deskthority - Suggestions and Changelog

[Vierax]

++ for SSL.

My suggestion is to add a darkest theme or a background colour that burns less the retina than the actual. Something with a lowest contrast like Black on 50% grey is enough, I don't talk about some Dolch scheme. Thx

[Muirium]

My suggestion is to add a darkest theme or a background colour that burns less the retina

Funny you should say that. Right now, like most nights, I'm browsing like this:

Screen Shot 2014-01-31 at 01.12.26 am.png (677.31 KiB) Viewed 7934 times

Not perfect, but it does the trick. A little bookmarklet by the name of Monochrome, which I edited to give me white text on black background for any website, when I press Command+2 (to access it from my favourites).

An official DT dark theme would be better to look at. I'd definitely use it. But I do notice consistency trouble at sites which have multiple styles. Writers don't always bear the variations in mind when they're posting diagrams etc. which assume a certain background colour.

[tuxsavvy]

Somewhat new to the deskthority forums (as I have been more active on geekhack forums but been trying to atone on deskthority wiki). Anyway, I noticed that on geekhack forums there is a way to see how much characters are left when trying to compose a custom signature. Contrary on the deskthority forums there was no way to view how many characters are left but one can preview their signature (which geekhack forums does not have that functionality).

What do you guys think of my suggestion?

[Compgeke]

Thing about signatures here is they don't show up on a post directly but under the username beside the post.

The counter also would have to be a phpBB mod and as far as I know none exist.

[tuxsavvy]

Thing about signatures here is they don't show up on a post directly but under the username beside the post.

The counter also would have to be a phpBB mod and as far as I know none exist.

Yeah I realised that they show up on deskthority forums within usernames.

I think geekhack forums uses simplemachine, don't know if that helps and thanks for the response.

[Daniel Beardsmore]

Writers don't always bear the variations in mind when they're posting diagrams etc. which assume a certain background colour.

Maybe one day someone will consider adding alpha channels to JPEG. I have never understood why I'm forced to make a choice between PNG (terrible choice for photographs) and JPEG (no alpha channels). Stupid ivory tower fools …

[Vierax]

Funny you should say that. Right now, like most nights, I'm browsing like this:

Screen Shot 2014-01-31 at 01.12.26 am.png

Not perfect, but it does the trick. A little bookmarklet by the name of Monochrome, which I edited to give me white text on black background for any website, when I press Command+2 (to access it from my favourites).

An official DT dark theme would be better to look at. I'd definitely use it. But I do notice consistency trouble at sites which have multiple styles. Writers don't always bear the variations in mind when they're posting diagrams etc. which assume a certain background colour.

I thought about display troubles when I did the suggestion : I have a dark grey background theme on my GUI and I ever see some issues in badly written websites or apps. I'm an absolute fan of white/yellow on black too but it's too difficult to handle it with the actual theme without some colour issues (and the white on white 7bit's secret sentences will be broken ) That's why I suggested a 50% grey. I know about browser extensions to change the CSS of sites but as you said it's not as good as a proper theme.
Having a black BG is good for backlighted screens (less power consumption and IMHO better comfort for reading) but not with e-paper at all (Kindle 4 is my mobile device to browse Web and wikipedia theme is perfect to it)

PNG (terrible choice for photographs)

Because of the less compression than JPEG ? Sorry I'm not aware of the photographer and webdesigner's job :/

[bhtooefr]

Writers don't always bear the variations in mind when they're posting diagrams etc. which assume a certain background colour.

Maybe one day someone will consider adding alpha channels to JPEG. I have never understood why I'm forced to make a choice between PNG (terrible choice for photographs) and JPEG (no alpha channels). Stupid ivory tower fools …

Well, there's always WebP...

https://developers.google.com/speed/webp/

Transparency is also supported with lossy compression and typically provides 3x smaller file sizes compared to PNG when lossy compression is acceptable for the red/green/blue color channels.

[Daniel Beardsmore]

Having a black BG is good for backlighted screens …

That's complicated. A typical backlight is a panel that's constantly lit (by LEDs or cold cathode fluorescent tubes), though some screens will vary the backlight intensity according to the brightest and darkest parts of the image, not to save energy, but to reduce the effects of backlight bleed. That's a huge problem with LCD: black pixels are formed from blocking out the backlight with the liquid crystal layer, which is not 100% effective (the effect is achieved using polarisation of light, not optical opacity).

OLED requires power for lit pixels, but, not being backlit, puts out zero light for black pixels. I remember reading a few years ago that it actually took more power than LCD, but in time it should require a lot less, as LCD lights up the whole screen white regardless. Worse, LCD achieves colour by filtering out the white light into subpixels using a colour filter, so two thirds of the backlight's illumination energy is thrown away (digital cameras have a similar problem). OLED only needs to provide the required light, and no more.

Because of the less compression than JPEG ? Sorry I'm not aware of the photographer and webdesigner's job :/

Yes. JPEG compression reduces file size drastically at the cost of literally throwing away most of the picture. Most of what you see in a JPEG image is the computer's intelligent guesswork of what it thinks was there originally, but it doesn't know. This is largely adequate for continuous tone (though you ideally want chroma subsampling disabled, which is something Adobe historically failed to provide, and probably still have not pemitted), but sharp edges cannot be correctly reconstructed and therefore screenshots and diagrams suffer significant blurring and artefacts.

The problem comes when you want to make a photograph independent of its background colour. Unlike a magazine, on the Web, there are cases where the final background colour won't be the one used when the photo was prepared. Your choices for non-rectangular images are GIF (hard to get above 256 colours, and only provides 1-bpp transparency) or PNG (huge files when used with continuous tone graphics). Browsers don't support the placement of any other data in the image, such as a bit mask, alpha channel or clipping path.

Let's hope WebP makes it into real world usage!

[bhtooefr]

Worse, LCD achieves colour by filtering out the white light into subpixels using a colour filter, so two thirds of the backlight's illumination energy is thrown away (digital cameras have a similar problem). OLED only needs to provide the required light, and no more.

Mind you, there are ways to improve color LCD visibility, although they still waste backlight energy. (Basically, the Pixel Qi approach, which is to put a color layer BEHIND some transflective pixels, IIRC. Backlight on, you get color. Backlight off, you get very easily readable monochrome.)

[Muirium]

Can we have a better PM backup option? After a year, my space is 22% full, and unless that quota keeps rising like Gmail's, someday I'll have to empty it out. Believe it or not I do refer to old ones quite frequently. (Just today I was digging out addresses for proxy duties.) A plain text dump of all messages at once would be most useful.

Right now the export option is limited to a screenful (25 messages?) at a time. The only export I want or need is all of them. Straight into my text editor!

[7bit]

I would like to add a sticky thread to the Marketplace:

Sellouts and Group buys

with a list of active sellout and group buy threads.

If nobody has something against it, I will create that thread.

[Muirium]

Sure. Wasn't someone doing this manually for a while? You or Matt3o…

[webwit]

Is it possible to mess around with how phpBB embeds Youtube videos?

The current way embeds videos in a way that requires Flash plugin to load. i suggest, if possible, that we change the embed code to something like this:

Code: Select all

    <div class="youtube" id="video_id" style="width: 320px; height: 180px;"></div>
    <script src="https://labnol.googlecode.com/files/youtube.js"></script>

It utilizes Google Plus's video embed javascript workaround thingie. This way we could reduce page load times especially in threads like "What are you listening right now?" etc... The script loads Flash only after you click it.

Here's a really crude demo comparing the two ways, the upper being the better solution:
http://julle.kapsi.fi/youdemo/testi.html

Thanks, this is now in use.

[Muirium]

Much better! My old iPad doesn't choke as much on page load now. Appreciated.

[webwit]

iPad and flash? Certainly this violates Steve Job's ecclesiastical jurisdiction.

[Muirium]

Fun fact: almost every video on YouTube works without Flash, too. I don't have it installed on my Mac either. Embedded HTML5 playback of H.264 does away with all that 90s media plugin nonsense.

Well, besides for the occasional weirdo who opts out when uploading their vid, and disallows it. They're few and far between, now that Flash is dead on mobile.

[7bit]

Embedded stuff is lame!!!
:lame:

Why not just a download link, so I can save the file with anybrowser and play it with anyplayer?

[Muirium]

The HTML5 version probably does play in anything. Hell it even works on my hawt iMac G4, again with no Flash installed. I think you have to opt into HTML5 playback on the desktop (Google stores it as a flag in your profile or something, it's been ages…) and then you're served H.264 and WebM or whatever Google's open source codec is. Basically all you need is JavaScript.

But yeah, they shouldn't hide the download links.

[Julle]

Fun fact: almost every video on YouTube works without Flash, too. I don't have it installed on my Mac either. Embedded HTML5 playback of H.264 does away with all that 90s media plugin nonsense.

Well, besides for the occasional weirdo who opts out when uploading their vid, and disallows it. They're few and far between, now that Flash is dead on mobile.

But funnily enough, you can't force Youtube desktop version embeds to use the HTML5 player every single time, it's got a mind of its own. There used to be a way but for some reason Google disabled it. But maybe if we delved into the mobile videos and the source on the Youtube mobile page, this could be possible.

For fairness sake I must say that HTML5 video on desktop computers isn't all that fantastic. Firefox's jurassic architecture makes it a chore to play any video even on a powerful setup, and Chrome's support of proprietary codecs is nothing short of retarded. Having those codecs in HTML5 video is almost like having another incarnation of Flash all over again.

[Muirium]

Almost. But thankfully not quite. I'm not letting that security nightmare on any system of mine! A top tier attack vector for the good of playing embedded video? Uh, um, not sure if I can take that generous offer of Adobe's!

[Julle]

I tried the new forum embed on Android, and it seems to be working quite nicely, not loading the embeds all at once and defaulting to HTML5 player, just like it should.

Do you use desktop OS X? How does the embed behave on a desktop Apple system if (and when) you don't have Flash installed? Does it default to HTML5 as Google claims or does it nag about a missing plugin?

[Muirium]

Goes straight to HTML5. The overlays work perfectly in Safari, too. And they save my old iMac and iPad the bother of a heavy simultaneous load along with the page, which speeds them up a ton on the Listening thread.

Thanks for bringing this to Webwit!

[mr_a500]

I've noticed a strange problem lately (last few weeks). Once in a while, when logged out and I click "Login", it just goes to the home page without logging me in. It doesn't matter how many times I click "Login". I can't log in unless I delete my browser cookies.

Also, my request from a year ago still stands: is it possible to return to the previously viewed page after logging in? This is what happens: I view a page, want to respond to a post, so I log in - and it puts me on the home page. Then I have to find the page I was viewing. So I have to select it from my browser history and refresh. It would be much easier if it was done automatically after logging in.

[Muirium]

What's logging you out so much? As soon as I need to login again, I'm on my back foot. It's not like I've got *that* many computers. Although I guess I should speak for myself!

[webwit]

It's some weird phpBB bug, I've experienced it myself. I've narrowed down the bug to here... https://github.com/phpbb/phpbb/tree/dev ... aeus/phpBB

[webwit]

Also, my request from a year ago still stands: is it possible to return to the previously viewed page after logging in? This is what happens: I view a page, want to respond to a post, so I log in - and it puts me on the home page.

I can't promise when/if I'll fix this, but in the meantime, hit the reply button instead and it will redirect correctly.

[mr_a500]

Yes, that's a good idea. I'll do that.

(...and when attempting to post that, I foolishly logged in the usual way...)

[Madhias]

Is it new that you see now the post count when clicking on an avatar?

[webwit]

No it has always shown that.