Forum OpenACS Q&A: Suggestion: Improve the UI with more images, icons, thumbnails...

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1: Suggestion: Improve the UI with more images, icons, thumbnails...
Posted by Michael Cordova on 10/29/07 03:11 PM
It would be very nice if every package had an image/icon/thumbnail. Not only packages, but also every concept used in OpenACS, and every action...

For instance, when installing a new package into the system, it would be nice to see a logo, or a snapshot about how that packages looks like, or whatever about the packages itself. The idea is having an image attached to the package.. And also an image about the "adding" or "installing" action, I mean, the page where the user is in that moment.

Maybe it's more important for dotLRN community to have icons everywhere, but I think that it's such a good idea for OpenACS already. The point is, if it should be done now, or not.

On the other hand... I found a big performance problem a few weeks ago when adding a lot of images in our new template at UNED, that we solved using CSS sprites technique. So, that's another suggestion, if you are interested in adding images, use CSS sprites.

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2: Re: Suggestion: Improve the UI with more images, icons, thumbnails... (response to 1)
Posted by Dave Bauer on 10/29/07 03:28 PM
This is a good idea.

One thing I'd like to get done eventually is to have a large standard set of icons that ship with the theme packages so we can have reusable icons that match the theme.

A package might have specific icons that belong to it, but in general I think it makes sense to have a way to allow changing them to match a theme.

CSS sprites is a great way to reduce download time. Every HTTP request takes time and having many images can greatly reduce the apparenent speed of page rendering.

Check out the yslow plugin for Firefox to help with this type of thing http://developer.yahoo.com/yslow/

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3: Re: Suggestion: Improve the UI with more images, icons, thumbnails... (response to 1)
Posted by Dave Bauer on 10/30/07 05:48 PM
Every every "concept" does not really describe a concreate goal we can work towards :)

I think it would be nice to have icons for packages, that would be interesting at least Many actions have stock icons,a nd we can use most action icons from major icons sets like Gnome etc.

I added all the gnome mime type icons to acs-templating, so they are reusable across packages now.

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4: Re: Suggestion: Improve the UI with more images, icons, thumbnails... (response to 2)
Posted by Brian Fenton on 05/19/08 04:02 PM
I just saw that AOL have a released a similar tool to YSlow but for IE. It's called Pagetest and looks very handy. It's hosted on Sourceforge. Details here: http://blog.patrickmeenan.com/ and here http://pagetest.wiki.sourceforge.net/
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5: Re: Suggestion: Improve the UI with more images, icons, thumbnails... (response to 4)
Posted by Steve Manning on 05/19/08 05:24 PM
Brian

I think the equivalent of this in Firefox is the FireBug add-on https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/1843. Its very cool and has the waterfall Timeline charts and other useful debugging.

- Steve

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6: Re: Suggestion: Improve the UI with more images, icons, thumbnails... (response to 5)
Posted by Brian Fenton on 05/19/08 05:37 PM
Hi Steve,

Yes, very cool indeed. I've been using YSlow for Firebug for a while, but it's great to have something for IE (as still most of our clients have it as their browser of choice). Nice to see AOL still releasing quality code too. 😊

Brian