v0.8.3 - The UX Refresh #3177
Replies: 6 comments 4 replies
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just pulled the latest image and amazing UI refresh! has a great look and feel to it, especially with the themes. also love how the gradient fades in! great job on this 👏 |
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My only feedback would be if you have a library using one of the comic library types change "Chapter" to "Issue". I know the section itself says Issue, but there are no "chapters" in comics (some specific story-arcs may be referred to as chapters in the issues themselves but that's obviously not what this is referring to). And then maybe a way to turn off either Volume/Chapter header from appearing? Take a random manga series (eg. 20th Century Boys), I have "Storyline", "Volumes", "Chapter" (also why is it VolumeS but Chapter?) and all three are identical (22 volumes of the series) making two completely redundant tabs. I don't use chapters so that's a useless tab for me personally always, but even for the people that do I can't see them using both for all series so you end up with a lot of redundancy. I guess you could just delete the volume number from all of them, but then you have it looking weird with volumes under chapters. Even if it was a library-scale toggle that let you display either/both (what even is Storyline? I tried to figure it out but for all my series it's just...all the series like the other two tabs. Does it mix chapter with volumes if that's how you have it collected?) |
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glad to see the roadmap in design, I very much like the idea of "make Kavita the Plex for reading" |
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I think I'm using a different Plex since this doesn't really look anything like Plex. The information density on the settings page is poor and it uses those useless "toggle buttons" instead of the tried and true checkboxes (which Plex also uses), making it look more like a bad mobile app. However, what is really bad are the series pages, as these (supposedly Plex inspired?) gradients are awful and doesn't even seem to go away with the pre-overhaul theme. The text is also tiny and has extremely poor contrast with the eye-searing gradient backgrounds to the point that Kavita would fail every single accessibility test there is. For example, here the contrast for the description is in the 1.9:1 to 2.3:1 range, which is even below the 3:1 target for large text, let alone the higher target for tiny text like this. The volume texts too are poor contrast, although at least in some parts they would qualify for good enough contrast for large text, which they arguably are not. Volume 5 has like 2.33:1 contrast and the best is probably volume 1 with 3.68:1 when text of this size should probably get at least 4.5:1. |
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As a monthly contributor, I am happy to see that this project is moving along. Really great. Thanks. |
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It's finally here, the UX Refresh. Robbie and I have been dreaming and planning this for over a year now and we've grinded for 2 months (with my trip to Norway/Finland between) to bring it to you. The feedback from the nightly testers has been fantastic! Everyone is in love. We have poured over the UX, both on mobile and on desktop, to bring what we think is a consistent and killer experience. We took a lot of inspiration from Plex and if anyone knows, I'm trying to make Kavita the Plex for reading. So let's get into the nitty gritty of what makes this release.
Colorscape
When I browse Plex, I'm always blown away by the accent colors on movie detail pages. Contrast that to Kavita, I felt it was sorely lacking. So I brought it to Kavita and let me tell you, it was no easy feat. Hours wasted on css gradients before realizing the complex system Plex has. Kavita now will show a nice gradient in the background of any page that has a cover (except reading lists and collections, these will likely follow in the future). What's even cooler is the system is able to be turned on/off with a custom theme or even customized by theme creators. This is the feature I'm most proud of with this release.
Individual Pages
This is a big thing for Book and Comic users, the ability to view individual volume/chapter metadata. This not only brings dedicated pages (and the ability to update metadata for individual chapters/books), but also the ability to read a series/chapter/volume from any card. No longer do you need to open the series detail page.
Settings Overhaul
Again taking inspiration from Plex, we updated the settings pages to bring tooltip information front and center and make changes to any field instant (no more pressing save). All settings, from admin to user preferences, are now on one screen. Some flows have been moved to dedicated pages, like CBL Import or MAL Interest Stack import. This should help with bringing visibility to some of the features Kavita has.
Publisher Images
Lastly, we added a new system similar to favicons for publisher images. This new system allows for users to submit or edit publisher images on our kavita repo and these images will be downloaded dynamically and displayed on the detail pages. Some images may not look good. I am counting on the community to add new or edit images to bring the best UX to all users.
All in all, I'm really proud of this release. Next up is an overhaul to the UX surrounding Kavita+ including reworking some of the systems and laying more foundation for future feature releases. I am also working on building out the test cases for the Scanner to allow me to continue working on the elusive Foreign Key constraint issue still plaguing us and working on bringing more optimizations into the Scan Loop to make Kavita faster.
Lastly, I want to make a big thank you to those that contribute on Weblate. This release was massive and many localization strings were changed. The localizers were on top of it and as of this release, we are shipping Kavita in 10 languages with full support.
Added
Changed
Fixed
Theme
API
This discussion was created from the release v0.8.3 - The UX Refresh.
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