Playing with Curve2

May 05, 2014, 04:59:13 PM Posted by Antes on May 05, 2014, 04:59:13 PM in Playing with Curve2 | 32 Comments
My mid term exams ended but my work never ends :P I took two presentations for different classes while working on them, i had some free time and did some of my past loved ideas on Curve2 and now I want to share them with you.

General of those changes are less likely to go inside the SMF 2.1 but I'll share them with you once I had more time, while doing this changes I find some of them actually good enough to be added into SMF2.1, still I want to hear some feedback from our users to shape it.

I'll try and I'd love to update this topic in future with similar concept edits. Those are not the complete work just basic edits but they will give you some idea about general perspective :)

Comments


Deaks on May 05, 2014, 06:29:57 PM said
First One ... I am fully against that look and would actually make a mod to revert it to normal if it wasnt an option ... sorry
Second one ... can you please explain what you wish to do.

Antes on May 05, 2014, 06:47:44 PM said
np, they are not official changes or wip to the future.

In second one, i moved the Like & report to quick buttons and removed margin between cat_bar & quick reply place also removed top-left/right border radius. Not the mention i removed windowbg/2 bg's and made them look like they are one piece and made the post view less detailed.

Deaks on May 05, 2014, 06:50:39 PM said
tbh I think better as they were good to see initiative, but maybe work on the current bugs instead of creating new ones :P

Antes on May 05, 2014, 06:58:04 PM said
Quote from: Μπράιαν Poύνικ Ντίκεν on May 05, 2014, 06:50:39 PM
tbh I think better as they were good to see initiative, but maybe work on the current bugs instead of creating new ones :P

No sir, you can't take the right of creating annoying bugs from me :P while working on those type of things we discover some hidden bugs as well.

Deaks on May 05, 2014, 10:11:16 PM said
Just did no raki for you

Antes on May 10, 2014, 03:25:40 PM said
Simple admin (back-end) UI, one of the things gets me mostly... Attached a screenshot to the first post.

Arantor on May 10, 2014, 03:26:52 PM said
Not convinced it's a good idea to drop the horizontal lines unless you're going to have some kind of hover effect on the entire row so that you know which button lines up with which board name.

Antes on May 10, 2014, 03:29:59 PM said
Quote from: Arantor on May 10, 2014, 03:26:52 PM
Not convinced it's a good idea to drop the horizontal lines unless you're going to have some kind of hover effect on the entire row so that you know which button lines up with which board name.

I think there is enough margin between lines but you kinda right it may(probably) confuse people.

Deaks on May 10, 2014, 09:21:31 PM said
im with Arantor I dont think its a good idea either as you have it, sorry man

live627 on May 11, 2014, 01:28:20 AM said
+1

You should at the very least use zebra striping.

Dragooon on May 11, 2014, 05:08:24 AM said
Quote from: live627 on May 11, 2014, 01:28:20 AM
+1

You should at the very least use zebra striping.
+1 for zebra striping. +2 for zebra striping purely from CSS without using alternative classes

Arantor on May 11, 2014, 09:15:15 AM said
Question of the day: does IE8 support zebra-striping purely from CSS? If not, then that won't happen :P

Dragooon on May 11, 2014, 10:21:11 AM said
Quote from: Arantor on May 11, 2014, 09:15:15 AM
Question of the day: does IE8 support zebra-striping purely from CSS? If not, then that won't happen :P
Another question of the day, how much damn do we give about IE8?

Arantor on May 11, 2014, 10:22:07 AM said
2.1 has been stated to be compatible with IE8+.

Deaks on May 11, 2014, 10:22:19 AM said
still a large share browser so really more than you should for ie7 or  ie6 :P

Dragooon on May 11, 2014, 10:22:55 AM said
Quote from: Arantor on May 11, 2014, 10:22:07 AM
2.1 has been stated to be compatible with IE8+.
Compatible != fully working

Arantor on May 11, 2014, 10:30:25 AM said
But usability is a fairly big concern...

Kindred on May 14, 2014, 02:32:34 AM said
Motoko has almost convinced me that we need to keep supporting ie8. I am, however, still on the fence and was leaning toward dropping it from 2.1 for this exact sort of reason...

Hristo on May 14, 2014, 01:18:40 PM said
Not that my vote counts much but still, I'm fully for dropping IE8 support from 2.1. As of April it has 4-5% usage, compared to ~8% usage year ago. Considering as of April XP is no longer supported I expect significant drop in usage within next few months. And when 2.1 is released IE8 will have less than 2% share.

Tony Reid on May 14, 2014, 01:39:02 PM said
Well, the fact is that IE8 is no longer supported by Microsoft. Given that it only just got through the zero day fix at the last patch tuesday - should SMF still be held back by IE8's crippled technology?

People that are still using it really need to understand the security implications, and be encouraged to upgrade to an alternative browser.

I know its not SMF's place to be a moral compass(I hate that term!), but if websites still let users get away with using it - then it can only be bad in general for the internet. And no - I am not suggesting that we go back to the early 90's with badges on the sites suggesting better experiences on other browsers!. Just that we should support our users in improving their experience of our websites.

I don't like to state things without fact, so looking at the analytics on my website, I can see that IE 8,9 and 10 usage is around the same - however since april I have seen a massive drop in IE 8 sessions - from 2700 unique IE8 sessions to 1020 IE8 Sessions a day. Interestingly - Safari has risen, so perhaps more people have moved from XP to ipad etc - which is perhaps another reason SMF should have more responsive/mobile themes.

Think I am wandering off topic now - so I'll stop :)



Tony Reid on May 14, 2014, 01:43:11 PM said
Quote from: Hristo on May 14, 2014, 01:18:40 PM
Not that my vote counts much but still, I'm fully for dropping IE8 support from 2.1. As of April it has 4-5% usage, compared to ~8% usage year ago. Considering as of April XP is no longer supported I expect significant drop in usage within next few months. And when 2.1 is released IE8 will have less than 2% share.

Everyones vote counts here :)

Looks like you summed up what I was thinking with a lot less words :)

Antes on May 14, 2014, 02:08:47 PM said
Quote from: Tony Reid on May 14, 2014, 01:43:11 PM
Quote from: Hristo on May 14, 2014, 01:18:40 PM
Not that my vote counts much but still, I'm fully for dropping IE8 support from 2.1. As of April it has 4-5% usage, compared to ~8% usage year ago. Considering as of April XP is no longer supported I expect significant drop in usage within next few months. And when 2.1 is released IE8 will have less than 2% share.

Everyones vote counts here :)

Looks like you summed up what I was thinking with a lot less words :)

+1

Arantor on May 14, 2014, 02:10:10 PM said
By that same logic, the minimum requirement of SMF 2.1 should also be updated to PHP 5.3.28 because that's the lowest supported version - and yet there are still hosts on PHP 5.2 even though it's unsupported.

Tony Reid on May 14, 2014, 02:23:52 PM said
Quote from: Arantor on May 14, 2014, 02:10:10 PM
By that same logic, the minimum requirement of SMF 2.1 should also be updated to PHP 5.3.28 because that's the lowest supported version - and yet there are still hosts on PHP 5.2 even though it's unsupported.

Well, people will not upgrade unless they need to, which from a dev perspective means supporting old tech, old coding methods and isn't that great for an open source project where developers need moral and can't go off and do some modern coding! (sound familiar?) - so why not aim to support PHP 5.3? Performance is surely better?

Shared hosts will upgrade for security reasons - they just need a nudge.

Arantor on May 14, 2014, 02:26:32 PM said
And every single argument made for upgrading to PHP 5.3 applies to IE 8 support.

Kindred on May 14, 2014, 02:27:11 PM said
Quite so, Arantor,
we recently discussed it and decided that 5.3 WAS a reasonable minimum requirement

Deaks on May 14, 2014, 07:36:43 PM said
Tony, IE8 still contributes to roughly 21% of the internet browser market (depending on what site you use for analysis) this is a large share so do you really think its good idea to ignore??

(data comes from http://www.netmarketshare.com/browser-market-share.aspx?qprid=2&qpcustomd=0)

Hristo on May 14, 2014, 09:01:38 PM said
For some reason NetMarketShare's (aka NetApplications) browsers market share data is always complete opposite to all other public analytics companies:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers#Summary_table

I do not know why! Maybe most of the 40 000 sites they gather data from are Chinese (where IE8 is still very used), but, sorry, I can't believe IE8 is the most widely used browser.

Arantor on May 14, 2014, 09:16:26 PM said
Maybe wherever they get their stats from includes large sites that are heavily hit by corporate users where there will be a large amount of legacy systems not able to be upgraded for whatever reason.

See, XP's death knell hasn't actually caused major drops in XP's market coverage. It's decreased, but it hasn't died overnight like everyone in the tech industry hoped it would. That's kind of the problem, really, there's still millions of desktops on XP (including the US' IRS and the UK's NHS which each have support contracts with Microsoft for their machines; I forget how many the IRS have but I know the NHS is supporting the migration of over a MILLION XP machines, I don't know how many net facing ones are in that, though)

Tony Reid on May 15, 2014, 01:24:25 AM said
Quote from: Μπράιαν Poύνικ Ντίκεν on May 14, 2014, 07:36:43 PM
Tony, IE8 still contributes to roughly 21% of the internet browser market (depending on what site you use for analysis) this is a large share so do you really think its good idea to ignore??

(data comes from http://www.netmarketshare.com/browser-market-share.aspx?qprid=2&qpcustomd=0)

Like Arantor said...

Quote from: Arantor on May 14, 2014, 09:16:26 PM
Maybe wherever they get their stats from includes large sites that are heavily hit by corporate users where there will be a large amount of legacy systems not able to be upgraded for whatever reason.

There certainly are large numbers of XP machines, Win2000/2003 out there - including our banking ATM machines (embedded XP).

The thing is, looking at data like this and making statistical judgements is meaningless without context.

On my site IE8 is around 2% of users, on SMF and other tech sites it could be different, on gossip/news paper site again different.

I have to get ready for work - but yes Bryan I do think IE8 should be a low priority. If a site owner really wants to support IE8 then they could look at having a low tech theme. But SMF shouldn't be held back.

Deaks on May 15, 2014, 08:00:34 AM said
Tony every site is different and you are right we cant use web site traffic as a comparison, but think back to a few years ago and how long IE6 was still supported.  Ok maybe if 3.0 ever gets made then drop up to ie10 but point is you want to be inclusive and as been pointed out their are ways to do that even for IE8 ... enjoy work I am finished Uni till September so party time :P

Tony Reid on May 15, 2014, 08:11:49 AM said
Yeah - we can always stick a shim in to get more advanced themes working, but SMF should not be dependent on browser.

The main issue for me with IE8 is that its a security risk - now that MS are not going to look after it.




Work is awful - its bright and sunny outside - and I'm stuck inside coding :(
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