[Owncloud] Style guru required...

[Christian Reiner]

Hi all, 
on my way here to the FOSDEM conference in Brussels this weekend I did some 
polishing on a small app idea of mine. As you all know I am an absolut newbie 
in modern web technologies and use ownCloud app design as a means to learn and 
bring myself back to the current state of that technology. So my apps are 
certainly somewhat limited in style and craftsmenship, but I keep getting 
better :-) This app idea is a simple effort to play around with css 
transitions and clean layout control. 

I am surprised how far I got, but now I have reached a point where I hesitate 
to invest time into additional features. I hesitate because first I am not 
sure if there is any demand for such an app and second because the app exposes 
some design flaw from the early stages of ownCloud that would have to be fixed 
before the app gets useful. The stupid thing is: that design flaw appeared in 
the early core apps and has apaprently been adapted by many app developers, I 
guess a classical case of copy and paste behaviour. I tried to develop a fix 
for that flaw but failed. So with this message I am looking for someone really 
skilled in css who wants invest some time into figuring this out:

Most of the apps  who feature some kind of element on the right hand side of 
the top control bar inside the apps content area share this problem. Take the 
music or the pictures app as an example. Regardless of what is displayed, a 
button, a search field or whatever, the positioning of that right aligned area 
is not done by floating as one would expect, but by absolute positioning and a 
right margin. Whilst this is working (kind of) it certainly is odd and 
develops into a problem when the layout is to be changed. 
There certainly is a reason why in the first place not a simple relative 
positioning with a float right rule has been applied. Actually I myself did 
also copy that design flaw in my Shorty app and had to invest quite some 
effort into changing that. And I have to say I am not happy with the result. I 
am not really sure what the real problem is. Aparently there is some issue 
with the size (width) of container elements. Take a look yourself...

Anyone who wants to give this app idea a try is encouraged to do so. It simply 
adds a small handle to the left side navigation area and allows to slide that 
navigation out of view. This works in a persistent manner, nicely animated and 
you can position the handle wherever you like by just hold&dragging it. The 
motivation for the app is usage of ownCloud on devices with small screens, I 
tested with an ebook reader and was frustrated that half of the screen size 
was blocked with that monolith of a navigation area :-( Future additions might 
be a second handle to hide the top header and an icon that shows some 
animation when used: the name of the app motivates that: 
FluXX Compensator (the elder amongst us will know that name...)
(oh, and yeah, there is a reasons why it has two 'X' in the name...)

I did not publish the app in the store, since it currently makes little sense 
without that fix mentioned before. But you can download an archive from my 
repository as usual and simply isntall it manually by dropping it into the 
ownClouds app folder. 

Here is the download: uncompress and rename the resulting folder: 
http://christian-reiner.info/s/sYgLwMKYjM

Feedback always welcome. And let's see who of the style professionals around 
is the first to come with a fix for that flaw :-)

Christian Reiner (arkascha)