NetNewsWire Style 2.5
November 2nd, 2008Version 2.5 of my NetNewsWire style is now available. The design is simple and clean with a great deal of focus on typography and legibility. In this new version I’ve made some improvements that will enhance the reading experience.
Another enhancement that I was hoping to implement was a consistent vertical baseline. But because of inconsistencies within RSS feeds it was very difficult to accomplish, probably even impossible. For example in certain feeds blocks of copy are not wrapped in the paragraph tag, instead just use the break tag. For this reason it’s hard to control the text and elements like images.
Anyhow, I’m very exited about the features I was able to add.
New Features in Version 2.5
-
Widows
Prevention of typographic widows in titles and body copy via jQWidon’t. -
Capitalization
All words in title are capitalized. -
Image Resize
Images wider than 600px are resized to fit the fixed width of the style.
Special thanks to Oliver Boermans for helping me with some bugs.
To install just double click the file.
Jorge
Thank you very much! I really love this style,
sacha zemp
Hi.
Images wider than 600px are only resized on the x-axis.
Looks not nice. You see that on the bigpicture blog from http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/
Jeff Byrnes
Beauty! Love this style, thanks for the update. Solves my long-standing issue with images that are too wide
And the prevention of widows is very nice.
Jens
Cute. However, the capitalization “feature” makes it unusable if you want to read headlines in most languages but English. Too bad.
Antonio
Jens, I’m no expert in linguistics so could you explain or show how capitalizing words would make them illegible.
Jens
Well, Antonio,
let’s take a headline from one of the major German news pages, http://www.spiegel.de:
“Wahlcomputer: Experten warnen vor neuen Auszähl-Pannen bei US-Wahl”
According to German grammar (not an easy one, BTW
The beginning of a sentence (or headline) is in capitals as well as nouns (plus some other stuff). Verbs, articles, adjectives, adverbs and stuff are in small letters only. If you’re used to the language, this will help you to very quickly understand the structure of a sentence (or headline).
In a feed reader, you tend to browse through some hundreds or even thousand of headlines very quickly. Even if understanding the capitalized headlines only some milliseconds slower than the original or correct ones, this will add up to quite some time, also with the need of more of the reader’s concentration.
Maybe it’s a nice feature for English-only (where I never understood the capitalization rules for titles and headlines anyway
— for other languages, it’s not. I like the design of Style 2.5 very much, so I simply deleted the capitalization command in the stylesheet.css.
I hadn’t analyzed the structure of .nnewstyle files before but this was an easy one. Hopefully, I didn’t infringe upon any laws anywhere in the world or didn’t cause you any annoyance by acting this way. And sorry if my English seems a little bit rusty. I don’t have the cance to practise it too much these days.
From Munich, Upper Bavaria, Germany
Jens
Antonio
Jens, no problem that you changed the CSS. I was going to do that for you anyway.
As for the capitalization, pretty much the same rules apply to the English language but they’re not written in stone. But the rules are there not really for legibility but just to highly the hierarchy of the words. In terms of Titles and Headlines it’s okay to capitalize all words and I see your point but even in German it shouldn’t make the words illegible or even cause a delay. I mean to me there really isn’t a big different between:
“Wahlcomputer: Experten warnen vor neuen Auszähl-Pannen bei US-Wahl”
and
“Wahlcomputer: Experten Warnen Vor Neuen Auszähl-Pannen Bei US-Wahl”
I would prefer to have control over which words to cap but I don’t. In the end I don’t see how this would make the style unusable.
Anyway, thanks for the explanation.
Antonio
sacha zemp, thanks for catching that. I’ve fixed it and uploaded a new version. The images will scale correctly now.
Jens
Okay,
maybe I’m just a self-opinionated aesthete.
Jens
Antonio
Haha!
Xander
Looks great! Loving the change, keeping the same view gets old fast.
Daniel Andrews
I have noticed that entries seem to have lots of blank space at the bottom, pushing the scroll bar down when it does not in other styles.
Any idea as to why this is?
http://skitch.com/danielandrews/43kk/netnewswire
LOVE the style, thank you so much.
Zachery Bir
You might take a further look at the Ollicle Reflex style, which scales large images on both axes.
Antonio
Daniel, not sure what that is. I’ll look into it.
Zachery, this style already scales images proportionately.
Jake Dahn
This is pretty cool. But I’ve just migrated from NNW back to GoogleReader with the advent of http://helvetireader.com/ . Heletica based minimalist google reader skin, pretty sweet.
Christian
Lovely style, thanks
terkoz
maybe I’m just Terkoz self-opinionated aesthete.
Jens