Binary Bonsai

In laying down this new design — Kalamari — I decided to try and go with a fluid-width layout for once. Traditionally I haven’t held it in particularly high regard; but I experiemented with it for a few hours, and ended up somehow finding it a natural fit alongside the ‘book-like’ typography.

What’s interesting about fluid-width designs, is that for me, they actually only make sense under OS X. After all, under OS X, no window can be maximized and locked to the screen. Quite the contrary in fact. Not only are windows rarely sized to fit the full size of the screen¹, but all windows are movable at any time. And the ace in the hole, is that you cannot move the upper edge of a window above the lower edge of the menu bar, and you cannot resize a window to be bigger than the size of your screen.

Combined, these factors are very significant, as they directly influence the way you work your windows.

Contrary, on Windows, un-maximized windows most often differ in size and vertical position from window to window. And without the menu bar blocking vertical movement and the screen-size dictating the size of windows, it isn’t quite that easy to quickly move and resize a window, while retaining a tidy workspace; and so I most often simply maximize all windows.

Hang on, I’m approaching the point.

Because of this, I work much better with OS X’s windows paradigm. Much better. My work environment simply remains more fluid than when I’m working on Windows, and I often find myself resizing windows to fit whatever content they contain.

In turn, because I do that², Kalamari felt more natural on OS X, since I find myself resizing the width of the window to where it feels ‘right’. But at work, on Windows, the window was maximized, and… well, it looked almost grotesque actually, because of the vast wasteland of whitespace on either side of the column in a maximized window.

So I have to come up with some way of countering that I suppose.

Yay.

1. The lack of a maximize button in OS X has been known to drive some people to the brink of madness. ↩


2. Well, and because Baskerville looks amazing in Safari on OS X, and Georgia looks like shit in Firefox on Windows ↩

So Technorati redesigned recently. Generally speaking I’m not much of a fan of the candy-drop look, but I in particular cannot fathom why they would add a ticker, which inelegantly flickers across the top of the site, displaying tags (such as, and I quote: “free porn”).

Very helpful… No wait, that other thing… Yes.

I too thought we killed the Marquee tag, and no I don’t generally have much use for Technorati, but when I do finally go there I don’t want to be distracted by a damn ticker! So I threw together a very simple stylesheet and put it on userstyles.org, which, if you’ve got Stylish extension or Greasemonkey installed, you can go right ahead and install without a hitch.

Go get it now.

I have learned two lessons today. First, I really love working with Javascript. It’s frustrating at times, but just downright old-school fun most of the time. Two, Firefox’s renderer is shit compared to Safari. Or at least that’s my conclusion.

Click the ‘« older’ link on the frontpage. It’ll fetch page #2 via AJAX. Now use the slider to the right of the search bar. See how Firefox simmers and blinks? Now hover over the text. Uf! Horrible! Now try Safari. Solid as a motherfuckin’ rock!

What they should do, is take Safari’s renderer and Firefox’s extensibility and put them in a cage and feed them chocolate and get them drunk and see what happens. I’m betting magic.

Firefox 1.5 has been released. Nuff said.

Internet Explorer usage is down to 15% with Firefox at 62% and Safari at 18%. Meanwhile Windows users are still reigning supreme at 71% (seriously…) and Mac users at 25%. And paradoxically 800×600 users are down to 2%, now that my layout is 640×480 friendly…

Incidentally, K2 has been downloaded roughly 5800 times since Mint started counting.