Oh nice, themebeacon seems much more comprehensive than themefinder.
For the speed issue; I was playing around with an idea of preloading the iframe previews to speedup loading; it worked but the browser would crash due to high CPU/memory usage eventually. Maybe you'll have better luck?
I like your solution too - it 'gets you to the goods' much faster :) At the moment I feel like mine sort of overpromises and underdelivers, e.g. the style and features functionality doesn't work particularly well yet.
About the pre-loading, I'm actually already doing that... But only the next one in the queue. How many were you trying to load at once? I did notice that even only pre loading one is enough to slow it down considerably on my nexus 4 though...
I think i was a bit too optimistic. I would load 5 iframes at once with 2 either side of the currently selected one. It was much quicker but I couldn't find a nice way to reduce resource usage; I think the browser still attempts to compute all those animations even when offscreen. Setting the dimensions to 1x1px for offscreen frames didn't do the trick; I tried going down to 3 and that still ended up in lots of CPU/RAM usage. I think it's probably do-able but would require some more tinkering.
BTW: I like your mobile/tablet previews. I was actually going to do the same but left it out for the moment :P
Yeah, I'm almost positive you're right about the animations, etc. still loading off-screen. I'm not sure how much of this is due just to javascript stuff going on vs. loading a bunch of things at once simply being really CPU intensive.
My 2 cents: cannot filter by number of columns or left/right sidebar, and results are wayyy to slow to check out (it would be better to be shown small screenshots and decide which theme you actually want to try live)
Hey thanks! Re number of columns and left/right sidebar, a lot of themes are customisable in this respect (particularly the sidebar bit). I'll look into it though - it's a good point.
Re result loading... yeah :( I have tried to improve this by 'buffering' the next theme in a hidden div, but it doesn't always work.
Actually, the loading screens are really just set on timers, so sometimes 5 seconds is too long, other times it's not long enough... I initially didn't have a loading screen on there at all, but it kind of ruined the user experience a bit if someone clicked the next button and the theme hadn't even started loading - they were basically just staring at an ugly grey screen with nothing happening.
Ultimately the problem with the current approach used on both my and the OP's site is that we're really at the mercy of the servers we're loading the demo themes off. Some are super quick, others are insanely slow. I think that I may have to do as you suggested and move to some kind of a screenshot / thumbnail first system.
Thanks for the compliment! Any tips on what could be done better?
Re seeing this on the front page sucking, not at all - just proof that great minds think alike :) But to be honest it did suck the way my initial submission seemed to disappear so quickly. Perhaps I just posted it at an inopportune time.
Yeah, that's what I meant. Similar products (yours being superior IMO) being given different exposure is crappy. =\
I'm not really in the market for themes, but maybe filtering by the of CSS preprocessor being used would be a nice thing to have? Also, the "checkboxes" do look like checkboxes but act like radio buttons, you might want to consider changing either the behavior or the look and feel. =)
Upvoted your HN original submission for what it's worth.
Viewing on iPhone I had absolutely no idea what I was supposed to do until I came back here and read the comments of others. Even then it was hard to find the arrow to press.
Then it keeps crashing safari. I tried multiple times but it always crashed either when first loading the page or when first pressing the arrow key.
http://www.themebeacon.com/
I even posted about it to HN the other day (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7888745) but it seemed to vanish in about 30 seconds...