Widescreens Rule

(On the subject of 3d: it depends on the browser (not just the operating system) having support for the user's video card, which means that some users aren't going to get it. So please, at the very least, don't make UI changes that are broken unless 3d is working. By all means make nice visuals for those for whom it does work, just as long as those for whom it doesn't can still do everything. But 3d is off-topic.)

Back on the subject of support for wide-screen: I, on the other hand, have my (fairly big) screen routinely in portrait mode (so it's taller than its 1200px of width - this lets me see lots of lines of things I write and edit without scrolling, which matters more to me than the few web-sites that get upset by my browser not being the shape their authors expected). The UI mostly handles that OK, but it could make better use of space (I can slightly improve this by detaching chat and moving it around, but only slightly, and it covers part of the friend panel if I do that). I must suppose tablets also see this effect when held in portrait mode.

The important thing is to write the HTML such that it adapts to the actual display, rather than presuming some particular size and shape. It's fine to tweak things such that they work particularly well for particularly common screen configurations, as long as it all works reasonably well (if not quite so well as the common case) for a broad range of different configurations. Doing that would automatically lead to good support for wide-screen (or tall-screen, using it in portrait mode).

I see no reason for 3D in Illy.  This is not a first person shooter game.  I rarely have terrain visible any way.  3D will detract from Illy - both in terms of consuming developer time and energy as well as bandwidth over the innerwebs.  As it is, Illy is too slow and rarely responds to my first click to do anything.  Instead I have to hit F5 more than anything else.  And the composing a mail almost always fails on the first try.  At least I have learned to copy my mail text to my clipboard before hitting F5 to restart the composition.

Rorgash wrote: dude.. its just been moved to the left, ALL the buttons are the same :P my question is, is that an optic illusion or is that map in 3d?

while some elements of the current UI are moved to the left side, there are also new elements on the screen shot that do not appear in the current UI.  Hence my comment, Rorgash.

If you go back to the original BL announcement and look at all the links you can see that that map is indeed in 3-d and you can scroll around elgea in 3-d too.

So that looks like a new UI altogether ... presumably it will be used in Elgea, too.