Oh how I love people who refuse to get the point of anything. I never suggested to ditch anything and, in case you missed it, I was obviously talking of industries where you can go by without it - hence why I was talking about web.
If there will ever come a day when I can ditch the Chrome's HN+ plugin to make HN look good, it will probably be with that. So I'm all for it. Great idea.
I think it's a bit too raw - unpolished at places. The "Messages" menu item for example; the red notification circle with the count of unread messages is off in padding. Some icons are a bit fuzzy when they should be clear (http://dribbble.com/shots/492245-Idiot-Tip-2, if you don't follow me).
Why do people insist on creating a ton of bootstraps, straps or "Web UI Kits"? Let me rephrase the question, why do people want to make the web look the same? These days all I see is some site with Twitter Bootstrap on it and I'm pretty sure it's proven that it's really rare when someone bothers to use those UI kits or straps and make them their own, so in the end you don't help developers with those things, you make them more lazier.
If I were a consumer and I had to choose between my company spending manhours implementing a design that's going to probably look derivative anyway (because let's be honest, its not designers using these things, its developers) or spending manhours implementing a new feature that delivers me value, I'd choose the latter.
I don't think anyone is advocating that you should use Bootstrap three years into a product lifestyle, but it helps deliver an MVP.
On the majority of cases, not true. The stink of a bootstrap is still there even if it's mostly over-designed. But that's not the point, the point is there's so many sites out there with just bootstrap - nothing else - and that is bloody horrible. Developers should stop inventing ways to be more lazy and just do what they do.
SASS, LESS, Bootstraps, insert_whatever_thing are just tools that ideally help to be more productive, but a few years in and you rarely see any raw code or from-scratch work. And they won't care either, because "it's more productive" is a perfect argument.
You seem to miss the point that many of those sites wouldn't have been launched in the first place if a way to make it look half-decent, fast, wasn't widely available. Making a website, especially a web app, takes some breaking inertia, if you've ever tried you'll know, and anything that helps you in getting it out is one step further from not launching at all. Given popularity, the design can be amended. A non-launch has nothing to amend, and is, if nothing else, a tiny loss for the web.
why do people want to make the web look the same? - to leverage the good work of others making things look nice. To allow users to easily know how things work, because they are familiar with them.
That, was the single most stupid thing I've heard in a while. "because they are familiar with them". It's websites, not homes for elderly people. It's the designers job to make the user be able to understand where something is and the direction this conversation is heading, I don't think any of you have ever seen good design - or a designer for that matter.
And those who say that a feature that brings in profit is more valuable than how it looks are just money-sucking suits. No wonder you want sites to look the same. It's like lawyers who also dress the same.
Funny that your startup's website (http://mediashock.me/) looks exactly like bootstrap and everything else. You're doing an awesome job representing dropout 20 year olds (http://codefoe.com/).
re: the single most stupid thing I've heard in a while - wow, I say stuff way more stupid than that all the time. Really, though - most users don't look at a site and think 'gee, I wish the designer had dome something more original with the login UI'. They want to look at stuff and immediately know how it works. The UI needs to be almost mechanical. If they notice it, it is usually a bad thing, and if using familiar idioms helps achieve familiarity, then good.
Being an Estonian citizen and all I know that I'm very lucky to have born in Estonia. Blazing fast internet speed comparing to U.S (according to a few U.S friends, not some giant stats machine) and free WiFi in nearly all of the bars, clubs, pubs, coffee shops, restaurants, malls there are. At least in the capital city that is.
That being said, tech might be top-notch, but the economy is sinking. Sure, they raised the minimum wage to 350 EUR / month, but all it really did was increase the number of "officially poor" and since living cost is catching up with Finland (not in houses or apartments as of yet, but pretty much everything else) the ~400 EUR most people get for paychecks around here is not for living, it's for suffering.
So perhaps a better thing to do would be to just fall behind in the tech field a bit (a bit, not die) and actually do whatever the hell is needed to provide companies with enough income to pay decent salaries. I have no idea how the entire "money making" system works and I'm sure it's complicated as hell, but if they have money to make Estonia a tech country that has a ton of poor people who are struggling to collect enough money to get the hell out of here then maybe they should instead invest that money in people - and in return get people invest in the country itself.
