11
votes
Adding a collapse button at the bottom
I've been using ~ on mobile to try it out, and although it's great, there's one major inconvenience.
If I'm reading through a long comment, I want to instintively collapse it so it won't distract me. But on mobile, I have to scroll a long way up to do that. It's even worse with comment chains.
Can we have a collapse button at the bottom as well? Or a swipe, like on the Reddit app? Or do we have to wait for the development of the app before mobile users get good UI?
I mentioned this in another thread, but a hugely helpful ux change for mobile would be to shift the collapse button on comments to the right hand side. It would make it easier to tap for right handed people, but also it would be in a consistent location for every comment. Plus since it's far away from the username, there would be no accidental tapping.
I also really wish collapsed comments would persist so if you navigate to another link and back you'd be scrolled to the right location.
As for putting it at the bottom I think you could instead make a 'bar' on the right side that follows the comment so you can collapse it any time, but that might be too busy.
That’s definitely coming and is already listed in the gitlab issues page. Remember, this is an alpha so a lot of “no-brainer” features are already planned, just not implemented yet... but if you spot any not yet listed, be sure to let us know so we can add them. And even feedback like this on things that are already listed is still helpful since it lets @deimos know what users want the most so he can focus on adding them first.
I think we're going to have to wait for a mobile app to have a properly dynamic UX, as it seems the site is coded with a priority on minimalism.
It’s more the case that this is an alpha (truly an alpha, it’s not just a marketing gimmick) and as such, most of the features here are only in their most rudimentary state right now and most planned features haven’t been added yet. A week ago there wasn’t even permalinks for comments (there still technically isn’t, the ‘link’ HTML anchors are just a stopgap).
If you want a better sense of where ~ is going, check out the gitlab issues page and look for feature, suggestion and investigate labels.
I definitely understand that nothing about this site is considered complete yet, but I was mostly referring to what the docs say about this.
I don't really know what you mean by this. What makes for "a properly dynamic UX"?
Most modern webpages use libraries upon libraries and hacks upon hacks to create the (counter?) intuitive and dynamic experiences we take for granted, things like floating website headers, buttons adjusting based on scroll position etc.
The docs gave me the impression that that was not the way you planned on going with Tildes, though I may have misunderstood...
Oh, yeah, I think you might be thinking of it a bit too drastically. It's not that I'm trying to completely avoid javascript or anything like that, it just should only be used for the things it's actually needed for. Javascript is already needed for a lot of essential functions on the site—you can't even vote or reply to a comment without it, and those are extremely core features. We can certainly build things that improve the mobile experience, even if they require some javascript.
That's great!
You'd be surprised how much you can do with just the basics! Tracking and js frameworks really bloat up many websites.
This site uses just the basics and is pretty powerful so I understand that, I just don't think it can be very dynamic (maybe there's a better word I'm missing here) with just the basics.