Hi everyone,
Hopefully I address everyones questions. Please let me know if I missed anything...
From Brigitte:
To summarize: your MODX Manager should show white text and icons on a black canvas, but the pictures should have their original color. Right?
This is correct. It is a lot easier to figure out what images are and what is going on when they show as they should instead of a negative image. Also, a very dark gray would be a great background color as well.
What about text enlargement, do you use just your Compiz tool, or do you add browser zoom?
I personally utilize the screen magnification from Compiz only. Most folks that I know that use magnification utilize some sort of screen magnification software. The browser zoom is a bit cumbersome, but is better than nothing.
Quote from: cookie_monster_az at Nov 05, 2013, 02:40 AM
The one thing about these settings in Firefox is that if any elements utilize a graphic as a background image, you will not see them. ... With the settings in Firefox, take a look at some popular websites such as Twitter, Facebook, Google results, etc. You will be able to see where buttons may have an outline, or you may not see anything at all.
Yes. Hopefully we can avoid this in future versions of MODx Manager, so that people may take advantage of their personal color settings on OS or browser level.
Being able to easily customize a piece of software goes a long way for me personally as well as others I have talked to.
As you said, font-based icons can be styled and scaled any way you want, and, best of all, you won't put them in the background, so no problem with personal color settings.
Could we apply this to the RTE as well? TinyMCE? Redactor?
I have not had a chance to look at Redactor yet, but I have attached a shot of how TinyMCE looks in Firefox with the hard settings I use. This is another reason I utilize Chromium with the negative window option. I checked out FontAwesome and WOW, very nice indeed.
From JP:
Unfortunately as far as I know the current Manager doesn't handle upscaling text through the browser very well as at a certain point the layout begins to break.
I just tried this and for say two or three times magnification in browser magnification, the Manager is not to bad. However, anything larger than that and things start to shift and the Manager starts to look a bit odd. This is the main reason folks I have talked with utilize separate screen magnification software.
I've started switching things to black on white text, and I think it is starting to look great. One question I have is if there is a particular color that would work well to highlight 'primary' actions or if everything should stay greyscale. For example, I noticed in a gmail high contrast theme they use a bright blue to highlight primary actions.
I've attached a screenshot of the header in high contrast. You mentioned that black text on white background is very problematic so I'm thinking the search bar will need to change. Maybe stay white on black, with a blue search icon?
SWEET!
The search icon colors actually look very nice and stand out. For myself, if the color of the search box was say a gray scale or a blue or something of that nature with the white text, that would be a nice touch. I have attached screen shots of a color scheme I utilize on my machine as well. I am running Debian with the XFCE 4.8 desktop. The color schemes I use are either Xfce-dusk or High Contrast Inverse. Debian use to have a nice color scheme called Darklooks in version 6.0 with the old version of GNOME Desktop 2.x. It has been a while since I have run a Windows environment, and I have only seen a MAC a few times. However, I seem to remember that MAC OS X had a nice dark theme that was very pleasing to the eye and yet high contrast and very functional. If you have access to take a look at any of those desktop themes, hopefully that can help with starting points for colors.
From Tom:
Many existing sites right now (i.e. anything non-responsive) will break the layout with text size scaling. I think that even the move to have high contrast settings is a big step because for Dan it is the difference between having to struggle with trying to read a site and being able to easily read. My guess is that dealing with a "broken layout" is probably a much easier thing to deal with.
Dan, what are your thoughts? Is broken layout a major issue? As well, are there sites which you've used which you think do a really great job of getting around this?
Bingo. I would rather have a broken layout that I can at least see to navigate. As far as a site that I have run across that handles this well, I don't have anything specific off the top of my head being that I don't use the browser zoom. I will look at the sites I frequent and let you know of something I see that seems to handle the scaling well.
And a few seconds pass and I have an example...this was one of the first sites I put together that is responsive to screen resolutions for mobile devices:
http://airtelligence.com/
As I was zooming in, once I hit about 6x, my display switched to what I expect to see on a mobile device. My starting screen resolution is 1600 x 900. The way this site responds and is scaled may not be the prettiest, but it is functional and still easy for me to get around and see what is going on.
Here is a site I visit often and tried the browser zoom and it is absolutely awful in handling the zoom:
http://www.tigerdirect.com/
All it does is blow up the site and you have to scroll horizontally to see everything. This is pretty inconvenient and disruptive to the viewing experience. Personally, if there is no horizontal scrolling, that is a big deal.
I believe I have seen JP say this multiple times (and if I have this wrong JP, please correct me)...by building for mobile first, it is pretty easy to work backwards into the desktop.
I think that is everything. Please let me know if I missed anything.
Dan
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