This week, I was tasked to bring back the dark theme to Telescope. We had the dark theme before and all the functionalities to persist it as a user’s choice but since the UI was incomplete at that time and there were too many pieces required attentions, we decided to put a hold on shipping the dark theme.
It was a simple task, I just need to uncomment my previous code and ensure the ToggleThemeButton is styled the same as other navigation tabs with a tooltip on hover. Also, thanks to changing in the theme object, professor Dave recommended to change the background color to pure white as he believes grey is so old school and did not reflect our modernized design. What can I say? Your wish is my command! Now we have a very contrast themes with white for light theme and black for dark theme. I feel these are the most obvious choices when it comes to different theme modes.
One thing I noticed is that the dark theme did bring joys to at least a few of our contributors for example Anton and Josue. Some of them even mentioned that they will never go back to light theme again. From a UX perspective, one might feel having the option to choose the color theme that they preferred would give them more motivation to use the site. It is interesting to know that a minor thing like a dark theme could affect the success of an application.
Besides helping with the dark theme, I was also reading up about PWA on the internet to find what to do to make Telescope a PWA. And this would be my focus for the next blog post.
Thanks for reading!
Tony Vu.
