On Jul 27, 2012, at 8:47 AM, Jon Robson <jdlrobson(a)gmail.com> wrote:
> This would be best answered by Brandon.From a personal point of view if the
> mobile site still looks like a mobile site in a desktop browser at the
> start of next year I will be somewhat disappointed with myself.
I, too, shall +1 this.
> I personally believe that mobile is the likely method for accelerating
> athenas development as there are less blockers to do that.
And again, another +1. Mobile allows us to do radical rethinks - both by choice and by necessity. In fact, it was thinking about how we were going to solve some information architecture problems in the mobile space that led to much of the reasoning behind the necessity for Athena in the first place.
> A lot of the existing bottle neck from my perspective is due to a lack of
> volunteer developers in the many mobile projects which slows important
> things like this down. Aside from the new design we are also planning some
> cool stuff for Wiki loves monuments with image uploading via mobile phones
> to commons. Poke me off list if you are keen to give time/expertise to help
> accelerate important initiatives like this. :)
Athena's timeline is murky. We are still very much in the design iteration phase as far as layout and interaction goes. However, the Agora project - a Foundation-specific style guide - is pretty far along and should be completed soon.
---
Brandon Harris, Senior Designer, Wikimedia Foundation
Support Free Knowledge: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate
Those of you who have gotten staff photos taken: do not be surprised if you start seeing yourselves show up in various mockups and the like, especially ones that involve more social features (like Flow).
I say that because I just used Vibha in something. If this bothers you, let me know, and I'll keep you out of the mockups.
---
Brandon Harris, Senior Designer, Wikimedia Foundation
Support Free Knowledge: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate
'sup?
We've been talking about grids/restricted viewports lately. The current expected interface model is that the page expands as large as the browser window. Changing this will require hard data.
I'm on board with this, and I think it's the right thing to do. Especially having been working on Flow all day (this is something that will just be absolute *ass* with full window stretching).
So, that said, here's what we need:
Supporting documentation and research.
This is going to be something that is going to come up at Wikimania. So I'd like to have a nice, fat list of references for this. Those of you who are just out of school and/or have masters degrees in this sort of thing - I'm looking at you. I'd love to have a page of talking points.
Let's say we have a week to pull this together, so it can be incorporated into slide decks and other documents and such.
Who is willing to spearhead this?
Hugs,
-b.
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Brandon Harris, Senior Designer, Wikimedia Foundation
Support Free Knowledge: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate
So, commenting on this (I know nothing of its origin, just that it was pasted into the design channel - I've been out-of-pocket):
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/30377416/design/agora-design/index.html
Overall, I think the colors in the "test" palette are too . . . candylike. This could be an artifact of the shadowed text (which I generally think we need to stay away from), but overall it reminds me too much of Twitter.
I can tell you that the global community will not really like it if we go this route.
The red works, the blue is close, the orange seems . . i dunno. I've never really seen orange buttons. But the green is way, way too twitter-like to pass. This needs darkening, I think, or strengthening.
What are the hex values these are based on?
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Brandon Harris, Senior Designer, Wikimedia Foundation
Support Free Knowledge: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate
So, I've been playing around with the colors and such today and after
* having replaced the blue with Lindsey's suggestion;
* removing orange from the "default" palette,
* played around with some super serious color-blindness tools,
I have come to the conclusion that our remaining "problem" color is the green shade (#008740) that I love so dearly. It just isn't working when you switch to any of the R/G colorblindness tools.
So I'm working on a new shade. This is more of a pain in the ass than one would think: you can either work entirely in "colorblind" mode (thus not seeing the real work) or work in "real" mode, and thus keep having to switch.
I've yet to find a good tool that will tell me straight up if there's enough contrast between the two.
At this point, I think we may have to just bite the bullet and pick a red and a green that are sub-optimal in this regard and then write up some strongly worded rules about the usage of the two colors with each other.
I found this bad-ass little app:
http://colororacle.org/
That sits in your toolbar and is "always ready" for tri-level switching (proto, deutro, trinopia). Photoshop has proof colors for the first two, but not the third, so it's useful.
I also found this wonderful paper:
http://colororacle.org/resources/2007_JennyKelso_ColorDesign_lores.pdf
I'm wondering if we shouldn't step outside of our group a bit. There *has* to be someone at the foundation with either proto or deutro; maybe we can enlist them to help us.
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Brandon Harris, Senior Designer, Wikimedia Foundation
Support Free Knowledge: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate
Hello!
I'm working on a project to integrate Etherpad Lite with MediaWiki. So
far, it's been going swimmingly. One of the first steps was to make a
plugin that allowed the user to insert wikitext-like formatting (a la
WikiEditor or the default edit page).
I've gotten my etherpad-lite plugin working now, it's performing well
with links, headlines, formatting....all without extra API calls or
hackish methods. However, many of the buttons are currently empty or
using the "default" icon for italics.
I could try to reuse either the buttons from the existing edit form, or
from WikiEditor, but they need to be 16px square, as opposed to the 22px
square of the existing icons. It might be good to also change the color
scheme to fit the different UI of Etherpad, as opposed to the WikiEditor UI.
If anyone on this list is available, I'd like them to take a look at it
and make some icons that make sense. Here's the current information
about the extension:
http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/2012-June/061265.html
You can also find it at
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:EtherEditor, though that page
has less information currently.
Once you get to the editor itself, like I said, the buttons won't have
anything helpful inside of them--but the titles are all correct, so
hover over a button to see what it does reliably.
Thanks so much for the help!
--
Mark Holmquist
Contractor, Wikimedia Foundation
mtraceur(a)member.fsf.org
http://marktraceur.info