: I'd like to suggest something else, should I make a secondary post or append it to this one? I'd like to avoid cluttering up the front page.

I'd like to be able to bookmark posts from the front page. Right now it really isn't an issue yet since posting frequency is low, but I often quickly check the front page for interesting reads, while not having the time to actually read them. I'd like to see a "Bookmark" button on front page posts that allow me to save those posts for later when I actually do have time to read the posts.

For quick scrolls over the front page, tapping the post and then bookmarking is one click too many.
You could argue I'm lazy, I call it efficiency.

While on the subject, if I click "bookmark" on a topic, it'll read "bookmarked" but does not offer an "unbookmark" option until I refresh the page. Since I have big thumbs(large bones) I often tap wrong, so it could be nice if there was a quick way to undo this, similar to how we can undo votes.
Edit: this seems to be a bug: it does work for comments.
Edit2: Made this into an issue.

Why? My mouse, as well as my vision, are focused on the left. The vote box feels like its light years away on a 16:9 screen. It's on the opposite side of the screen from everything else I might click in the GUI. Its a waste of time/movement.

HTH!

I wanted to say that I really enjoy the "[Back]" link that shows up when you select "Parent" on a comment. Frequently, when I want to navigate to a comment's parent via the parent link, it's because there's a lot of other comments in between the parent and child comments, so being able to easily navigate back is just delightful. It's so thoughtful and demonstrates an understanding of the reading experience that multiple times I wished reddit had. More like this, please. :)