Wedge

Now it's kinda screwed up on iPad, where the main page content s wider than the actual page... It's weird and annoying.

iPad 3 / iOS 6.1.3: Sidebar does not disappear entirely, something like 13 pixels remains on the right hand side of the screen.

In other news, the size of the 'Users Online Today' entry text is significantly smaller than the normal Users Online entry text (i.e. the names) and the plugin does also need updating for the icons used for online/contacts changes, just haven't gotten around to it.

To add, iOS 6.1.3 / iPad 3 (with dev stuff, but nothing that would apply here), button opens sidebar, does not close it again.

Hmm, PMs should probably issue a notifier, users on mobile including iPad will not see the sidebar by default and may not know they have messages.

Works as expected on Chrome 28.

The icon is not clear as to what it is (but the exact same argument should be levied at Chrome when it changed the wrench icon to a 3-bar icon...) but I don't really know what can be done to make it more useful.

I still think capturing the middle button is a bad idea for anyone who has it set up for other uses (plenty of users do use it to open things into a new tab and the above example)

But hey, you know best about this.

Middle mouse button would be interesting and so extremely flawed. Aside from the technical issues you've found, there are two very, very large objections to middle clicking.

1. A lot of mice have a scrollwheel instead of or even as well as the middle button. The mouse I'm currently borrowing has two principle buttons and a scrollwheel and I can depress the scrollwheel to middle click. Normally this also results in my scrolling the page somewhat meaning that I usually miss the thing I was trying to click on.

2. My laptop doesn't HAVE a middle button. It doesn't even technically have a right mouse button. Right clicking on the MacBook Pro trackpad is a two finger single tap to the entire trackpad, middle clicking is the Command key plus a tap to the trackpad. Yes, that's right: I have to physically use the keyboard, even though it's right next to the trackpad, to do that. Needless to say, it isn't happening any time soon. And most laptops I've seen have a similar issue: there's often only two buttons, which means if middle click is supported at all, which is not that likely, it's implemented as pressing both buttons together.

There is a wider issue here: outside of reasonably specialist activities - CAD, modelling and the like - and some games, middle click is *just not used* anywhere. For years I had my old mouse set up so that middle click didn't actually middle click at all, but instead issued a double click, to push less wear on to the left mouse button's switch. During that time I never found a single application that ever used the middle button for anything at all. That was a few years ago but generally speaking things haven't actually changed that much.

Hell, on my Logitech M500 mouse - the one with the back/forward buttons in easy reach of the thumb - of the games that did use middle mouse button for something, I just reset that to the back button because it was so much easier than actually using the middle mouse button. But even those were the minority in the first place.

Then, add in the fact that it's a feature NO-ONE is going to notice unless they're told about it - there is absolutely zero UI hinting in any current desktop operating system for middle clicking - and the fact that not everyone reads every post all the time (except possibly me, and even then I do gloss over the details of some of them though I try to pick up on what I think is important) and it all combines to a point where there is a feature that is potentially very cool but that no-one would ever find it except by accident and then they might not realise what they actually did about it. There is no way that is good design.

Show me one other website where middle clicking is a common and recognised aspect of the site. And then show me what they did to explain to users about it.

Of the people that actually do use middle click, they use it for a given operation and not the one you wanted to indicate (as stated, it's frequently used to open tabs in a new space). It works for me in Chrome, in that it does as described. But there is precisely no chance I'd ever know it was there unless you mentioned it. And if you have to explain to people that it's there and what it does, it's probably not the best choice for a UI element no matter how cool it is.

PS, yes I'm on hiatus, though I'm actually able to check in more than I previously thought (though Chrome seems to have trouble handling JavaScript, so I'm reduced to using Safari while I'm on OS X because I can't be bothered to either boot my Boot Camp partition or install Firefox *shrug*)

PPS, I stopped thinking of Wedge as just a forum a long time ago. But to call it a blog is a great disservice, it lowers it to the level of WordPress.

That's one of the curses of changing something that isn't directly a 'feature'. I add stuff that is very blatantly, even transparently obviously, 'new features', it's stuff people can see themselves using, it's stuff that people can directly relate to. They see what I add and think, 'hmm, I can see how I can make use of that', or 'that would have been useful for <situation I had in the past>'

Something that is not clearly 'a feature' is hard for people to grasp in order to comment on it. It's a usability thing not a 'feature' thing, and as a result people need to see it, interact with it and get a feel for it to be able to figure out whether they like it or not. It's much the same with some of the WeCSS stuff, actually... same symptom under a different situation - most people are not in a position to see it or interact with it to be able to figure out if they're going to like it or not, and most people won't use it anyway because most people are only going to do minimal colour changes based on themes other people made.

I have a similar problem in terms of getting feedback when it comes to some of the stuff I've worked on with Wedge, e.g. when I asked about permissions. Everyone seems to grasp the nature of the problems that I see with what SMF had, but no-one's really quite sure how it should be fixed, and even when I tried bumping it via Facebook, the additional views didn't really help. It's frustrating in a way because I specifically wanted feedback but came to understand why I wasn't going to get very much on it.

The quest for perfection is a lonely enough road as it is, and when taking into account usability and aesthetics, it's even lonelier. Good design doesn't shout at you to tell you how good it is. It lets you do what you want to do without being in your face, in a way that feedback generally seems redundant. But bad design will generally get met with feedback along the way. The lack of feedback, generally, is a good thing where design is concerned.

I'm not sure how I feel about the sidebar at present. The idea of it sliding out is a cool one, but I'm concerned that it isn't obvious enough and it seems a bit twitchy to me - I go by the front page an awful lot and more than once I've ended up bringing the sidebar into view when going to click on the 'Wedge' in the linktree.