A wedge in the hand is worth two in the wild

Nao

  • Dadman with a boy
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A wedge in the hand is worth two in the wild
« on July 8th, 2011, 05:40 PM »
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.[1]

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.
 1. Apparently, that's how people do it. I think we'll release Wedge Gold when we reach one million fans. Hopefully that's in less than 5 years. Would be fun to have you wait to get a product that's been ready for years. Would be like SMF 2.

Re: A wedge in the hand is worth two in the wild
« Reply #16, on July 11th, 2011, 02:06 PM »
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)

Re: A wedge in the hand is worth two in the wild
« Reply #17, on July 11th, 2011, 04:48 PM »
Quote from Norodo on July 11th, 2011, 01:48 PM
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.
I see what you mean. Then 'stylings' are what you'd call skins.

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

Re: A wedge in the hand is worth two in the wild
« Reply #18, on July 11th, 2011, 05:18 PM »
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Pete, what do you think? And anyone else?
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. That said, our 'skins' are more flexible than most, I think.
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Which also reminds me that we still haven't found a perfect compromise on naming packages/extensions/add-ons/plugins
I thought we were going to go with add-ons? :P

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.

Re: A wedge in the hand is worth two in the wild
« Reply #19, on July 11th, 2011, 05:25 PM »
'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

Re: A wedge in the hand is worth two in the wild
« Reply #20, on July 11th, 2011, 05:33 PM »
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.

Re: A wedge in the hand is worth two in the wild
« Reply #21, on July 11th, 2011, 09:05 PM »
Quote from Arantor on July 11th, 2011, 05:18 PM
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.

Re: A wedge in the hand is worth two in the wild
« Reply #22, on July 11th, 2011, 09:14 PM »
I've learned in life that whatever is extremely unimportant, is rigorously indispensable. (quote from Jerome Bonaldi, French TV personality in the 90s.)

Re: A wedge in the hand is worth two in the wild
« Reply #23, on July 11th, 2011, 09:29 PM »
: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.

Re: A wedge in the hand is worth two in the wild
« Reply #24, on July 11th, 2011, 09:37 PM »
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.)

Re: A wedge in the hand is worth two in the wild
« Reply #25, on July 11th, 2011, 09:44 PM »
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...

Re: A wedge in the hand is worth two in the wild
« Reply #26, on July 11th, 2011, 09:59 PM »
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...

Re: A wedge in the hand is worth two in the wild
« Reply #27, on July 11th, 2011, 10:04 PM »
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.


Re: A wedge in the hand is worth two in the wild
« Reply #29, on July 11th, 2011, 11:59 PM »
Quote from Norodo on July 11th, 2011, 10:04 PM
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:
Well, having been myself responsible with a bloated piece of software in the past, I can in all honesty say I don't think they'll do much in that area. I mean I've posted COUNTLESS bug reports, very detailed, with ways to reproduce on all machines. Never ever got a *reply* about them, and 90% of these bug reports went directly into bug-report-hell.

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.
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But Firefox' plugins can be awesome indeed.
As long as they don't conflict with each other.