IE 7... but now that I'm on the Tablet I noticed that they go away @ zooms above 100% in MicroB.

BTW, they are right justified in the table after the pm's tiime stamp. If you can't see the time stamp either, I'm thinkin' it might be a zoom issue on your end.

I underestand where the orange comes from but I find orange on white harder to read. IMHO my personal preference is for a darker theme.

PS my avatar was cropped rather than resized in this transition. When I tried to edit it, it looked OK -- what's up?

Click on your name to the upper left of your post to see your profile. If you save the pic in the right column and make that your profile pic, it fits perfectly.

The old ITT theme delivered like ... a turtle on crutches, here. I actually slightly cringe when hitting the reload button for updates ...

I'm actually liking the new theme ('cept for the "Talk Menu" to the right -- that kills too much real-estate) -- the loading is *much*faster*.

Thanks guys. What I needed to do was to provide a 50x50 avatar. Now all is well.

OK, just for the record I'll sum up my own feedback here, although much has been mentioned already.

I have refrained from doing this earlier because I wanted to allow some time to get past the initial "change trauma", get used to the new look, and see how things would evolve.

So here is what remains true after a few day's use of the new forum theme, as it stands now. I should also mention that these impressions are in comparison with the blue "Classic" theme, which I'd always used up to now. I was never into the dark "N810" theme, neither on desktop or on the tablets (where I still use Minimalist) -- and was happy I was not forced to use it :-).

First, I must say that (quite apart from the ongoing debate on providing user options or not), Reggie has been very responsive and reactive to specific comments and suggestions about the new theme, and many small but effective tweaks have been made. The pages we see now are both similar to, but quite different than, those we had initially.

Specifically, I now realize that the "thread view" pages are something I can get used to, from a readability point of view, even though I'm still not a fan of the "maemo orange-and-white" dogma. The sidebar with menu and "active topics" is a useful addition (although it'd break the display on the tablets if I were using it there).

However, the *other* page I use all the time (New Posts), because it's the only way I've ever kept up with things on ItT, is another matter.

I like the way the "next unread" link had been moved to the post count on the right, because it beats trying to hit that tiny icon on the left, and is consistent with the Minimalist theme.

The problem is, that page's content is by definition made only of links (topic titles), and thus almost exclusively orange-on-white. Do as I may, I still find it an assault on the eyes, and hard to endure for any length of time.

In all cases, and readability aside, what probably bugs me most is the general loss of information density in this forum view compared to the previous ones. I still stand by my previous remark : on the Web, there are news sites, content-heavy sites, blogs, wikis, forums, etc. And they all tend to have their own specific layouts because their contents are created and evolve differently, and accordingly their readership comes at their content differently.

What we have here is the result of taking a theme that was originally conceived for the contents of maemo.org, and imposing it (for, let's say, well-meant "philosophical" reasons) on the contents of a community forum.

I find it's not working that well, for me. A good forum is a fast-moving, fast-scrolling beast. It's all about keeping in touch, daily, with a frenzy of activity coming in from all sides. It's all about taking in the best possible snapshot of all that activity and information in one go, to get a feeling about how and where things are moving, and choosing where you're going to invest your time and attention. In short, it's all about information density, whatever the size of the screen.

For me, filtering ItT's activity and bluster through the low-density display of its maemo.org sibling sites definitely lowers my ability to stay involved as I've been, through ups and downs, since 11-03-2005.

The waste of horizontal and vertical screen real estate is simply galling (even if there has been progress on the latter). It's almost impossible nowadays to buy a monitor that is not an LCD and does not have a wide aspect ratio, so using both dimensions intelligently is even more important than before.

On my 1920x1080 desktop display, almost half of the width goes unused. On the "new posts" page, that means that a lot of the thread titles uselessly wrap around in their boxes, thus reducing even more the vertical information density... right now, my PC shows me about the same amount as my 800x480 tablet using Minimalist ! And in thread view, that means a whole lot more scrolling for the same amount of posts...

Again, this doesn't trouble me for content in the other parts of maemo.org, but for a forum it's definitely counter-productive.

I'm not optimistic concerning the better use of screen width, as it would mean an exception to the maemo.org theme for the Talk section, which seems clearly out of the question ATM.

I believe there's still room for some more damage-control tweaks regarding vertical density, however. Here are some suggestions (if technically doable, of course) :

* on the New Posts page:

- put the the page selection list on the same line as the "breadcrumbs" list ?
- put "Search: New Posts " + "Showing results 1 to x of y" + "Search took 0.0N seconds." on a single line ?
- delete the useless "Results" line ?
- reduce the vertical/padding spacing inside the individual thread title boxes ?
- or even turn the list into one single box, with just lines as separators ?

* on the Thread View page:

- reduce space between breadcrumb+topic title and "post reply" icon ?
- move the "The Following N Users Say Thank You to X For This Useful Post:" to the same line as the "Quote & Reply | Quick Reply | Thanks!" ? block ?
- (readability) slightly tint the background of post header and footer to better focus on the content ?


Oh and Reggie, if you can find a fix for the all-orange New Posts page, I'd be really grateful :-)

I concur about the loading...
My post above yours was my first post from a tablet to this forum ....ever. I used to avoid this site on the tablet so that I could keep one tablet affiliate frustration free in my life.

...as far as the waisted real estate, I would rather have the finger friendly "Talk Menu" tools and "Active Topics" to the right as it is now and deal with ad free "waisted" real estate farther down the page. It also allows for faster finger scrolling once you get past "Active Topics".

One way to have our cake and eat it too would be to have a user configurable "posts per page" where you could set an amount of posts loaded to the active topics lower edge if it is bothers some. Another way might be to expand the "Active Topics" dynamically, adding more or less depending on page length.

However, I'm all for letting things settle down a bit so we all can see any features that the change has brought. Any change that has gotten 1 more member to use his tablet as it was intended can't be all bad.

Off Topic:: YoDude I like your Avatar and made mine after seeing yours but I put to much details into it and you lose to much quality after I shrunk it down. I might remake mine with the keyboard slide up so I can make the whole thing bigger.

Great suggestions fpp! I'll see what I can do!

Thanks.

Oh, and I forgot to mention that I agree with GA in that the new quoting format, with the icon link to the quoted post, is really nice ! :-)