Design update

Jorge

Jay Regarding the color of the text when you select something, no biggie, we can probably get aroundthat by properly selecting a color tone for the selection background color that provides reasonable contrast with white text as well as black text. I’ll play aroun a bit with the colors.

Jay

Jorge Ha yup that’s exactly what happened. I got distracted by jumping straight from adding that button into re-theming the whole formatting toolbar. Fixed in next update.

Jay

Jorge I can’t figure out how to reproduce this. It should be fixed to one line and truncating. Is this in the app or which browser is it? Is “Purchase Requisitions Journal” the name of a document?

Jorge

Jay No it’s not a document Purchase Requisitons Journal is just an outline entry inside one of my documents. This is in the desktop app for windows. The pane is not renamed so the header is showing the actual outline entry name that the pane is zoomed to.
When the pane is named , the breadcrumbs show under the pane name and everything scrolls normal. But when the pane is unnamed, the pane header shows the outline entry the pane is zoomed to, and the breadcrumbs show above the outline entry. it is nthis case when a really long entry name is wrapped in the header and the probelm reproduces.

Jay

Jorge Ok I found it - it was an inconsistency between the development and production versions so I wasn’t seeing it while testing the development version. Fixed in next update.

webalstrom

Jay This looks good. Thanks for the update.

One thing that is still weird is what happens if the pane is not named. The breadcrumb is at the very top since there is no pane name to display (which makes sense) but then the topmost visible node is not included in the breadcrumb but is instead shown in bold on the line below. That is not how it is handled if there is a pane name.

Named pane:

Unnamed pane:

Would it be better to be consistent with either everything in the breadcrumb or always having the topmost node on the line below in bold?

Jay

webalstrom Do you not like the style of the unnamed pane? I did it that way because it seems like the zoomed node should be bold and prominent, and also it shaves off some horizontal space which is necessary for thin panes.

But in the named pane, the breadcrumbs have the full width of the pane since there’s nothing else on that row, so it seemed to make sense to be on one line. Do you think making the zoomed node bold and more prominent would make it better and more consistent?

Jorge

Jay
Given a narrow pane where the breadcrumbs exceed the space available
When you hover over the breadcrumbs
Then the breadcrumbs dont expand as a tooltip to show the complete path of the breadcrumb tha tis not visible.
This means that the only way to know exactly where you are is to expand the width of the pane to inexhorable size in order to fully realize where you are in the outline.

webalstrom

I’m not partial to either style, but I think consistency is key. I had to take quite a bit of time looking at various panes and scrolling through expanded lists before I realized what was going on.

One idea I have is having the zoomed node in bold at the end of the breadcrumbs on both the named and unnamed panes would both highlight the location and make for consistency?

Another way would be having the next level symbol (>) at the end of the line with the name of the zoomed in node in bold below it (like the current unnamed pane style but with the addition of the > symbol.

Jerud

Oh man, all these new changes are so exciting…and coming at the worst possible moment for me. I only just now got around to flipping over to “real” Legend and turning on Beta…so much has changed, and I haven’t even had a chance to scrub through my old buglists…I haven’t even looked around on the new forum yet! Overwhelm!

The new CSS-based editor is really enticing because of how it blows the lid off customization possibilities. But…it’s pretty hard to use and intimidating otherwise for laypersons. I know CSS when I see it but to make any real changes aside from color I’d have to pull up W3schools.com every time 😄 Perhaps “under the hood” features like this should be stashed behind an “Advanced Controls” pane, or only available to top-tier subscribers? I can just imagine a casual user opening that menu, seeing “code” and freaking the fsck out. Instant uninstall.

As much as this level of configurability is awesome, it’s also distractingly overwhelming and kind of just a hassle to hunt around for all the options. So when I went to turn vertical lines back on, and realized that they actually were already on, just at a very low opacity, then I had to hunt through the “colors” Pane to fix that…which I only could do because I already knew that control existed previously. A new user would never think of that. I think it would make a LOT more sense to group display controls together by the UI element. Give the basic color picker and either a slider or a text-entry box for opacity.

As mentioned before I haven’t properly re-evaluated all my previously-logged bugs, but noticed one is still present just in my first 10 minutes of playing around: parent-items’ ‘expand’ carets still shift outward when you toggle “align indents” on, putting them inline with the carets of the next-indent-level-up, which is really disorienting (and makes no sense).

Jerud

Thinking about this a bit more…extensive user-customized CSS could make support and troubleshooting very difficult. When you’re looking at someone’s screenshot and you can’t tell what’s a link, what’s a mirror, what’s a calendar tag, H1 item, etc. because they have some crazy personalized system, that’s gonna be hard on everybody.

The CSS editor already lets you ‘reset’ – but there’s no way to restore back to what you previously had. What we really need is a way to store these CSS profiles – including a ‘default’ profile – and selectively restore them. When someone comes to the forum and needs to post up screenshots, we can ask them to toggle their CSS to ‘default’ before doing so. At a very minimum, we should be able to toggle between a single ‘custom’ and the ‘default’ configs, but clearly we’ll need a CSS profile manager if we’re going to be sharing templates around.

Which brings up another issue – what if I want to try out someone’s template but it comes with a CSS stylesheet that drastically differs from what I’m using? If I just want to try out a template for some personal or hobby use, but it requires modifying ALL CSS across my entire Legend install, I can’t do that because I can’t risk messing up critical workflows in my work-related Boards. Sitting down to a day of work and having all my colors flipped and tweaked would be a major disruption. I hate to say it (because it adds a lot of complexity) but it seems like custom CSS needs to be assigned on a per-document basis.

BTW This isn’t the only thing that I think makes sense to manage per-document instead of globally. I have several already in my notes, but one I struggle with daily is the the sync-to calendar (not the account, but which calendar in the same account). I am constantly missing work events because they sync-to my personal calendar when I add the date tag and I forget to manually change the calendar. And when I try changing that setting to default to my work calendar I miss personal events for the same reason. It doesn’t help that changing the calendar for a date tag is cumbersome in general and (i’m pretty sure) impossible via the keyboard. That’s…kinda a major fail for “productivity” software…

Jerud

Jorge Upvoted for making me look up “inexhorable”.

And also because, yeah, breadcrumbs should expand on-hover. In spite of the “bug report” format of this post I think this is essentially a feature request – albeit it’s one of those features that we take for granted in most SW so its absence does “feel” like a bug.

I’m still getting the hang of the new forum so I might be wrong…but I think you should have posted this as a new thread so it could be tagged for triage/processing. Right now it’s just a comment under Jay’s top-level post which is neither a bug nor feature request. I’m not a mod or I’d go ahead and move it for you…

Jorge

Jerud Thanks I am still getting used to this forum and should have posted it there. I could have sworn I tagged my response as a feature request, but I think it didn’t take. Just did that in this separate item
https://forum.legendapp.com/d/101-breadcrumbs-dont-expand-when-hovering

Jerud

Getting back to the actual subject of this post: the Design Update (sorry). Specifically projects/headers.

Since we now have explicit <h1> <h2> <h3> <h4> styles in the theme editor, I propose this is a good time to start calling items with a ^prefix “headings” rather than “projects”. It was tried once before years ago and didn’t “stick”…but I do think “heading” a much clearer – and more versatile – name. I’ve always felt calling them “projects” was like the app trying to “tell me the right way to use it”…which is exactly the thing Legend doesn’t otherwise do. Also, it just doesn’t make sense to “nest” projects, which is exactly what you’re doing with h1, h2, etc.

Additionally: We can already control .prefixHeader styling (for ALL ^prefix items) in the theme. What about taking it just one step further and having .prefixHeader1, .prefixHeader2, etc.? This would enable something I (and I think others) have requested – automatic styling according to indent level – without necessarily having a whole lot of those diamond bullets throughout the outline (because the prefixes can be dimmed or removed). There would also need to be a .prefixHeader0 to handle headers at indents deeper than <h4>.

LauraH

Hrm…. so just switched to Beta App… and now none of my prefixes are visible; and my side bar (which displays all the boards) is white. I checked the display settings - as best I can tell with the CSS my sidebar is set to be black, my prefixes should all be grey…

Something is badly wrong. I know it’s beta… but seriously? What’s going on?

Jay

LauraH Fixed in the latest update

LauraH

Does one of our shinny new CSS tags control the size of the font for the node we’re zoomed into?. I like the look in general; but the default font is a bit to large for my taste. Wondering if I could change it? I could be missing something; but didn’t find a CSS tag for that element.

Jay

LauraH I’ll add that!

Jay

LauraH I added it! In the latest update.

LauraH

Thanks for adding the pane header controls @“Jay”!

One thing I’m running into as I use the new display settings…. having the “RESET” button so close to the “close” button has me constantly nervous I’m going to hit it accidentally and loose all my customizations! The customizations are great, but would not be quick or easy to recreate and get back to my own “familiar look” if I accidentally reset them.

Could the RESET button be moved somewhere a bit more out of the way? Bottom left for example?
OR - is there a confirmation box? If I hit “RESET” accidentally - please tell me a box will pop up to ask if I’m sure I want to reset defaults and erase all my customizations…
Is there a way to “save our customizations”?

🙂

Jerud

LauraH, yes, you do get a confirmation box. I made the same mistake : )

Also, being able to save theme changes seems like a very good idea and something we’ll almost certainly need down the road as I’ve mentioned in another thread. I understand it is a rabbit hole though, and requires additional UI to implement.

In the meantime I think you can select-all, copy/paste into a .txt file to “save” your theme. Restore it by repeating the select-all and deleting all default content, then pasting over top. This looks jumbled and hideous when you do it, but once you switch away from the theme tab and then switch back, Legend seems to correctly parse it and repair the formatting. I’ve only tested this a little bit though (using Notepad on Windows), so no promises 😇 May be troublesome if Jay adds or changes some of the entries between the time you save the backup and restore it.

@Jay , I would love the ability to individually “reset to default” each of the individual items in the theme stylesheet…I have pretty much never wanted to use the “reset all” button but un-breaking individual items has been in my requests list for years. I never mentioned because of the difficulty to implement in the old UI. The new theme editor seems to make this a more realistic request.

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