Dev News Stream

[Eric]

Three weeks until the big day! Here are a few more new features fresh off the backlog for your enjoyment.

1. (PRETTY BIG DEAL) The color palette for the post editor is now theme-aware! Light and dark themes each have a selection of 24 pre-defined colors. The colors are mapped such that regardless of which theme you use, the content will be guaranteed readable. (If you don't see this immediately, refresh your cache.) @FrancisJohn
   
   
   
2. Clicking on the dice button to expand the Tower now scrolls the tower to the bottom of the screen rather than the top, so at least some of the post should be visible. @Neopopulas
3. The Table editor plugin now defaults to a 100% width table instead of a pixel width, providing better compatibility across desktop and mobile views. Additionally, the Cell properties panel also defaults to percent width instead of pixel width. @Fenryr
4. When their advertising period expires, games no longer automatically switch to Closed status, allowing prospective players to continue posting while invitations are extended. GMs are presented with a notice that the advertising period has expired, which links to the game settings dialog to make it convenient to set the game's privacy to whatever is desired. @iantruesilver
   

[Eric]

Today's update is on the editor color picker. The out-of-the-box color picker had a difficult time handling the color swapping required to ensure readability across light themes (like MW Default, Clockworks, and Beach) and dark themes (like Mocha, Night, and Lime), so we built a replacement. Here's a quick summary of what it does:

The Default panel contains a palette of 24 colors. These colors are theme-aware and will swap to a more readable version on the opposite light/dark mode. It also shows up to six recently used colors for easy picking. On the to-do list, but not yet deployed, is a keyboard shortcut to apply the most recently used color without having to open the picker.
 

 

 

 

 

The Power panel contains a palette of 324 (18x18) unique colors that are guaranteed to be readable (contrast ratio >= 2.0) on all themes. Obviously, many of these tend toward the middle part of the color spectrum since pale colors would be hard to read in light mode and rich colors would be hard to read in dark mode. Any colors picked from here are also added to the recent colors on the Default panel.
 

 

 

 

 

Absent from this view is the hex code/color name picker field. A great deal of the named colors, and certainly most of the arbitrary 256-space colors, are going to end up difficult or impossible to read if viewed in one mode or the other. You can still use these in Source mode, but you do so at the risk that some of the people reading your post are going to have difficulty with your content.

We also removed the background color picker. In practice, this was never a good idea, as it could create a whole host of readability issues while driving the complexity of resolving them up by an order of magnitude or more. The background-color and related CSS attributes are still available in Source mode; use them judiciously.

There are other useful features in the works, such as remembering your color selections across the whole site (rather than dropping recent colors after each navigation/refresh). If you have ideas for how to make the color-picking experience better while giving equal goodness to light and dark mode users, I'd love to here them! Post in Site Feedback as usual.

[Eric]

An update to the Clone functionality has been deployed. Instead of cloning directly to the reply editor, it will now always clone to the editor's buffer (the behavior that used to be control-click/long press), from which you can then insert it into the editor using the associated button:

Two benefits of this change:

1. Clone-to-buffer now works correctly on iOS devices where the long press was previously being swallowed by the OS-level multi-layer click mechanism.
2. Cloning multiple times no longer results in a geometrically increasing series of copies ending up in the reply editor.

Recognizing this is one extra click for a lot of use cases, we'll continue to noodle on ways to enhance the experience.