[Gimp-web] News on Screenshots/Imagebox

[Raphaël Quinet]

On Wed, 15 Aug 2007 20:59:47 +0200, Jakub Steiner <jimmac at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Wed, 2007-08-15 at 19:02 +0200, Raphaël Quinet wrote:
> > What about adding a checkbox near the top of the page saying "Yes,
> > I want fancy animations for the screenshots?".  [...]
> 
> Just turn off javascript on a slow machine. The site remains nice and
> readable. Exposing such a selector is like asking people if they want
> their car screen cleaned. It's annoying.

Well, turning off Javascript may not be the best option when you have
10 other tabs open to other sites that need Javascript (and do not
have the same speed issues).

Also, I have to admit that I don't like the current animations for the
screenshots, even on a machine with fast graphics.  I really enjoy all
the improvements that have been made to the new web site, except for
this part (screenshots/imagebox) because I consider this to be a
regression in usability.

What do we gain by trying to frame the screenshots inside a fancy box
with Javascript animations?  In my opinion, we mostly lose:
- The image quality gets worse.  As reported by others, the browsers
  suck at resizing images (nearest-neighbor resizing) so the
  screenshots look bad.
- The resize effect when switching between images is rather annoying
  (when the images do not have the same size or aspect ratio).
- The navigation is not easy to use.  The controls should be visible
  all the time in order to let the user browse through the
  screenshots easily.

I would prefer one of the following solutions:

1) Go for the simple HTML version.  Make the thumbnails larger (around
   400 pixels wide) so that each preview takes the most of the width
   of the page.  Each preview links directly to the original image.
   Using large previews allows the user to see much more than in the
   small thumbnails that we have now.  Due to the increased size, we
   would not put more than 5 or 6 previews on the screnshots page, but
   I think that it should be OK.  We could also use the same layout as
   http://www.inkscape.org/screenshots/ and spread the screenshots
   over several pages (they do it for different inkscape versions),
   although I would prefer larger previews.

2) Use the current thumbnails but then go to a "slideshow" type of
   page with "next" and "prev" arrows in a fixed position and images
   already scaled down to a fixed size.  Clicking on the scaled-down
   images would link directly to the original image.

Well, I don't want to spoil the fun because I know that a lot of
effort has already been invested in these pages, but I think that a
simpler solution would actually work better.

-Raphael