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Comment by Aaronontheweb | Hacker News Reader

I made this in the course of a couple weekends and wanted some feedback on how I can make it better. I've heard email notifications for comments and easier social sharing features so far, but I would love to know what else I can do to make it better.

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Great idea and great domain name, but I would suggest that monospaced fonts and #6A6A6A text on white are not exactly the best thing ever for readability.

You can probably leave the colors the same if you just switch to a proportional font, add a smidge more of padding, and bump up the line-height just a bit: http://cl.ly/3x1n103K472Z1J2t3Q3k

Jarin,

your mock-up looks FANTASTIC! Could you tell me what font that is you used there? I'm not a designer by any stretch of the imagination and am generally clueless about these sorts of things.

Hey no problem, maybe try one of these:

  .ideaBody {
    font-family: Helvetica, Helvetica Neue, Arial, sans-serif;
    line-height: 1.6em;
    padding: 0.9em 1.2em;
  }

Or the one in the screenshot:

  .ideaBody {
    font-family: Verdana, Geneva, Tahoma, sans-serif;
    line-height: 1.7em;
    padding: 0.9em 1.3em;
  }

Thanks a lot, Jarin! I'll implement this tonight!

Here are a few simple CSS tweaks that can improve readability. I only spent a couple of minutes, but I think it helps: http://pastebin.com/WEKswHND

EDIT: Here's a screenshot preview: http://cl.ly/022H381a2N2p1N0h3q0k

Elbrodeur,

Dude, you are a life-saver. I'm going to use this and deploy it soon after I try to patch that scrolling lag issue people have been reporting - is there any way I can give you an acknowledgement or something in the footer of CaptainObvious or on the about page?

Very nice improvements... I hope you are online when I do my own ShowHN ;-)

Shoot me an email. I have at least 5 minutes to spare for pretty much anybody.

Fantastic, thanks. This is one of the reasons I love HN.

Please drop the "s around everything. The picture being there and the context forces me to associate it with a person and not the site, the "s are redundant. Especially in comments. Also scrolling is insanely laggy for me, I have no idea why, but I assume it's all the JS.

Just pushed a new build that removes the quotes - that was one of those things that looks better on a mockup than it does in production.

As for the scrolling issue, it could either be the Twitter @Anywhere hovercards or the background (used some CSS hacks to make it scale with the window when you resize) - could you let me know what browser you are using?

Google chrome, version 10.0.648.151 which chrome tells me is up to date. My operating system is Windows 7 and I have about 2.1GB RAM free out of 6GB total and CPU usage is at ~1%. I don't get the same lag in Firefox 4.

Ah, thanks for that key detail about Firefox - that tells me that the scrolling background might be the issue since it does some browser-specific stuff in order to resize with the window.

That's odd - I tested it in Chrome on Windows 7 on a machine with similar specs and I don't have that issue. I'll do some digging around and see if there's something funky with that block of CSS or my JS

I'm having similar lag issues when scrolling up and down the home page with latest Chrome on Ubuntu 10.10. Firefox 3.6 is fine.

Good stuff, indeed. I have always a place to go to just discuss ideas with other creative people. I've used Twitter to do something similar, mentioning Twitter handles of those who would could use the idea I had in mind.

I'll post tonight!

I still see the quotes.

I think the key missing feature is being able to register interest or activity for an idea.

It would be extremely useful to see if anyone else is working on an idea, who they are and what their focus and status is.

e.g. When seeing the idea about selling twitter names, it would be helpful for everyone if I could say "Oh yes, Twitter are launching this next Friday" or "Like the idea, have a prototype, need a designer."

Comments do help, but a structured solution would make things much easier.

Ideally this wouldn't be only first-person, so that people can report other projects which seem similar. You'll need moderation either way (votes or active moderation, whatever.)

If implemented well enough, this could breed a sort of communal start-up site. Maybe the originator of the thread gets to choose from respondents and splits equity among them, at which point the idea is locked.

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