It seems like you’ve experienced many clashes of opinions about design improvements, haha. Sometimes these discussions are even more troublesome than the actual coding implementation—it’s not an easy job for you, I’m sure.
After reading the discussion under the thread "Change Timeline View/User Interface/Its BORING", I noticed that the focus there was more on avoiding repetitive date displays. It seems like there were two main points of feedback:
- They wanted to group entries by date to make it clearer which entries belong to the same day. Their main focus was on improving clarity and separation between entries on different dates.
- Building on that, some users suggested showing the specific date as a floating top bar. This design might save more screen space on mobile devices compared to PCs, but I wonder if it would weaken the emphasis on the date itself. (Would keeping the date in its current top-left floating position be a better option?)
In this thread, our discussion also touches on date clarity, but from my perspective, I’m more concerned about whether the separation between individual entries is clear enough. Personally, I prefer not to use and display diary titles, and I like show full entries in the timeline. My entries often use blank lines for paragraph breaks and tend to be quite long. As shown in the screenshot I shared earlier, I often feel that the paragraph breaks created by blank lines are more visually prominent than the separation between entries, which makes it hard for me to distinguish one entry from the next.
Regarding paragraph breaks, since Diarium doesn’t currently increase spacing between paragraphs, I’ve been adding extra blank lines to create clearer paragraph breaks in my entries. I initially thought about suggesting increasing the default paragraph spacing to make entries more visually separated, which might help make the separations in the timeline view clearer overall. However, I’m also concerned about the potential impact of such a change. As you’ve mentioned, not everyone might like this adjustment—for example, users who already use multiple blank lines for paragraph breaks might find the spacing becomes too large. Or, sometimes people just want to insert a line break, not a full paragraph break with extra spacing.
A possible solution could be to differentiate between line breaks and paragraph breaks, similar to MS Word, where Enter creates a new paragraph, and Shift + Enter creates a line break. Additionally, old entries could default to being displayed as line breaks to maintain consistency. Could this be an elegant way to handle the paragraph spacing?
I know I’ve digressed a bit with the paragraph spacing topic. But overall, I think the focus of everyone’s discussions about improving the timeline view boils down to ensuring that, while maintaining the design’s cleanliness and aesthetic, the separation of various elements—whether at the date level, entry level, or paragraph level—is as clear and noticeable as possible.
