New homepage under testing

[Etan Reisner]

On Fri, Dec 12, 2008 at 08:56:10PM -0800, Ka-Hing Cheung wrote:
> I forgot to say that I really hate the "lightbox" thing. While I don't
> mind the idea, resizing 3 times for each screenshot sucks big time.
> Also, if I click on the buddy list screenshot it shows the 3rd one out
> of 6, if I go either direction, I would only see half of the
> screenshots, and then I would have to go all the way to the other end,
> suffering dozens of resizing in between.
>
> The white text on black background also feels out of place.
>
> -khc

Casey and I briefly discussed the lightboxes in #pidgin, where by
discussed I mean I complained about how I think they are something we
really should try to avoid because they have a number of more-or-less
serious drawbacks that can make using them an annoyance very quickly. The
inability to skip around in the list of images is a very good example of
this.

My short list of complaints from #pidgin:

    They get in the way of seeing the page, they don't let you directly
    click on anything else on the page without dismissing them first, when
    large they cause the page to get scrolled badly, etc.

Much of the current annoyance with the lightboxes we have can be
mitigated, by doing things like removing the fading, the delay before the
navigation buttons appear, etc. But by their very nature they have issues
which I think make them worth avoiding.

I believe I managed to mostly convince Casey of this when I mentioned it
in #pidgin. So hopefully, we'll come up with a better overall screenshot
system (which may very well include lightboxes in some respect, just
preferably not this one).

    -Etan