At the beginning of this year (2020), I read an article called Doing Things That Scale. This article put a lot of things into perspective for me.  Also related here is Solving the wrong problem.  (In fact, the author of Solving the Wrong Problem has a LOT of good articles; I recommend reading through his archives.)

These all seem like little things, but little things add up. They confuse and mislead people, causing them to make mistakes and waste their time and others'. And in a website, that wasted time is multiplied by multiple people, because rarely does a poor UI design choice affect just one person.

A Complete Waste of Space

This site makes terrible use of available space. Here's a (marked-up) screenshot of what I see what I click the "rules" link:



Here are some numbers for you:

NOTE: All of these numbers are 25% larger than nominal due to screen scaling, because I'm looking at this site on a 15.6" screen at 1920x1080.

• The actual display area for the page itself is 941px high (there's also 89px above for the tab list + address bar, and 50px below for my taskbar.)
  
  
• 274px of that height -- nearly 30% of the available screen space, and an excess of half a million pixels -- is space that communicates only one thing: That the website I'm on is related to PINE64.  It doesn't even communicate that this is the forums.
  
  
•  The actual useful information -- the word PINE64 -- is only 35px high, one eighth of this section.
  
  
• At 83px, the pinecone logo is over twice the size of the name. (Also, it's got a Raspberry Pi in its background, so it has poor contrast, especially at the top.)
  
  
• Next comes a 208px-high section.  That's over 20% of the available screen space.  That's right, we've now used up more than 50% of the available screen space.
  
  It gets better, though: this part can't be scrolled past.  This entire region is forced to be displayed on the screen at all times.  Therefore, at any given time, more than one fifth of the available screen space has been spent on this section.
  
  (EVEN BETTER: I discovered that this region interferes with the post editor under some circumstances. More on this later.)
  
  
• The blue area is 80px high, the black area is 40px high, the light-grey area is 48px high.
  
  
• Below that is 48px of blank space (I got tired of drawing arrows)
  
  
• Below that, the blue breadcrumb box (which has an inexplicable 1-pixel-thick green border) is 63px high.
  
  
• Then there's another 42px of blank space
  
  
• And a 43px "Thread Closed" indicator
  
  
• And finally a 70px thread title, before the rules start.
  
  
• Oh, I'm sorry, no.  Below that is 184px of mostly blank space.  At least I know a lot about the person who posted the rules.  And the date the rules were last updated.  Oh, wait, no I don't, that's when he joined.
  

• Get rid of the enormous image at the top.  Yes, it's very pretty, but it communicates no useful information.  Instantly reclaim nearly one third of the available display space!
  
  
• Drop the word "View" from "View New Posts" and "View Today's Posts".  That's implicit.  (The blue bar doesn't say "View Main Website" "View Rules" "View Getting Started" "View Wiki" "View News Blog" "View Help")
  
  
• Drop the word "Open" from "Open Buddy List".  Better yet, gather some statistics; find out how many people use this "Buddy List" feature at all.  It might be worth banishing to the submenu that pops up when you click your name.
  
  
• Drop the "User CP" link.  You can already access it from the dropdown menu when you click on your username in the black region.
  
  
• Drop the explicit "Private Messages". Or abbreviate it to "PM".
  
  
• Now the total horizontal space occupied by the blue, black, and grey areas is less than the total screen width.  They can thus be placed side-by-side.
  
  At this point, you should be able to fit the entire header region into 64px at the top of the screen.
  
  
• Eliminate the 38px of vertical padding in the "content" div
  
  
• The breadcrumb trail can be merged into the topic heading.
  
     (Also, I have no idea what that dropdown triangle next to the second "General" does.  It just displays a list of numbers.)
  
  
• The "Thread Closed" box can be moved down into the topic header.
  
  
• Also, it has much more padding than is needed.
  
     And it can be given a negative margin so the internal padding can overlaps with the padding of its containing box.
  
  (I've noticed a lot of poorly chosen margin/padding settings in the stylesheet.)
  
  
• That gravatar is 120x120 (150x150 with DPI scaling.) It's enormous and it doesn't need to be.
  
  
• Get rid of the useless padding around the author's name, description, and Yelp rating
  
  
• Cut the line spacing on the stats box from 1.4x to 1.1x, and put a negative margin so its internal padding overlaps the padding of the containing box.
  
  
• Get rid of the &nbsp; floats and the <br>
  
  
• Put a 4px margin-top on the main HTML table since we just deleted all the spacing in the last step
  
  

Hi, done a quick search but found nothing,
Installed the tor browser earlier and i get the error
"tor browser requires a cpu with SSE2 support, exiting"

Just wondered what the workaround is at the moment? if at all.
running manjaro at the moment like everyone else.

Any ideas would be good,
Thanks

Does anybody know a way to change the resolution from the default 1920x1080 to something like 1366x768? The KDE display manager only has the 1920x1080 option in the scroll bar.

I am using Manjaro and a few days ago updated u-boot to latest version. The instructions from pacman included some `dd` commands to run post install, and after running them and rebooting the machine I was no longer able to boot back up. Black screen, so I can't see any error message.

Did I brick my device? is it possible for me to fix it in any way other than full re-install of the OS?

Do I need to connect it to UART maybe to see what the error message is?

Thanks!

I am currently a huge fan of pine64, but am wondering if it would be possible to get a more powerful version of the pinephone, maybe a pinephone pro? I know that pine64 is trying to support certain chips for as long as possible but with the introduction of the pinebook pro and the rockpro64 using the Rockchip RK3399 could it be possible to make a pinephone with this chip and maybe 4 GB of RAM? Personally, I know that I would buy the better performing one if I had the option, even for $100 more and I'm sure that many others would like to see it as well.

Hi,

I've been messing around with my brand-new Pinebook Pro. I had an issue where KDE appeared to have died, so I force shutdown the laptop. After that, I could no longer log in - my password would get accepted, but it would hang on the progress bar after the password.

To try and work out what's going on, I dropped into tty2 (Ctrl + Alt + F2), but then I realised that things are seriously wrong - I would get segfaults running man. I force shut down the laptop again, and now I'm getting the power LED flashing.

I am fully aware that this is my fault (well, except the initial KDE blackout which I probably should have debugged more), however, does this mean that eMMC is now corrupted and the only solution is a reinstall?

Also, I don't know what the colours of the power LED are as I'm colourblind, but I'm certain people in the know understand what I'm talking about. I think the error codes should also possibly be on the wiki - I'm happy to add those there when I get a reply here.

I am running Danielt's wasp-os on my Pinetime.  Yesterday in the afternoon I set the correct year, month, day and time on the Pinetime. 

Last night at about 11:30 pm I checked the Pinetime and the date and time were correct, and the battery icon was yellow.

This morning I checked the Pinetime and the date (year, month and day) were correct but the time was wrong.  It said 08:48 and the actual time was 11:00 am.  The battery icon showed red.

I can understand the clock resetting if the battery gets too low, but I can't understand why the time would be wrong but the date is correct.

Any ideas?

Hugh

i know that few if any have had their hands on one, but has there been any indication of what the actual operating time should be?

As I tell my son on a regular basis, if we had focused a fraction of our time on battery life that we have on doubling cpu numbers we'd charge our cars for 1 hour 1 day a year and drive wherever we wanted.....

I just bought a Chuwi Hi10x and he operating time is good but not great

Hi,

I received my new PineBook Pro yesterday, and can't wait to get stuck in and put it to work. Apologies if this question has been answered somewhere already, I did have a look around and couldn't find a definite answer.

The new PineBook has Manjaro 20.04 installed by default on the EMMC. This works great. The issue comes when I try and boot from SD card. Every image that I've attempted to boot from SD so far has resulted in a black screen, although I'm fairly certain that the system has booted as on some images I hear the startup sound/chime, so it looks like a display/graphics issue. I've tried different SD cards, including ones that I know work on other SBCs. And I've tried several images so far:

• aryufans bionic and focal images
  
• armbian
  
• Manjaro 20.04
  

Hi,

I am very pleased with my Pinebook Pro.

However it seems my screen has some really nasty offset resulting in a two-millimeter black bar at the left-hand side and the bottom and some pixels vanishing at the top and the right-hand side (see attached files).

The screen seems to be glued-in so I guess my only chance is to "unglue" it, try to move the screen and then somehow glue it back!?

Does anybody else have this offset?

Cheers,

Yann

Attached Files

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