Dark mode

Hi!

As I'm sitting here squinting, it occurred to me that LT doesn't have a dark mode (white on black) and that that would be quite nice to have, especially if you could switch easily between light and dark mode.

This is definitely coming. Not particularly soon, but it's on my agenda.

We can't really do a dark mode until all of the site is moved to the LT2 design that is on Series, Zeitgeist, Talk, Groups, and More right now. But the new design gives us all kinds of flexibility and was designed with things like Dark Mode and Reduced Motion in mind from the beginning. So it's on the way...eventually.

>2 conceptDawg: Cool! 8-)

Will we also get a choice of colours for those who can't stand the Dark top strip?

>4 MarthaJeanne: Well, to be honest, the eventual LT2 site design doesn't quite as dark of a strip up there. It's much more toned down. The current top design is just the LT1 design carried over in order to keep it the same across pages.

Besides not liking the colour, I find the while on dark hard to read.

>6 MarthaJeanne: You'll always have the standard mode to use, dark mode will just be an option (once we have it).

In the meantime, maybe check out a dark mode plug in for your browser. I use one and it's nice for evening or early mornings before full sun.

The top bar is in dark mode now.

>9 MarthaJeanne: Gotcha, you were saying generally the white text on dark is what you don't like. Sorry! Thanks for clarifying.

The white background hurts my eyes, a dark mode would be great for me at least.

The browser is under your control. With the use of plugins such as "dark mode" (there are several) or Stylus you can alter the appearance of any site that bothers you without requiring a given website to make development and design changes to fit your preferences. Most living spaces can be repainted to any color you prefer (if you own them) but you would not go to the builder and ask them to change the available colors.

James

Actually, if I was having a house built, and the builder was only offering colours I didn't like, I would chose a different builder.

>13 MarthaJeanne:

Yes for a new house, but would you do so on a 15 year old house?

What if you wanted the walls to be painted black (like the song)?

Just looking at Chrome and its Extension store, there are dozens of "dark mode" options that will alter the appearance of any website you visit.

The time to approach developers is not with cosmetic things that you can change if they bother you but functional items. For example, the new iOS 16 (and other operating systems) are embracing a newer passkey approach to logins instead of passwords. Some sites will adopt it right away (banks, commerce) and other sites will be slower to adopt it. Is this important for LibraryThing? Perhaps not. But it is something that only the developers could implement.

James

>14 Keeline: Although this old house is currently undergoing a renovation :-)
A closer parallel might be lighting rather than repainting, so more like asking the landlord whether it's possible to get a dimmer switch installed :-P

It sounds from the comments in >2 conceptDawg: and >7 kristilabrie: that it's a yes (one day). But certainly the advice to control our own browser and/or operating system settings is solid in the meantime.

Going back to the metaphor would that be equivalent to having guests wear sunglasses indoors because they find the decor/lighting so dazzling? :-D

If I didn't like the color brown, such as used in the menu bar, I would not ask the developers to never use it. That is my issue and I could change it with some CSS in Stylus or another method.

But if something does not work as promised or as I think it should, that is the kind of thing I might ask the developers for, knowing that it is unlikely to be fixed unless a lot of other people are having the same issue.

Most other web and application providers are impossible to reach. For example, I have issues with two Adobe products. The chances of getting their bugs fixed is next to zero because very little of what is mentioned in the Adobe forums is even seen, let alone addressed, by the development team. They have their own roadmap and priorities. Even if my problems are real and significant, the chances of them being worked on is almost nil.

(One of these Adobe concerns using available hardware resources, multiple cores, when performing processor-intensive tasks like OCR in Acrobat "Pro". The other concerns the Droplet feature of Photoshop which always fails on one early file on the batch due to a memory limit that should never be reached. I've reported these but know they won't be resolved. They have been this way for many years and we and others have given them hundreds of dollars to use their software. With LT we paid for the lifetime (nominal sum) but now all of the individual users are free.)

It is useful to manage expectations and know where you can address issues on your own and that was my point.

James

We are getting very close to being able to offer a dark mode for LT. We just have to finish conversion of two or three more major pages and I'll feel good offering a dark mode that won't flip back and forth to "blinding white mode" if you were to hit an LT1 page (because there won't be any LT1 pages left).

cool!

Any update on a much needed dark mode?

No update, just waiting on us to finish two more page overhauls before I can release it. And I'm pulled away on a different big project right now. But hopefully soon.

Are we there yet?
Are we there yet?
Are we there yet?
Are we there yet?
Are we there yet?
Are we there yet?
Are we there yet?
Are we there yet?
Are we there yet?
Are we there yet?
:)

conceptDawg said in #17 that they need to LT2-ify all the major pages. The catalog is a massive one that isn't done yet (and one which I'm personally dreading - hopefully they'll still let us have List mode and have more than three columns) but I certainly wouldn't expect anything until after that.

>22 lorax: Thanks for the clarification! I've been largely out of Site Talk, etc., so I wasn't aware LT2 wasn't complete. #17 sounded imminent, and the "two more page overhauls" in #20 didn't sound like a lot left, unless they're monster updates as you've indicated. Appreciate it!

Coming soon(ish).
But the catalog page is already LT2. Surreptitiously I changed it over a few months back. It's kind of a hybrid though so it's a little bit of an oddball since it loads the actual catalog in a frame on the page.
We have Work and Author pages left and then we'll be ready for Dark Mode, though I might sneak it in before they are done.

>24 conceptDawg:
Thanks for all the hard work

I'd love to have dark mode native on LT. The plug in I used to use on my old Windows laptop made the colors pretty wonky on this site, but not on others. In the am and pm I am always blinded by the glaring white of LT and have to turn the screen way down which doesn't work well for darker sites.

>26 Bookmarque: Have you tried f.lux or similar, which can tone down the blue component of your screen's white light during the evening and night? I find it easier in the eyes.

Yes. Dark Mode all the things!

Can't wait for dark mode.

Yes Cynfelyn, I use the built-in that Apple has in Safari, but it's not enough. Just now I had to turn brightness down when I popped here from other sites that are dark. The sun is up, but it's cloudy and this sea of white is just too much.

conceptDawg (#24):

That's a huge relief! I'd been dreading that transition since all the others were such a drastic change in UX.

Maybe this is a good place to mention that the catalogue view is still wonky on mobile, refusing to shrink to fit the screen width in portrait mode.

>32 AndreasJ: That has to be intentional, right? Otherwise we wouldn't be able to see all the columns (depending on which catalog style is selected).

I seem to recall conceptDawg saying isn’t, but in either case I don’t like it. It should shrink to fit, and allow me to zoom if needed.

>32 AndreasJ: That sounds like it should be a bug

>31 lorax: Don't get too excited because that's just the technical LT2 version; there will still be an update.

knerd.knitter (#36):

Ugh. Back to dread, I guess.

Yeah. Catalog is a tough nut to crack in its current form. It's an LT1 page being loaded on an LT2 page within a frame.

We'll get that solved, and Lorax will hate us because there will be a redesign in the catalog when that happens. Hopefully not too drastic but definitely an update to make it more accessible to those that need it and to make it more mobile friendly.

Silly me, wanting a data-rich environment! Or at least the possibility of one - go ahead and make the default a three-column view with cover, title, and author but let us keep our complexity if we want it.

>39 lorax: 100 percent in agreement with you on this.

+1 Please don't make the catalogue less functional. Isn't the app supposed to cater to mobile needs anyway?

Oh, I have no doubt whatsoever that the catalog will become less functional - from the user perspective, LT2 is all about whitespace and lower information density, so I don't see how it's avoidable. The question is whether the decreased functionality will be severe. Taking away one column per viewing style? Manageable. Forcing us all into something that looks good in portrait mode on a phone screen, with no options for more data? Not good.

>42 lorax: Agreed.

>42 lorax:

They’ve promised LT2 will be mobile-friendly, so I think we can assume it will not look good on a phone.

>42 lorax: And all of this after I built an entire view style just for you and named it after you?! This is the thanks I get?

Well you are now dead to me and the catalog will now just be one title per page with nothing but white space around it.

>45 conceptDawg: Intrigued, I trotted off to have a look at 'The Lorax' view style, hoping beyond hope it might be the salmon colour-scheme. Alas it wasn't.

But flicking between the styles, 'Atkinson' came as a shock. Everything but the icons disappeared. Is this intentional, a bug, or the price of using a PC instead of a mobile phone?

Or a warning of what you've got in store for Lorax?

>45 conceptDawg: *gets out mop, starts to clean up the splattered sarcasm*

>46 Cynfelyn: Salmon LT logo, voila:

>46 Cynfelyn: The old views are no longer useable.

>46 Cynfelyn: When I switch to Atkinson on my laptop I can see everything fine. What browser are you using? I'm on Chrome

>50 norabelle414: I'm using Firefox. In Atkinson on this page, for example, I am only seeing the coloured horiontal bars separating the messages, LT staff members "L" icon, bnielsen's salmon image, and, weirdly, this text as I type it.

It's the same on various other types of pages where there's the TT change style icon, including my profile page, a charts page, the badges page, and a search results page. A work page, with no TT icon, seems unaffected, even when I click over in Atkinson from a TT-icon page.

Oh yes, and while I can see this text in the "Add A Message" box, the text in the "Preview" box, the two boxes' headers, and the three buttons' text are all blank.

Weird.

>51 Cynfelyn: Fixed. After reloading the page you should be able to use the Atkinson font style again.

>52 conceptDawg:. Aha, so that's what it looks like. Thanks.

However I'm going to try Georgia for a while, the only style available with serifs.

Any news on this? Just dropped by the site and the lack of a native dark mode hurts my eyes. I'm using the Dark Reader extension but it's really wonky here.

>54 _takechiya: We're in the busiest time of the year at LibraryThing (with SantaThing and our Holiday Store, and Holiday Card Exchange, etc.) ... try checking back in a few months?

So...it's been a few months. Progress?