Sci-Fi Storm

New looks for Storm 2.0

by on Feb.06, 2005, under General News

I’m slowly making progress on Storm 2.0, in between various interruptions of life. Mostly I’ve gotten some theming done, with a combo of CSS and XSLT. Take a look at the Beta Site: the default theme is now dark blue, but grey, maroon, and black will also be available. IE users will get black by default for now to get around PNG transparency issues, but the will be a separate theme for IE (probably only one). I’ve also put in a feathered effect on all the title bars. Backengine work still needs to be done – you can’t actually register yet, but the beginnings of the cookie authentication is in place. Comments? Suggestions?


10 Comments for this entry

  • chad

    Comments

    Here’s my $0.02: I think the blue is great, but the orange/brown for the text doesn’t go over very well. Not sure what color to use in its place, but perhaps a semi-bright green or cyan.

  • msew

    keep current UI use new tech

    current UI is much easier to read and much nicer on the eyes.

    Upgrade to new tech. Keep the current UI and colors.

  • karrde

    Dark Backgrounds Rock

    Looks good on both layout and style terms for me. Always prefer light text on dark backgrounds… eaiser on you eyes when you’re starting at a screen all day.

  • Anonymous Coward

    looks okay, but…

    looks okay but first, it needs more color. i’ve never been a big fan of the current colors, but they are more readable than the beta. the link color is good i think but there is way too much white (title bars, menu bars).

    in addition to color, perhaps some graphics. take a look at http://www.theonering.net/index.shtml for an example of what i’m thinking about.

    in ie6 the menu bars and title bars are detached from the little bevel on the edges. it doesn’t look right at all in opera 7.54 (which i used as my standard browser). looks pretty good in firefox 1.0.

    • Doc

      Re:looks okay, but…

      Color: Love to, but two reasons it won’t happen soon: 1) I’m trying to get the layout nailed down so then I can make the engine work with it, and 2) Adding color will require more work on the individual themes (separate files for each graphical element, etc.), and right now the only thing different is the background and font color statements in a style file. Fine tuning looks is for a later time.

      Graphics: Love to, but I’m not a graphics designer. Volunteers welcome 🙂 If I can get some cash, I might see if any of the hardup webcomic artists I read might want some extra dough…

      IE: Funny, I don’t think it did it yesterday, but obviously there is something there. IE will get its own version of the standard theme eventually, unless they fix PNG support sooner. Currently I don’t see it as worth immediate debugging.

      Opera: Never used it, actually. Downloaded it and took a look; apparently it identified itself as IE (at least “compatible; MSIE” was in the USER-AGENT string), but it doesn’t display PNGs as table cell backgrounds, either overall or via CSS. This is a drawback of the browser. I’m not likely to write a separate theme for Opera at this stage though.

      Firefox: That is the reference browser, so Firefox/Mozilla should look exactly right.

  • PumpHunter

    Remember design goals of WWW

    Yes, one comment, whatever you do, please remember thet point of it all was scalability. Too many damn sites abuse the intent of stylesheets and lock their fonts in a tiny size, which I for one have a hard time reading.

    • Doc

      Re:Remember design goals of WWW

      FYI, this works both in IE and Firefox (and I assume Mozilla), although Firefox allows almost unlimited change: Hold down the shift key, and roll your wheel on the mouse – you can scale all the fonts on the site. Site text too small? Expand it as needed.

      Note that this seems to affect all pages viewed from then on in that window – you’d need to open a new one to get back to normal (I don’t know a shortcut).

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