[Geany] A new look?

[Lex Trotman]

On 5 April 2011 00:34, Matthew Brush <mbrush at codebrainz.ca> wrote:
> On 04/04/11 06:55, Lex Trotman wrote:
>>
>> But the font size is fixed, which is no good.  To give you an idea,
>> note in my screen shot how much extra space there is on each side
>> compared to yours, now think how small that makes the text.  I
>> currently use 18 point as default, but you probably wouldn't want that
>> on your screen.
>
> Press Ctrl and + to zoom in :)

Why should we have to do this??  Plus when you zoom most pages (in
your list) show artifacts and/or font rendering problems.

>
> I have a big monitor as well, and I've noticed many of the nice professional
> sites don't scale or change the font size when the browser is resized.

Sadly this just proves my contention about web designers ;-)

Perhaps I'm being too harsh, they are taught at design school to do
things on a piece of paper and I understand that they consequently
have trouble getting their heads around things that vary.  By calling
them lazy I really mean that fixed size is much easier to design.

Some
> of the nice ones I've noticed lately:
>
> http://www.ubuntu.com/

Nah, doesn't do it for me, all advertising no content & text too
small, if I didn't know anything about Ubuntu it wouldn't sell me on
it.

> http://gitorious.org/

An ingenious background that makes it look less like it is fixed size,
and the multi column text layout is good, but again some of the fonts
are too small

> http://ground-control.org/

As above but not quite so nicely designed

> http://store.apple.com/ca/

Shows that you can have sidebar navigation :)

> http://www.libreoffice.org/

This one is an interesting one, even though it has two column text all
the text follows the default size, it isn't fixed, & I like the
background gradient.  The overall look is clean.
Maybe we could do something similar with one column for news the other
for description/features/info?

>
> I usually use only half of my monitor for the browser, which works well with
> this style of fixed-width, centered websites that seems to be all the rage.

1. NEVER confuse common with good, Microsoft anyone? :)

2. I have 12 tabs open, 8 of which are using full width.  The only
ones that don't look too good are the GTK reference ones.  Of the
fixed size ones, two are manuals, (all text so of course they are
fixed width), one is news (lots of pictures, another of the reasons I
gave for fixed size) and that leaves one other fixed size.  So I am
not going to re-size the browser for one website.

>
> Note also that all those examples are using the same general style of
> "across the top" menus.  I think a lot of people look there by default
> nowadays for the main site navigation.

None of them have menus across the top, they all have 4-6 links across
the top, which all go to other pages so you have to go to other pages
to look for things.  I think 4-6 is too few for what we have to cover.
 Hence I advocate a sidebar which fits more.

But maybe we can use the method that http://www.linuxmint.com/ uses
where, as you mouse over the top categories the next line shows the
subcategories, that way you can find what you are looking for without
having to go to other pages to search for it.  Anyway its something to
try as an alternative. It could probably re-use most of the menu code
Pockata has already, just make the menu horizontal on the next line.

>
> My $0.02 CAD.
>

Raise you $0.02 AUD its worth $0.0015 more as of writing this.

Cheers
Lex