SilvereX žurnalas

Do… or do not.

There is no try.

Paskelbė SilvereX (21:36) kategorijoje english, mintys randomu
2 komentarai (-ų)

Recently I’ve been working with high resolution monitor – 17″ WUXGA resolution. That’s 1920×1200, no less.

Of course, fonts are too little to see with standard Windows settings (small fonts, 96 dpi). Large fonts (120 dpi) are also too little, so I am using 160 dpi now.

Most Windows applications are good enough for such large fonts, with or without little tweaking, except that graphics don’t get larger and usually are too small. Best applications are, unsurprisingly, Office 2003 and Visual Studio 2005. Their menu graphics scale proportionally with fonts.

Worst application is, unsurprisingly again, Internet Explorer. A big part of the fault is web site designers’, though. Pixel-based designs are common, and Internet Explorer cannot zoom not only images, but text too. The result is non-browsable Web. At least, of what use is DELFI.lt with its content in 1/4 screen width and indecipherable menus? Or Lietuvos rytas, CNN, even BBC News in their unreadable tiny text, even with largest fonts set?

Firefox comes in handy. It cannot zoom images, but at least I can read now. But several sites rendering is too bad–text often goes out of table boundaries, and Firefox toolbar icons are way too small (and they call them Large in menu customization dialog). And entire interface seems driven larger by fonts only–every line seems tight-fitted around text, which looks inelegant.

Opera wins. It zooms page with images, and when it zooms, it also zooms pixel-sized tables, thus making my sites more readable (i.e., more than two words in a line). And text stays inside tables. I can also zoom its interface icons, though it is not automatically done as in Office. These guys must have done it right when they designed Opera version for small screen devices. The only two issues which I noticed are too little line heights in dowload transfer status and maybe too little tab close icons (I have reported the bug). Firefox guys could learn a lot from Opera. The only thing for which I missed configuration option is which next tab is selected after closing a tab (I like Firefox select-right-one style).

Most of the sites on the Internet don’t look the same with high DPI settings. From the sites I usually visit, I could mention Omni.lt as looking exactly the same (except the graphics), also, Digg, Slashdot and LWN.

Designers, forget about pixel designs. They’re completely unusable. There were much sites which I visited and they had very narrow columns (many WordPress themes are such, and my previous theme was one of them). You should even make images sizeable together with text. Dive into Accessibility is a good start. Strangely, accessibility is not only for disabled people any longer, but for people with high-end technologies.

Paskelbė SilvereX (22:09) kategorijoje english
9 komentarai (-ų)

Today I have watched War of the Worlds movie. This is another example how to make a bad movie based on a good book. If you forget for a moment that most sceneries and objects had to be rendered (which you, as a watcher, should), War of the Worlds is bland, comparing to original book–oversimplified, too little action and events… action is moved to today’s US and is sooo typical American kind which you can find in almost every Hollywood movie. Such a pity, could have been one of the best sci-fi movies, considering the Herbert George Wells book and what Steven Spielberg can do.

Paskelbė SilvereX (21:27) kategorijoje english
4 komentarai (-ų)

Recently, I have been testing Konqueror web browser instead of Mozilla Firefox on Linux. Here are several things I have noticed:

• Konqueror can ask me if I want to open a new pop-up window. Firefox nowadays has either too strict or too lousy pop-up policy and sometimes does not get it right. Asking me, along with an option to block them always or allow always is the best thing, in my opinion.
• I can configure CPU priority for plugins. I don’t like animated flash ads to make my PC much slower and louder (I have a cheap laptop and I can hear very well if CPU is on 10%, 50% or 100%), so I always set lowest priority for plugins. Firefox, on the other hand, has Flashblock extension. It is definitely a good thing, but sometimes I’d rather see them, but not with 100% CPU load and slowliness of all applications. And Firefox definitely allocates more than lowest CPU priority for plugins.
• Konqueror definitely renders pages faster and uses less CPU for that. On the other hand, Firefox gets very exact font sizes (as IE). Konqueror makes small font sizes too small, and big ones too big, even when I use 96 dpi, with which Firefox on Linux renders font sizes exactly like MS IE on Windows. The closest I could get is medium font size preference set to 11.
• I miss Ctrl+Enter and other shortcuts in Konqueror very much. These are really killer features in Firefox. Konqueror only allows me to choose “www.” prepended to address from a drop-down list, but not when I have visited some page on that site.
• Konqueror can route all plugins sound through KDE’s sound server, so I can enjoy sound in funny flash movies, something which I could not do with Firefox (artsdsp and esddsp).
• Search bar is quite unusable. Though it looks very similar to Firefox one, I cannot put more than one search engine into drop-down list there, and when I press Enter, my input disappears at once. I can select it from history drop-down, but not edit it.
• Konqueror has no such thing as Home page (home button opens home directory), only Start page(s). I am using self-made page with links to my favorite sites and frequently access it. But it’s not that big issue, I got used to not closing my start tab or opening or restarting Konqueror, because it loads really fast, faster than Firefox.

So far, I have been using Konqueror under my GNOME environment. Though it doesn’t look that elegant and clean as other GNOME applications, I am using it as my default browser currently. It’s one of few really good KDE applications which I use under GNOME.

Paskelbė SilvereX (20:42) kategorijoje english
5 komentarai (-ų)