column widths

[Epicea_old]

This seems to have altered from the last time I looked at the new control panel. In the calendar view the room name column is now far, far too narrow. The room names are wrapping over multiple lines which severely warps the screen because the it causes the row to different heights for different rooms. The column really needs to be much wider to stop that happening.

Not quite sure why that altered, it was perfectly alright to start with!

[markkinchin]

When the number of dates in the table do not fit on the screen the table starts to try to fit as much as possible by reducing the width of each cell.
So displaying one week will let the name spread out but displaying a year will show it squashed up.

This is the default behaviour for the HTML table.

To make it more usable I have set a max height for each row so if you have a long room name and lots of dates that do not all fit on the screen, the room name will truncate instead of stretching the row height. I have also added a tool tip to the room name so you can still hover to see the full name if needed.

[Epicea_old]

That's much, much better. The screen feels a little cramped though, it's all bunched up at the top and rather too dense to read easily. A bit of whitespace/padding between rows wouldn't hurt maybe?

[markkinchin]

The screen feels a little cramped though, it's all bunched up at the top and rather too dense to read easily. A bit of whitespace/padding between rows wouldn't hurt maybe?

The problem is there are people using this with huge screens and only a couple of rooms and there are people with lots of rooms and small screens.
The layout is a compromise but leans towards fitting as much on the screen as possible.

I am considering if it is worth adding a view selector for the calendar with options like "condensed" and "spacious" layout.
Thoughts and ideas on this are welcome?

[Epicea_old]

Obviously there's a lot of different users with different requirements and there's a need to consider what works for other people. But I think some of those concerns can be dismissed.

The simplest is that it's an absolute fact that a dense display can't be read easily and that while it creates an impression of information being displayed that's largely illusory as the information can't be read easily. It's as true now as it was 30 years ago on a 3270 terminal, i.e. we've know for 30 years that scrolling is better than eye strain or missing information.

I think you can also dismiss concerns about small screens, in fact it's probably the reverse. On a small screen a dense display is especially difficult to read, for example the iPad is widely used and it's not only difficult to read but it's hard to interact with and select items etc. More than that, over 90% of displays in use are actually greater than 1024x768 and if you control for users running recent OS'es you're looking at over 97% of users with displays over 1024x768.

Issues with numbers of rooms are also a lot less important, or likely, than they might first appear. That's because there's no particular probability that someone has a number of rooms that falls in the problem band, i.e. just enough for the screen or just too many. The most likely situation is to never fill a screen or to always exceed it, that's just the way distributions work.

Having an option for "condensed" and "spacious" layout looks like a luxury that's just not required. I would strongly prefer there's a single "readable" layout at this time. There seems to be higher priorities than making the display more dense for a small number of cases.

The column width and wrapping had a far higher impact on the depth of the display than a bit of whitespace by design. That's much better now, it's ironic that I would prefer not to have long room names, these are just the ones we settled on to make the booking.com synchroniser work so that matching strategy had this unintended consequence.

[markkinchin]

That's much better now, it's ironic that I would prefer not to have long room names, these are just the ones we settled on to make the booking.com synchroniser work so that matching strategy had this unintended consequence.

This problem has been addressed. You can now set the matching room names for booking.com directly in the synchroniser settings and they no longer need to be the same as your Beds24 room names.

[Epicea_old]

thanks, that's handy, I did wonder later if that was a better solution

[amberbb]

thanks, that's handy, I did wonder later if that was a better solution

Now that this bug report has been adequately addressed, Epicea, could you please now edit your first message with this subject (ie this thread) by prepending "FIXED:" to the start of that subject.

This way, it's more obvious to everyone reading the topic list in this forum that it's probably a waste of their time to read this thread.

Thank you in advance for your co-operation.