We just added Alexandrite to the server, it’s an alternative desktop UI for Lemmy created by Sheodox who worked tirelessly to make the necessary changes to we could host it ourselves here. So go to https://a.lemmy.world and have a look!
He continues to update it constantly, you can follow the development on his github page or in his community. If you like what you see and want to support him, why not buy him a coffee? :)
For those who don’t have Lemmy World as their home instance and want to use Alexandrite, either ask your instance admins to add it or go to https://alexandrite.app!
Edit: I should probably have mentioned that Alexandrite is meant for desktop!
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That is something the Alexandrite developer @[email protected] can reply better than me. As far as I know the focus is on desktop use! And it does a great job at it imo!
I do definitely want to make it work on mobile at some point! It’ll probably be a while though.
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Thanks! :)
I love the Alexandrite UI
Is there a post with all the different enabled UIs?
They are listed in the sidebar
Thank you sir!
I don’t see it. Where is it?
go to the homepage: https://lemmy.world/
it’s on the section, bottom of the page. There are 4 links, 3 of them are different UIs:
https://status.lemmy.world/ - Lemmy World Status
https://a.lemmy.world - Alexandrite UI
https://m.lemmy.world - Voyager mobile UI
https://old.lemmy.world - A familiar UI
Just dropping in to say this UI is beautiful and the features are superb. Thank yous for all the lemmy world staff and Sheodox for the time and dedication!
I like the UI so much more than the standard Lemmy. This should be the default UI. Hopefully he makes a light version.
I need a light version.
Anything that gets nearer to a RES-like experience from Reddit is an absolute plus. This UI is brilliant.
There is https://old.lemmy.world, which I am using. It even has a dark mode! It does have a few missing features. The message field doesn’t have any formatting buttons, you can’t change the shortcuts up top, the submissions don’t have alternating colors (but comments do!), and the preview button for messages sends your message to the server, which breaks often and deletes your message.
yes, goes well together with Voyager. From app subdomain I route mobile clients to Voyager and desktop to Alexandrite, feels amazing.
The genius thing about it is the way it fully utilizes the whole width of a display, with the post content appearing in between the list of posts and the sidebar. I haven’t seen another Lemmy/Kbin UI that does this.
It might only be suitable for widescreen desktop use, but it does that one thing very well.
It definitely could use a bit of work on the mobile screen sizes, but it looks very promising!
Hell, I’m a web developer, maybe I’ll try to contribute.
Wow, I love this a lot. Initially chuckled at the theme color slider in the settings, but it’s unironically a great way to edit that haha.
My instance (lemdro.id) has Photon as their modern look alternative, which also looks pretty sleek IMO, but I think I’ll be using this going forward mostly because it’s more desktop-looking than Photon’s more mobile-centric layout.
Fantastic work on this, can’t wait to see how it grows going forward.
Photon dev here, what’s mobile-centric about it? I actually aimed for it to work well on both. The reason the pages don’t span the whole distance is for legibility reasons.
I actually aimed for this to be desktop first, that’s why i use buttons instead of gestures.
Your decision is good though, I personally think Alexandrite is much better than Photon.
It definitely functions well on both, I don’t mean to suggest that it’s meant for mobile. But yeah, I think it’s mostly the fact that all the content is only on the center 1/3 of my screen. To me, that just feels a lot like a mobile view compared to something that uses the whole area of the browser.
A lot of social sites on the modern web look this way now, and generally it’s a result of them trying to prioritize mobile uses first, so when I see it anywhere now it’s just a “oh, this is a mobile site” in my mind.
An option was added to make everything span the whole screen, although it isn’t very well optimized.
Try it now, I’ve made the design much better for desktop.
Looks great!
I want to add my praise to the heap.
I’m pretty happy with Voyager on mobile, but when writing something, it’s not ideal.
The generic Lemmy UI is more than OK on desktop, but the lack of error code reporting to the user was frustrating, at times I tried to resubmit posts and comments and the spinning Submit button just kept on going, for some communities in particular. So I stopped posting in these communities.
Now, with Alexandrite, I feel like this is a good UI that I really like. And I love that you write out the background error message for why posting or commenting fails!
Really nice job!
Lack of error codes is something I see often even in professional website development. Even Windows has run into that issue now; Click button. Button loads. Button stops - no action. Or, the application just closes.
I think with the separation of product design and engineers in modern teams, it ends up being really hard for everyone to settle on a good path for errors on every single little thing - and including that in the design can make you “feel” your product is error prone, even if 99% of people never see any of those.
Well pointed out.
That’s rather nice looking! I might have to deploy this and try it out on my instance.
And the developer is quick to add features. Highly recommended for desktop.
Looks great, but I need a light version. (Don’t hate :P )
Seeing custom web UIs being deployed officially and directly on the same domain as Lemmy instances is incredibly encouraging. I wonder if my Leanish will be polished enough to be published that way eventually.
One can dream!
This is excellent news :) I’ve been using Alexandrite since u/sheodox announced it so I’m very pleased to see it added as a dedicated front end for .world :)
Very cool! Can you add this to the list o’ themes in the settings please?
This not just a theme, it is a totally different front end to Lemmy. You can only use by going to the url given.
