ballp.it Changelog

[Lemon]

Okay, so I made a change I'd been thinking about for some time. Here's the general idea:

Because the ballp.it design goes wall-to-wall, more elaborate posts with several paragraphs become hard to read (at least for me) on a larger monitor display. There's a whole bunch of disagreements on the actual "perfect" line-length, but it's broadly agreed over 75 characters on a line and a block of text's scanability becomes compromised. There's a bunch of use cases where you could get over 200.

So, I played around with an idea, which is running on the site right now, mostly affecting the threaded view. If you look at ballp.it on a larger monitor, and you've got thoughts to share on it, go right ahead.

[Mix]

Also, posts themselves take up about half of my monitor, which, again, idk if that's intentional, but its....very big for me. (I can also just zoom out if I'm the outlier here, so its not a huuuuuge deal) I'm not against bumping the size up a bit in general, though

[Wrought]

I like the way previous posts in the thread are displayed now when you make a new post but I have to agree with mix, I think this stuff is kind of too big

[Frank West]

I've got a sizable monitor and I agree it's too big, especially when writing a new post, where the text size gets HUGE, like 24pt.

[beelzeboob]

Disagree with Wrought, I hate how the old posts display when making a new post. It's confusing to the eye and I have a hard time referencing the post I'm responding to.

[EYE OF ZA]

I felt like the forum text was a bit too big but then I opened the new post form and WOW that's big.

I think the confusing thing about the new list of recent posts is that it changes the way that posts are sorted. I don't intuitively know whether the "most recent" post is on the left or the right side.

[chai tea latte]

I found myself surprised by the new display on my wide monitor - it felt unwieldy. When i made the browser half my monitor's width it felt perfect.

I really like having the tiled previous posts for quoting. I think that's way better than the vertical list.

[Shell Game]

Okay so this was a change.

Also left to right for two columns only is really weird. Like intolerably so.
1 2
3 4
5 6
7 8

Mostly I just don't want to read any of it. ._.

Also big text sure. That I can get used to though it is odd. The prior comments thing overwhelms my mind though. It's too much to take in. I usually try not to complain about changes but... I hate this.

[Turtle]

I'm curious what this looks like on other people's screens that it's intolerable. On my screen, the text is large but I don't particularly mind because it's not like I'm looking at anything else, and the replies are something I have to scroll down to even see - which I don't do because I don't need to reread what people have said by the time I hit the reply button. I mean in that sense it doesn't help that they're there but I don't mind it.

[Shell Game]

I'm curious what this looks like on other people's screens that it's intolerable. On my screen, the text is large but I don't particularly mind because it's not like I'm looking at anything else, and the replies are something I have to scroll down to even see - which I don't do because I don't need to reread what people have said by the time I hit the reply button. I mean in that sense it doesn't help that they're there but I don't mind it.

I frequently react fast and like to review to make sure I'm not just repeating something or misunderstanding something. And sometimes read back even further to get context i may not have had from the second post on a page.

[Lemon]

Okay, so I'm not seeing complaints about the truncated line length for the actual posts, that's good, that's the main thing I was trying to resolve.

So if we're mostly against how big the text can be in compose (it can be as much as 32px), I think I have an idea to normalize that in a way that will look more like the actual displayed posts.

Stay tuned.

[Lemon]

Shift+refresh on a bigger monitor. I've updated the compose new post form (and only that element) to match the display of the read post display.

[Neal]

Shift+refresh on a bigger monitor. I've updated the compose new post form (and only that element) to match the display of the read post display.

I like this much better than the way it was just working a little while ago. Thanks.

[moooo566 (taylor's version)]

Honestly, I'm not a fan.

All the blank space on the right looks pretty bad to me, just unbalanced and kind of bizarre. That's especially true when nothing else does the same thing - bulb/quote/edit feel a bit orphaned now and going from scanning down the left to flicking my eyes way over to the other side of the screen feels quite unnatural, which seems to be the opposite of your intention. In general, if content isn't going to fill my screen I prefer it in the centre so it's a bit more balanced.

This is also true of several elements of the reply page right now - the embed icons protrude past the elements above and below, the post/preview buttons are floating way out there, and the post history below also still goes across the screen. This screenshot shows what I mean:



While I'm thinking of the most recent posts in that screen, I can't say I'm getting along particularly with the tiled recent replies. Maybe I just need to get used it it, but it's slowed me down following the previous conversation on this thread while writing this. It also means there's a lot of empty space again where there's one long post (like this one) next to a short one that still has to occupy the same vertical space.

Also just a note (probably one you're aware of), the preview doesn't seem to crunch over in the same way the post itself will.

[moooo566 (taylor's version)]

Bug report rather than aesthetics complaint this time. I think this might be a new thing connected to the update as I haven't seen it before. On mobile (chrome, with ballp.it as an applet off my home screen) the reply field seems to scroll rightwards infinitely for me rather than wrapping. The only way to navigate back to the left of the page where everything is seems to be to put the cursor in the text and select backwards. The text all appears on one line so it's really difficult to reread (and find the post button but in my case that may be a feature). On android, fairly recently updated.