Dangerous Prototypes

Please report any bugs or annoyances with the new site.

I'm really very happy with most things, and the overall appearance. I just wanted something simple. Hopefully we can get more schematic symbols, components, and other stuff worked into the wiki and forum.

Mine so far:
*No pictures on blog search or tag/category
*Italics and bold don't work on blog, maybe PCB store
*pink highlighting
*maybe change wiki edits and user options to bar at top, only shown to logged-in users. Make wiki 2 column and wider no matter what
*wiked editor is not working on wiki
*links color/underline/boldness are not clear enough (all sites)
*separator between terms in header bar, maybe highlight current area
*Add schematic symbols, part styling to wiki, forum.
*new forum image/icon set

I kinda miss the link to the wiki on the mainpage.

Overall the design is great :)

Yeah, it is listed as projects and goes to the #project tag. I'm not a big fan of that either. Maybe it could be called DOCS, and there could be a links to specific projects on the left. I'm not really sure what to do, but I am unhappy with it as well.

First forum revision is now up. There is still quite a bit to do, but this gets us matching.

*Zencart image click area is small
*blog lacks #comment tab
*new icons for read/unread: folder, posts(Normal, sticky, announce), unread/jump to last
*remove framework, change main forum index coloring

The mobile theme for the forum isn't enabled on a PSP :(
Its got a user agent with the following string:
"Mozilla/4.0+(PSP+(PlayStation+Portable);+2.00)"

Thanks for the report. I updated the site version, as well as the version we keep in SVN.

I replaced the original mobile detect that was a non-open garbage-ware with an in-house written public domain version. It still needs a little TLC before it is perfect, I really appreciate your report, it helps us make better open source :)

I get some weird layout issues under Firefox (3.6) on Linux. Have tried deleting cookies but hasn't made a difference, anyone else seeing this?

Attaching a screenshoot (zoomed right out so you can see the layout)..

[attachment=0]

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Thanks for the bug report, I'll take at look at it ASAP.

PS: is it also like that on the forum, blog, or free PCB store?

Thanks, it only seems to effect the forum..

Have you accidentally zoomed out on the site ? (crtl+scroll down)
Try resetting the zoom value with crtl+0

No, was only zoomed out like that to get the off-centre headers and footers into the screenshot..

I like the horizontal lines with schematic symbols on the home page!  :-)

SeaMonkey web browser (FreeBSD) - the Maker Faire banner graphic is located off screen to the left of the DP banner, leaving just 2 or 3mm of the right hand end of the graphic visible. This problem does not happen with the Wiki which is fine.

Talking of the Wiki, can we have the "recent changes" page back, perhaps in the toolbox?

@dps - there are several hidden in other places too, an obvious one is the comments section electret microphone, but also check the contact page and other places ;) I really wanted to carry this over to the wiki and forum, but the developer who did them got busy and couldn't keep working for us.

@dpropicweb - thanks for the heads up. I'm trying to get someone in to fix the forum ASAP. Hopefully by monday. The job was kinda left half-done (see above). I added recent changes to the bottom of the jump to box now.

Hahaha, nice!  I like that the contact form goes only one way.  :P

Another bug:
In the Free PCB drawer i cant click the text "larger image" also on the image itself the are only a couple of pixels spread over the thumbnail to click on for the larger image.

I'm using Firefox 7b1 on Vista Ultimate SP2 64bit NL
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.0; WOW64; rv:7.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/7.0

Are you happy with those RED icons? It really make the forum unreadable. It gives me a real pain to eyes when looking at them to check new posts, ...
Please, reverse back to old icons!!!  or choose icons with less brightness. Bight red on gray is really very ugly. Idem for the blue ones on the main page!

No. I am not happy with the icons. I paid a designer to make them and feel disappointed. They were supposed to make something cool, then gave me clipart. I asked for at least something with schematic symbols, and they gave me this crap with the symbols overlaid on a single clipart button. I could have done that myself in 5minutes and not paid or spent time dealing with the designer. I am totally not pleased with it.

One of our new forum members is a fantastic designer, and has been helping out though. I think there is a new icon set to use in my PM. I will check on that next, after lunch.

Thanks Pietja - I have that one noted, it will be cleared up shortly.

@octal - I just installed new forum and sub forum icons from Sven. I like them a lot more, are they also more to your liking?

With the new forum and sub forum icons, I can't tell visually if there are new posts within that forum.  The icons look fine, but please make a color change or other distinction between "No unread posts" and "Unread posts!"

Hmm.  "View unread posts" seems to work well.  Maybe I will switch to that method of keeping up with discussions.  :P

Unread posts are blue, normal is gray I think.

Maybe the new posts can be signaled with /without the !

[quote author="ian"]Unread posts are blue, normal is gray I think.[/quote]
Ah yes. It's much better than the previous theme, but that unread distinction was a bit too subtle for me ;)

Can the unread forum icon be red, that would be more inline with the unread post icons (assuming they won't change :) )

The unread Posts Icons becomes other look later this Week

[quote author="svenw1980"]The unread Posts Icons becomes other look later this Week[/quote]

what about forums? The DP triangle looks great but the difference between gray and blue-gray ones are almost non existent .. check out how it looks on my screen, there's no way I can see which ones have bit of blue in them... the unread ones need to POP (be strong red or something like that) so they are visible from a mile, not troublesome like attm

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> the unread ones need to POP (be strong red or something like that) so they are visible from a mile,

Or YELLOW in keeping with the dangerous ! theme.

The Backgrounds from the Forum becomes changes too ;)

Let me give everyone a quick update:

First, thank you for all the bug reports and patience during the redesign. I left the sites on default themes for two years before DP was big enough I felt we should invest in a new design. It's not so much the cost of the designers, as the time it takes to hire and manage the process.

I was in the process of hiring one last developer to make all the little changes mentioned in this thread, but at the same time Sven dropped in and kind of took over :) He's replaced the worst of the icons, made code and style updates, done some beautiful illustrations, and is working on a fast-loading combined style and unified head/footers to apply to the whole site.

The current forum theme is only half-finished. Our designer had some family issues and was unable to complete the job. Sven's mock-ups and previews of the final forum look great, I think we will really like it.

Some minor annoyances have already better.
*We have some temporary icons and more are on the way.
*The bug with clicking on a preview image in the store is fixed
*A problem with the header loading from the footer (creating a bump in the page load) is fixed on the wiki and blog, and will be fixed everywhere.

Cloud flare global proxy server is back in effect today too. If you have any problems please let me know.

Thanks again, and please keep the bug reports coming.

pretty understandable, all together but few ideas
1. make the stuff visible (even ugly dots that show there are unreaded topics are better then this "identical" icons) with temp ugly pics and then put whatever is "final" when it is done. attm there's no way to follow new topics other then opening all forums and that's slow and nasty and ..

2. I can't find the option (looks disabled) but phpbb allows users to chose templates. It would be cool to have "default" template available for users until the DP template is finished. So ppl can chose the theme.

3. do you really see any benefit from cloudflare. I finally removed them from all my sites (still need to fix the registrar data but turned off cloudflare service in dns settings). I noted on all of my sites noticeable drop in number of visits (20+%) and in last month received more then 1000 email wrt "your site is not accessible any more". Looks like they have serious issues with service and have periods (15-20minutes) during every day (sometimes 3-4 times per day) when their service breaks completely. I turned them off 2 days ago and already see visits returning. I will leave them off for another few days and if it shows that after they are removed visits go back to normal I will remove them from registrars too... You have dedicated server, probably you have more cpu power free then whole cloud they have so what they made is a great idea, just they lack resources to make it actually work. If you want to proxy the traffic to the forum/wiki/blog you can make identical setup as cloudflare is using just on your server. I will be setting it up on my server in next few days so I can write a manual how to do it when I finish setting it up locally.

b.

Thanks Arhi,

For a temp fix I removed the ! from the no new messages icon. That give a color and shape change.

I didn't realize there was an option. I enabled it and installed one of the default themes. The option is in user control panel:
ucp.php?i=174 (http://dangerousprototypes.com/forum/ucp.php?i=174)

We have also been having issues in SEA (asia) areas. I disabled it again and we'll see how it goes.

Hi Ian,
thanks for all these efforts, but I think Arhi is right. I got back the old icons and find them more usable.
btw, could you send me on my email the icons set you need, I'll try to make a new set for you. If I succeed at making something better than those red ones, I'll send them to you :)

Here's the old (new) icon set.

Thanks ian,
I'll try to do something the time permitting.
What I find is wrong with the approach, is to use electronic symbols to represent the forum/posts states (read, unread, new, mine, ...)
I think the electronic symbols have a meaning, and now these glyphs have fixed meaning in our heads as electronic developers. If we use them to represent the posts states, we need to do a lot of brain effort to do the correspondance, as we need to temporarily forgot the "old" (electronic) meaning and try to make the new correspondance.
This is a wrong approach.
What need to be done is to simply use simpler symbols, maybe inspired by electronic stuff like using a highlighted LED for example instead of the little DOT overlay to mention "mine" posts, ...
anyway I'll keep looking at this thing !

I hear you. I was not happy with the schematic symbols stuff either. I had to pay for that crap!

[quote author="ian"]Thanks Arhi,
For a temp fix I removed the ! from the no new messages icon. That give a color and shape change.
[/quote]

looks very visible now :D (the color change is not really noticeable but the missing ! is a big giveaway :D )
Thanks a bunch for the fix. It is now way easier to follow up the forum.

[quote author="ian"]
I didn't realize there was an option. I enabled it and installed one of the default themes. The option is in user control panel:
ucp.php?i=174 (http://dangerousprototypes.com/forum/ucp.php?i=174)
[/quote]

it is great thing to have available while working on a new template. When you are finished with making new one you should disable it again. If you have time & resources it is also good to have 2 tempplates - one light (like the current one) and one dark (where backgrounds are dark/black and foreground colors are white) because ppl often prefere dark pages if they mostly visit them during night (less glowing from the screen) :) - this unfortunately makes every upgrade "double work" so I for e.g. on a forum I used to administer gave up the 4 layout option and left only one.

[quote author="ian"]
We have also been having issues in SEA (asia) areas. I disabled it again and we'll see how it goes.[/quote]

(you are talking about cloudflare here?) they are weird, I really liked the idea of what they tried to accomplish but they have some serious issues with servers.

Ok, i'll include a Colorswitcher.
Preview: Sheme Dark Sheme Light ;)
Real Preview hopefully later this week

btw, while back I wrote a "browser and os identifier" for phpbb that was showing browser and os info of the poster (for each post) .. You can see how it looks like here: http://www.it4um.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=43&t=7388 (http://www.it4um.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=43&t=7388)

I can pick up the source and send it to you if you want it :)

On that forum we also installed some "portal" plugin .. many users liked it (I never managed to figure out why but what the hell :D )

Here is little bit Preview from the Dark Sheme, but not final and not too much ;)
The black "Subforums" String is not styled atm

[attachment=1]

And the Default Light Sheme

[attachment=0]

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dont be afraid to give more light to the text (increase contrast) on the dark theme. Also, look at the designs on more then one monitor. I have 3 monitors here attached to computer and the light theme pic look ok on all of them but on wife's computer for e.g. looks "too similar" so for that monitor for e.g. you'd want them to be even more different. The dark scheme for e.g. on 2 of mine monitors looks ok but on third the description can't be read. The blue/green color (no idea what the eng word for it is) blends with the dark gray as text is too small and it becomes very hard to read it ..

and take into account that 4 screens I just tested this were all calibrated for different stuff (one calibrated with color lazer behind the desk, other with digital printer across the street, and 2 to "my liking") note that each font will be rendered differently if you render it on widows, linux, bsd or osx .. so if you cut it too close it will look great on your screen but ..

Anyhow I love the idea of how the unread/read icon pops "out" .. I'd just make the "no new stuff here" icon even more bleek

There is no way, it looks always different on different Monitors. I can make the whole page white with black text and black with white text and it looks not same on all monitors. ;) And the Fonts are not changed in the Previews, but in final on linux, mac, windows the Fonts should match. I must find a way in the middle, that it looks for most ppl ok.

Oh and you can switch to that Sheme that looks nicer on your monitor, thats more Options as before ;)

[quote author="svenw1980"]it looks always different on different Monitors[/quote]

The hint was just to look at it on few different monitors before you upload it to live site, nothing else :). I sooooo know it is impossible to make it look everywhere as good as you'd like :(


[quote author="svenw1980"]final on linux, mac, windows the Fonts should match[/quote]

that ain't going to be possible. even if everyone uses exactly the same font file windows, osx, gnome, kde, xfce .. they all render fonts differently so there's no way to have it same. (for e.g. osx renders font "heavy" and it is preferred by many while I prefer how fonts are rendered with gnome and hate how they are rendered on widows and kde... mind that win7 does render them pretty good compared to xp that has renderer I do not particularly like)

[quote author="svenw1980"]Oh and you can switch to that Sheme that looks nicer on your monitor, thats more Options as before ;)[/quote]

I mentioned that as a nice idea. As I said I was keeping it on a forum for a while but after one upgrade I just decided to scrap all schemes but one as phpbb is so idiotically designed (software not visual) that you need to implement too much changes directly into schemas .. especially as we had bunch of additional mods we developped (like that os/browser type thingy) so basically the final idea there is to keep (what we did, not what you need to do :)  - just idea) default scheme available while our proprietary scheme was being modified and then after it is finished the default scheme would not be available any more..

anyhow, I am soooooooooo glad I do not have anything to do with phpbb so I know amount of job you have to deal with ... good luck with it :)

The Font thing, it can match ;) -> http://www.w3.org/TR/css3-fonts/#font-face-rule (http://www.w3.org/TR/css3-fonts/#font-face-rule)

Only Problem is last Firefox and Internet Explorer, they have fontsmoothing applied in Renderengine. Text with hard shadow looks crappy there thats why i've switched complete to Chrome/Chromium for Webdevelopment. When my Code says 1px Shadow then i want 1px and not washed Text given by Renderengine. Thats all things why a Design never looks identical overall.
First is to bring all "new" online and most little things can finetunded after that Step

New Preview (Dark Sheme)

*small read/unread Icons removed
*non-Forum Links darker/italic
*increased Overall-FontSize
*project images removed (in dark sheme)
*textshadow for higher Textconstrasts
*unread Subforums uses red Links
*Screenwidth > 1300 the Content becomes 1300 width, small is 978 (shown in Preview is 1200)

==In Work==
*better Icons for Dark Sheme (without crappy white pixels)
*Main Forum Read/Unread Icons

[attachment=0]

more soon ;)

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looks awesome

I don't know if this is happening to others, but the forums keep automatically logging me out on a regular basis. A typical example is: I log in, hit the "view new posts" button, then find I've been logged out, so I log-in again and it happens again :(

It happens with Opera 11.50 and Firefox 3.6.20.

Any one experienced anything similar?

I visit forum from chrome and it never happened to me... try to remove all cookies from your browser and login then - it might work. Also check if time on your computer is ok

I had that a couple of times too. It just happened randomly. But I was able to log in without deleting cookies or cleaning cache on Firefox.

Today i got a strange problem with the homepage, with both the latest FF7 beta and IE.
Both side bars with the Categories, Recent Comments and the rest are at the bottom of the page under the main blog posts.
[attachment=0]

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[quote author="pietja"]Today i got a strange problem with the homepage, with both the latest FF7 beta and IE.
Both side bars with the Categories, Recent Comments and the rest are at the bottom of the page under the main blog posts.
[attachment=0][/quote]

Same problem here, Google Chrome.

Ditto ditto: Mac OS 10.6, Firefox 6.02.

Ditto: FreeBSD 7.2-STABLE, SeaMonkey 2.0.13.

thanks everyone. It was a image causing issues.  thin it should be fixed now.

Looks good now!

Hi Ian,

I can't see the "search" textarea & button outside a specific forum - is it a choice or a consequence of the new site layout?
It would be nice to have a search form or a link to advanced search on the board index page.

tinito

Yea,that annoys me too. It is on the to do list.

Thanksgiving made site un-browsable.
Only one post is showing without any next/previous option. No scrolling too. http://snpr.cm/GL8ygy.png (http://snpr.cm/GL8ygy.png)
The single post looks like this http://snpr.cm/4yxDOf.png (http://snpr.cm/4yxDOf.png)

Is this stuill happening? I never noticed it yesterday. I will look into it now.

No. The problem remained for few minutes.

probably another cloud flare issues :/