Re: Cygwin/XFree86 Website Design (Possible Deuglification?)

Re: Cygwin/XFree86 Website Design (Possible Deuglification?)

[Colin Harrison]

Hi,

While I was zapping spam this morning did a screen capture of XWin in use.

File attached (too large...rejected 1st time by sources.redhat.com >50k)is
the capture shrunk to 25cm width (~700 pixels wide) and saved as a .png
230KB. Did the shrink as it didn't look too good full size on my IE browser
(1280 x 1024 screen). I've posted the result also on an experimental (play
not pay!) website of mine:-

http://www.straightrunning.com/desktop/desktop.png

(This is not always up, 24/7 as it's on my development machine and via a DSL
link)

The capture shows both XDMCP and multiwindow modes in action:-

1) A Windows XP desktop (tamed to remove all Telly Tubby/Early Learning
Centre themes and garbage :)).
2) A XDMCP KDE session to a remote RedHat linux box running Mozilla.
3) A remote Konsole shell being used to monitor spam being zapped on my
mailserver!
4) A remote Ethereal session being used to sniff my firewall traffic.
5) A local cygwin/xfree86 xterm.
6) A local cygwin/xfree86 xeyes showing shaped window/transparency.
7) My custom X selection menu from the XWin system tray icon.

I can post more of the same if you want (more web friendly or different
format/quality/size etc)? 

Colin

Re: Cygwin/XFree86 Website Design (Possible Deuglification?)

[Harold L Hunt II]

Colin,

Great screen shot.

I have the following suggestions:

1) Make a full resolution version (1280x1024).  Keep the shrunk version, 
but maybe standardize on 800 x 600?

2) Can you make a thumbnail while you are at it?  Say 200 pixels wide?

3) Run 'uname' or 'uname -a' in the local xterm so that people realize 
it is running on your Windows machine.

4) Open an xterm on a remote host (or in your KDE session) and run 
'uname' or 'uname -a' in it.  Again, so people don't have to think :)


I think this could be a great shot.

Harold

Colin Harrison wrote:

> Hi,
> 
> While I was zapping spam this morning did a screen capture of XWin in use.
> 
> File attached (too large...rejected 1st time by sources.redhat.com >50k)is
> the capture shrunk to 25cm width (~700 pixels wide) and saved as a .png
> 230KB. Did the shrink as it didn't look too good full size on my IE browser
> (1280 x 1024 screen). I've posted the result also on an experimental (play
> not pay!) website of mine:-
> 
> http://www.straightrunning.com/desktop/desktop.png
> 
> (This is not always up, 24/7 as it's on my development machine and via a DSL
> link)
> 
> The capture shows both XDMCP and multiwindow modes in action:-
> 
> 1) A Windows XP desktop (tamed to remove all Telly Tubby/Early Learning
> Centre themes and garbage :)).
> 2) A XDMCP KDE session to a remote RedHat linux box running Mozilla.
> 3) A remote Konsole shell being used to monitor spam being zapped on my
> mailserver!
> 4) A remote Ethereal session being used to sniff my firewall traffic.
> 5) A local cygwin/xfree86 xterm.
> 6) A local cygwin/xfree86 xeyes showing shaped window/transparency.
> 7) My custom X selection menu from the XWin system tray icon.
> 
> I can post more of the same if you want (more web friendly or different
> format/quality/size etc)? 
> 
> Colin
> 

Re: Cygwin/XFree86 Website Design (Possible Deuglification?)

[Colin Harrison]

Hi Harold,

I've captured again

Starting from a 1280x1024 capture my shrinker gives me (preserving aspect
ratio):-
http://www.straightrunning.com/desktop1280

800x640
http://www.straightrunning.com/desktop800

750x600
http://www.straightrunning.com/desktop750

200x160
http://www.straightrunning.com/desktop200


On my IE browser (screen 1280x1024) the 750x600 one looks the best for me.

Looks as good as original from this morning (but no spam on my screen this
time!)

Colin

Cygwin/XFree86 Website Design (Possible Deuglification?)

[Harold L Hunt II]

The Cygwin/XFree86 website is looking pretty tired:

http://xfree86.cygwin.com/


Things I don't like
===================
1) The green and black header.  Yuk!

2) The hideous X logo.  Yuk!

3) All the crap on the front page.  Most of that stuff should be put on 
secondary pages.

4) News needs its own page.

5) The Screenshots page needs work.  Most of the screenshots are out of 
date.  Several new features need to be shown to entice new users.

6) Screenshots need thumbnails.  People don't like following blind links 
to images.  We should have some thumbnails linking to the images.



Philosophy for changes
======================
1) Content is king.  If we don't have anything to say, we don't need a 
webpage.  The whole point of the webpage is to showcase our information. 
  With that in mind, we aim to make the webpage less ugly, but we can't 
forget that the whole point is to share information.

2) Plain-text bodies are good.  I like being able to add a lot of 
information on a web page without having to deal with stylistic issues.

3) Eye-candy should be relegated to the left-bar, header, right-bar (if 
we want one), footer, and link sections within pages.

4) HTML compliance is a must.  All pages should validate.

5) Don't assume much of web browsers.  Keep away from JavaScript if we 
can (we don't use any yet).  CSS is okay.  DHTML may be pushing it too 
far.  I don't want to spend a lot of time making sure it works with a 
lot of web browsers.


Example sites that I would like to emulate
==========================================
1) http://www.kde.org/ - Good use of color, nice link sections around 
page and in page itself.

2) Huh... couldn't find another example.


Example sites that I do not want to emulate
===========================================
1) http://www.gnome.org/ - Too plain, too dark, not enough info on the 
front page, no link sections, etc.

2) http://xfree86.org/ - This is an example of how I never want our page 
to look.  :)


Next steps
==========
1) Does anyone want to help?

2) Would someone like to make some professional screenshots showcasing 
our most recent new features (Earle's customizable tray-icon menu, 
Alexander putting the -query string in the title bar, multi-window mode, 
the 'always on top' option in the right-click menu in mutli-window mode, 
and the list of icons created by the XFree86-bin-icons package)?

3) Would someone like to pick an overall color scheme and set of styles? 
  Just mock-up the front page for me and send me your .html and .css 
files and I can see what I can do with it.  This would be a huge help.


Let me know what you think,

Harold