KES 2.2.0: Magazines at your fingertips with KES omnibar
The start of August brings a new release with a small, but hopefully important, collection of improvements to KES.
Add-ons
Subscriptions omnibar (@shazbot)
Location: General > Subscriptions omnibar
Introducing a life-changing game-changing handy feature that should fundamentally change the paradigm of how you navigate to your magazine subscriptions. The omnibar is a floating search panel that is invoked with a meta key of your choosing. This brings up a list of your subscriptions and a search prompt that filters the list as you type. Use the arrow keys or mouse to navigate and hit Enter or click to jump to that magazine.
The omnibar is designed to be fast, performant, and intuitive and obviates tediously maneuvering with the mouse (but you can use the mouse if you choose to). Now your magazines are accessible at any time.
Under typical usage, you would invoke the meta key, start typing to quickly drill down the results, and hit enter to jump. For example, you could type enha to filter the list for the /m/enhancement magazine, and use the arrow keys to navigate if there are multiple hits. The omnibar will show a live count of search results versus total subscribed magazines in the upper right.
To close the omnibar, invoke the meta key again or click/tap anywhere outside of the omnibar.
The omnibar also supports multiple accounts and different instances, so if you have a multitude of accounts on different kbin instances or within your home instance, it will make note of those magazines atomically, meaning you will see the correct list. If you are logged out, the omnibar shows a default sampling of the most subscribed magazines.
For our friends on mobile devices, a tappable element can be added to the top of the page to open the omnibar without keyboard input. In addition, the search bar will start unfocused so that you can scroll the list with a swipe action instead of having the keyboard open immediately. (thanks to @Twelph for testing mobile)
When first toggled on, the omnibar caches the list of magazines to ensure loading is fast whenever you open it again. Therefore, if you wish to update the list if you change your subscriptions again later, toggle this feature off and then on again in the KES settings to force the list to synchronize again.
Hover indicator (@minnieo)
Location: Accessibility > Hover indicator
The second in a set of accessibility-oriented features, this one draws a visual outline around the element currently targeted with the mouse.
This could be used as a navigation or clickability aid by those with vision impairment or navigational difficulties, or could be used in conjunction with a screen reader to provide an explicit indication of where the cursor is on the page.
Customize colors site-wide (@minnieo)
Location: Accessibility > Adjust colors
The third accessibility add-on, this one lets you globally change the contrast, saturation, hue, brightness, and sepia tone of colors across the site and save this as a setting. You can also customize the upvote/downvote/boost colors, such as setting them to a colorblind-friendly color.
This add-on is designed to aid those with visibility or legibility issues who want to make elements more high contrast, high-vis, etc, or for whom the default green/red upvote/downvote colors are not distinguishable.
Checkmark next to subbed mags (@shazbot)
Location: Threads > Checkmark on subbed mags
Requested by @akai, this add-on is designed to work in conjunction with the subscriptions omnibar above.
Provided you have enabled the omnibar first, this add-on will use the fetched list of subscriptions to draw a checkmark on the thread index if you are currently subscribed to a magazine:
As is customary with KES add-ons, this feature allows you to set a color of your choice for the checkmark.
NSFW blur disabler (@shazbot)
Location: Threads> Unblur NSFW thumbnails
A simple fix that was requested by a user: disable the blur on NSFW images so that they always start unblurred.
Fixes
Besides small hotfixes made between 2.1.0 and 2.2.0 (see the detailed changelog), this release includes a couple of fixes:
- Also apply alpha sorting to the followers page on a user's profile, since it uses the same structure as the subscriptions list
- KES color menus were not showing the saved color when set, despite saving this updated color under the hood. This is now fixed so that
color pickers show the user's currently set color - Fit the notifications panel better into the view if using a narrow mobile device
- Ensure that threads with no default thumbnail display correctly on mobile when disabling the hide thumbnails add-on
API
On the API front, two features were added for script authors:
-
getHex()function: allows a script to parse kbin theme colors into real hex values. This ensures that you can set sane defaults in fields by using the theme's variable abstractions while still parsing them into usable hex values at the end. - Manifest generator: the KES codebase now ships with a local file that can be used to open a GUI in the browser. Fill in the requisite fields to generate sanitized JSON output for insertion in the manifest.
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