Spotlight+wrap NetNewsWire Style

Much to my surprise, my favorite NetNewsWire style is Spotlight.

Introduced in version 2.0, it continues to be my favorite to this day. I was pretty sure its shiny-dark-blue-plastic header would grate on me after a month or so, but for some strange reason that hasn’t happened.

I think it’s because I run NNW visually Spartan (three-pane-widescreen sans toolbar) so the header is really the only thing that sticks out, and that’s what I want to look at anyway.

Since I’ve been happy with the Spotlight style for so long, and it looks like this relationship is a long-term one, I decided to put some time into enhancing it a mite: Spotlight+wrap.nnwstyle.

It’s just the same as NNW2’s built-in Spotlight style, except it will wrap headlines instead of truncating them:

stock Spotlight

Spotlight+wrap

My main problem with the Spotlight theme is that NNW2 won’t tooltip headline table columns whose content is wider than its enclosing table column. Coupled with the Spotlight style’s truncation behavior, often the entire headline is simply inaccessible until I switch to a style that wraps the headline. Now I don’t need to switch from my favorite style.

I’m not in love with the wrapped text look, but at least it’s functional. I already spent way too much tonight creating vector versions of the dark blue aqua look and attempting to get a scaled CSS background image. Bottom line: You Can’t Do That (the scaled CSS background) staying in pure CSS.

While I had the hood open, I couldn’t resist two more tweaks.

First, I stole Takaaki Kato’s idea to suppress FeedBurner’s annoying footer. Like Takaaki, I also can’t figure a way to suppress the FeedBurner ad images using pure CSS. Too bad.

Finally, my pixel imperfection kicked in when I noticed Spotlight’s title.gif had noticeable JPEG artifacting. I removed the top and bottom pixel borders (I now do those in fluid CSS) and fixed up the artifacts. There’s still some color banding in upper portion of the background image, but it only tends to become noticeable at ≥ 400% scale.

And yes, we’re all aware Mac OS X’s upcoming resolution independence will threaten my emotional stability. I’m not worried: I think everything will look so bad for so long, I’ll just go numb.

Update Jan 12: While I couldn’t figure out how to suppress the FeedBurner ad images using pure CSS, Oliver Taylor knew how and shared his magic CSS with me. I’ve rolled a new version with his magic: Spotlight+wrap-1.nnwstyle. Thanks Oliver!

Update Feb 9: Alex Hong created a Spotlight-inspired NetNewsWire style named Feedlight whose header wraps elegantly.

Sunday, December 24, 2006
12:00 AM