Wedge
Public area => Development blog => Topic started by: Nao on July 8th, 2011, 05:40 PM
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The unlucky streak had to come to an end, so it seems like my life is relatively back on track. I was at least able to devote way more time to Wedge this week, and hopefully can keep doing so in the coming weeks (and months.) And because good news come in pairs, Pete is back to work as well.
In the ten days or so since my last post, we made a total of 26 commits (at least another coming from me later tonight), some of which are, as usual, really huge with dozens of changes.
The most interesting one (in my humble bastard's opinion) is another redesign of the default theme, urged by the upcoming day when I'll release the first official screenshots. See, it's interesting to give oneself a target release date for something, because then you start wondering whether you'll be happy with it on that day. And when you decide you won't, you get back to work and try to fix that. As a result, Wine has evolved even more, most notably in the choice of fonts. You'll have to trust me when you see it: Wine used to be okay, but not exciting. Now I think it is. As least those who could see it seem to agree I'm on the right track. One day, mastery of web design will be mine. Oh yes. It will be mine. So... Screenshots, eh? Not today mates! But soon, very soon. Hopefully next w... uh, I mean when we reach 100 Likes on our Facebook page.
Pete committed, among other things, his first version of the new admin homepage.
It's certainly a good start for finding motivation to strip even more things away from the old SMF codebase. Bad menu structure. Options that have been there for years and that nobody ever used. Chocobos and Peruvian pan flute players.
Discussions are still ongoing on many more features. We're active and excited again. Well, when I say "excited", we always were, we were just tired -- working on a secret project for a year was never gonna be easy, it turned out to be even harder. And when I say "active", I mean in comparison to last month. I mean, I now spend about 8 to 12 hours a day on Wedge, when I used to work only 4 to 8 hours on it, mostly because of my computer troubles. What a slacker really!
My to-do list is still filling up faster than I can actually empty it, but I'm used to that now -- my to-do list for Kyodai Mahjongg was miles long when I stopped working on it. There just wasn't anything on it that was worthy of the time I'd have spent on it. So, just like in the good old times, my to-do list is mostly there as a reminder of what I can do if I find myself out of new ideas. Which usually never lasts more than a few minutes. And believe me, the ideas I regularly get and put into my to-do are pretty good overall. I keep thinking, "hopefully I won't have to be the one implementing them... But I'll do them, even if it costs me years. And my social life."
So... Screenshots next week, and hopefully an alpha at the end of the month. Although I wouldn't hold my breath for a public release by then -- a private release is likely, but others will probably have to wait until late August. And yes, that does mean I get to spend my entire Summer working like crazy on Wedge. Isn't that cool? What do you mean pathetic? Oh, now you flatter me. Two sugars dear, please.
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Personally I love the Wine design you are doing.
There is only one thing I am not happy with: I only drink beer. :lol:
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As a sophisticate French, obviously my origins had an influence over the name. Drink moderately! Except for great wines. :P
I don't like beer so you'll hardly see a styling of mine called Lager!
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I prefer rum, how about a styling called Spirit :D
My favourite happens to be
(http://www.appletonestate.com/uploads/images/spirits/12_yr_oldREVjan26.jpg)
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Yeah, I like wine way more than beer. Nao we should exchange italian and french bottles! ;)
Regarding Wedge: great progresses !! What about TE's converter?
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Nao's writing style is intoxicating enough :whistle: Just love it :cool:
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I always try to get high before writing a blog post, because I know people are watching and it makes me nervous.
Of course, it'd be better if I actually had had anything under the hand to get high in the last 10 years, which sadly isn't the case. (So I had to settle on a chocolate crêpe for a similar effect.)
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What about TE's converter?
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Feeling up to convert attachments to media items as well? ;)
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Awesome.
Anyway, it's nice to hear that you're back on track. I'll hopefully write a couple of themes for Wedge once it's out, even if I don't end up using it, hehe. Can't wait to see how that works.
I'm looking forward to seeing how well the import function works, too.
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Themes or stylings? :P
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Feeling up to convert attachments to media items as well? ;)
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Shouldn't be, but it's starting to add up... The amount of things that need to be converted is staggering by now.
Thankfully, the whole concept of having an *importer* allows us to easily test it on live websites :)
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I've all but given up on learning new words like this for new softwares. Themes, skins, templates, stylings. Call them what you will, my word for something that modifies the look and layout for a piece of software is "theme".
If I have to divide it further down "template" is what I call the content part of the process, and "skin" is what i call the design/css part of the process.
All of this is, of course, just words...
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I've all but given up on learning new words like this for new softwares. Themes, skins, templates, stylings. Call them what you will, my word for something that modifies the look and layout for a piece of software is "theme".
If I have to divide it further down "template" is what I call the content part of the process, and "skin" is what i call the design/css part of the process.
All of this is, of course, just words...
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Then I will be making themes, probably, unless the codebase is super-Zen(http://www.csszengarden.com/)-like for customization.
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It's not "super Zen like", because with all the information normally wanted in the pages, it can't really be totally Zen like. The whole basis of Zen like is that you have at least a reasonable amount of control over the content - which on a forum, you don't, not really.
That said, it IS easier to approach than SMF's is, if only for the fact that the curved areas are done purely in CSS rather than some mystic hodgepodge of IE-compliant-using-images-instead stuff. (Though, even that's configurable at the *style* level, not the theme level)
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If I have to divide it further down "template" is what I call the content part of the process, and "skin" is what i call the design/css part of the process.
Which makes me think -- maybe it's more widely accepted as a term. 'Skin'. For what we're doing. Rather than 'stylings'. Maybe I went wrong on this one. Maybe we should rename stylings to skins, maybe it'll be clearer to everyone.
Pete, what do you think? And anyone else?
Which also reminds me that we still haven't found a perfect compromise on naming packages/extensions/add-ons/plugins :P
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Pete, what do you think? And anyone else?
Which also reminds me that we still haven't found a perfect compromise on naming packages/extensions/add-ons/plugins
You know as well as I do that our users will tend to disagree anyway, and will call them themes and mods, because they're familiar terms.
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'skin' is a familiar term for flash and iTunes as far as I am concerned.
'Theme' I associate with SMF....... billy2 winces.
Go with 'skin' for me.
Billy
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I'm not overly concerned about these... regardless of what they are called in the end, users will get use to it, just like moving from another platform that uses different terminology.
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Oh I'm not interested in trying to sway your vocabulary, I'm just saying that terms frequently change and it's not fun to modify your vocabulary every other site you frequent.
I know for MyBB they call the templates "templates" and skins are called "themes". My preference is to call the finished layout "theme", the color set/css "skin" and the content-driving part "template" but I'm sure if you put two webdevelopers in one room they will give you three different opinions. ;)
All in all though, what you call them is extremely unimportant.
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I've learned in life that whatever is extremely unimportant, is rigorously indispensable. (quote from Jerome Bonaldi, French TV personality in the 90s.)
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:hmm:
Well I won't complain that you consider and reconsider all aspects of the software. History has shown to me that software that has been -moderately- deliberated and delayed has consistently been better.
I must also comment that I as a Norwegian love that you use Opera, haha.
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Well, I'm a die-hard Opera fan, have been for the last 6 years at least, but recently I found myself in a corner with it... It systematically becomes unstable once I get to more than 200 tabs. Tab grouping doesn't help either -- whenever I restart Opera, my groups are gone, or totally disjointed (what used to be a group becomes three groups with several stand-alone tabs in the middle, etc.)
So I've switched to Opera+Firefox once I got my new machine, since it's very demanding in terms of Ram. I do my testing, main browsing etc with Opera, and once I have too many tabs open, I move them to Firefox. Works well for now...
Plus, Firefox has some great font rendering (even if not faithful to the actual font hinting of whatever. I don't care, it looks so good.)
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Tons of tabs don't really work well at all in any browser, but it might be worse in Opera than the others. Can't say I ever tried having more than 10 tabs. I get this tick and I ragequit them all, if I get too many (as in they fill more than my screen.)
A possibility to alter the background tabs to be suspended on HDD could be interesting...
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Chrome sucks at many tabs (over 80 and it starts showing blank pages when loading a tab... This happens in Opera too, but after 200 tabs). Plus, it doesn't have any way to group tabs. And related tab plugins suck. (Chrome doesn't allow much freedom...)
Firefox handles tabs way better. Plus, with TabGroups Manager, I can actually 'hibernate' a group that I don't need to read right now. They also reopen quite quickly. I can rename groups -- very important. But the current major flaw is that I can't go through the recently viewed tab list manually. In Opera, I'll just hit the '4' key to minimize the current tab and get the last viewed tab, and I can do it forever until I find the tab I was looking for. In Firefox, if you minimize a tab, it just switches to another, and if you minimize that one, it redirects you to the first one. :-/
Also, I'm using Tree Style Tabs, and I can't get both the tab list in the vertical tree, and in the regular horizontal tab bar. Opera does that, and I'm used to it... Ah, and it only shows one group at a time in the list tree. :(
Ah well...
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Can't have everything in the world. The guys at Opera work hard to make life easier though, so I suspect any problem anyone might have will be fixed in a year or two. :lol:
But Firefox' plugins can be awesome indeed.
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My wife gave me a hard time when I started approaching 30 tabs. :)
Now I only average a dozen or so.
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Can't have everything in the world. The guys at Opera work hard to make life easier though, so I suspect any problem anyone might have will be fixed in a year or two. :lol:
Just look at the demo site... Click on any media item, then move the zoom box around. It leaves black lines in its trail... That's not a 'complete' box-shadow implementation to me.But Firefox' plugins can be awesome indeed.
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This is why I don't use Opera :P
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I personally prefer stylings but on the flip side, I'm happy to bow to the court of vocal majority if that's preferred term on it. And, fair enough, it IS, really, more common.
And having a 'skins' subfolder would certainly make more sense to noobs than what SMF has ('css'), or even what Wedge currently has ('styles'), which isn't even the same as the name of the feature (stylings). Meh!That said, our 'skins' are more flexible than most, I think.
I thought we were going to go with add-ons? :P
Now, obviously 95% of the SMF community says 'mods'. Maybe it's make sense to use 'mods', then. Although, in that particular case, it's not really a noob-friendly name. It's just what the community uses.You know as well as I do that our users will tend to disagree anyway, and will call them themes and mods, because they're familiar terms.
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This is why I don't use Opera :P
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Well that's what you're going to... I always said I preferred 'plugins'
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I received a pm asking me where to download the Wedge auto-embedder :P
Meh!
Poll time for styling and add-on?
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...it doesn't matter what we call them, our users will do it wrong - because that's life.
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Wonderful.
So I have been 7 months trying to forget the word "mods" and call them "plugins" instead and now Arantor says the proper word is "add-ons" and Nao want to call them mods again.
Can you please make your mind? :eheh:
Only joking. As a lot of you have already said it doesn't really matter, because the people will get use to whatever word you chose. For example when I started with SMF ages ago, I came from the Joomla community and was used to call them components, modules and mambots, so the word mods was new to me and I adapted really quick.
In fact I think the word that make more sense is "add-ons", because they are not "modifying" anything in the core but "adding" a functionality.
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Thinga majigs that hook up to the wicha macall its. That make the whoits work. :whistle:
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Well, there's a slight semantic difference between plugin and add-on, which is why I went for add-on as a term. I really don't care what we call it provided that 1) we're consistent and 2) that it makes sense. Heck, we can even use an unrelated word if there's some logical reason for it (like I, oddly, suggested 'drawers' for Simple*Desk*, moons ago)
From the way you all have been describing how the add-ons/plugins will interact with Wedge (no template/code changes to the base), "extension" seems like an appropriate and widely accepted term to me.
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This is why I don't use Opera :P
fuck it. :PDoesn't explain why you use Chrome, which is worse than Opera in every respect :troll:
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Chrome is simpler and I like simple, although I've been trying to use Firefox but it keeps failing for me. Maybe FF6 beta would be better.
IMO I'd go with modules for independent modifications, and plugins which modify a code. Since you can't modify the code, I'd keep modules. And I like templates and skins better, makes best sense to me.
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I think mod could stand for module yeah.
A module is self-explained and doesn't imply anything.