Who decided we all use widescreen displays?

3 replies [Last post]

Sun, 11/14/2010 - 9:09pm

AHendin

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Joined: Nov 4 2010

I know lots of folks have widescreen displays, and I use one myself sometimes, but please consider accommodating those who use smaller screens! Not to knock the overall enhanced design and functionality of the new site, and it looks great on my MacBook Pro 1440 x 900 screen, but my main screens are not puny: 19", 1280 x 1024, but I use them in 1024 x 1280 portrait orientation, which means that horizontal width is 1024. Side-to-side scrolling sucks. Thank god the message board topics list and reading pages are more accommodating, but here I am trying to write my post, and I'm STUCK in a fixed-width window that is half-again wider than my screen. Lots of side-to-side scrolling, which is perhaps the worst offense of fixed-width pages.

So here's my plea for making at least the Forum pages more friendly to those who use "alternate" screen orientations. Please don't force me to scroll back and forth to write posts! And what's with all the blank space above post bodies? Please, let's go back to our nice compact style. Not the old, but let's tweak the new!

The navbar could be significantly more compact: who needs all that white space around every button, and at the end of the Message Board item? I'm happy to have the stuff in the right section when I want it, but please keep the important stuff inside 1024 pixels wide.

I've also found a fun bug with the mouse-over drop menus. Will try to post video soon. Wish I had more time to note the fix; sorry!

Abe

Wed, 11/17/2010 - 11:28am

DLoayza

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Joined: Nov 4 2010

I have the opposite problem

Funny, the entire site seems to be a relatively safe and narrow width. I figured it was designed for viewing on a non-widescreen monitors.

Using Firefox, I measured the width of the content to be about 1000 pixels. On my 22" widescreen monitor, message board posts (including the left side bar with usernames and their useless generic avatars) are under 600 pixels. The messages by themselves are a measely 400 pixels. I find this horribly and ridiculously narrow, and requires much more vertical scrolling on my part than any site I've been to in a while.

With Internet Explorer things are slightly wider, around 1200 pixels for the full site. Message board posts are still unusually narrow for my taste. Whats strange is that most sites are designed to automatically adjust to your screen width. This one seems to be playing it extra safe or something.

Maybe you should check your browser text size? (correction: check page "zoom"). You might have increased the text size without realizing it (CTRL -/+), which would cause such a problem.

I think they're well aware of the repetitive drop menu. It's not a bug, it's a feature, designed to bug you. =)

Sun, 11/21/2010 - 12:54pm

AHendin

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Joined: Nov 4 2010

Maybe you should check your

Maybe you should check your browser text size? (correction: check page "zoom"). You might have increased the text size without realizing it (CTRL -/+), which would cause such a problem.

I think they're well aware of the repetitive drop menu. It's not a bug, it's a feature, designed to bug you. =)

Indeed, I noticed this just before reading your post! Somehow page zoom was zoomed way big, how embarrassing that this didn't occur to me. Of course, it wasn't zoomed on other sites, and I don't know how it got zoomed here. Now, I zoomed back to normal, but then I logged in to reply and the zoom both returned to formerly larger size AND I wasn't logged in until I logged in a second time. Maybe I need to reset my Firefox profile. Ho hum.

So, page width seems OK. The argument could be made that accessibility could be better-considered--some folks do need/prefer larger text sizes, and pages that reflow instead of having fixed-width are friendlier to those folks. On the other hand, if you can't see well enough to read ordinary text, you probably can't see well enough to be cycling, so maybe it doesn't matter here!

The reply box width is still a problem, however, as is the text size there. Compare the font size of the body above the reply with the text size of the reply box as you're typing, and remember a basic principle of good typography: it's much easier for the human eye to follow shorter lines without skipping. Larger text mitigates this issue, but not completely.

Another flaw: the [cite] tag isn't respected across paragraph breaks. I tried using [br/] between paras, but [cite] is turned off as soon as a CRLF is found. (Replacing the square brackets with angle brackets, of course.) Makes it challenging to quote text above a reply. I definitely think we could have a better text editor here.

All will be adjusted and tweaked in good time, I'm sure, and I doubt it helps to talk about it here unless the webmaster is reading this; I'll try to post such comments in future to the appropriate place!

As for the repeating drop menus, have you figured out how to get two of them to drop endlessly? I made a movie of it. ;-)

Wed, 11/17/2010 - 11:56pm

nycc_oldtimer

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Joined: Nov 10 2010

I can view the message board

I can view the message board on my iPhone 4. It has 960 by 640 pixel resolution (326 ppi). To be honest, the white on blue text doesn't look bad on the iPhone 4. Too bad it hurts my eyes on a regular computer. Mac or PC.

NYCC Oldtimer

NYCC.org

Who decided we all use widescreen displays?