a1 thus far
Here’s what I’m workin’:
Idea being, captions will be on the left, and you can view either one at a time, or all at once. What do you think about the pic size? I’ve increased it again, but I’m a bit concerned that the pic probably doesn’t fit on an 800×600 screen, what with nav bars and whathaveyou.
Ugh, also, for some reason the up/down is not very responsive in IE, and the formatting of the caption options bar is fine on every browser I’ve checked, except for IE. So the one browser I care the least about has problems, and of course it’s that browser that most people are still using.
April 2nd, 2007 13:35
Arrogant Technocrat Schwab sez: Ignore IE. It’s a piece of shit, always has been, and you shouldn’t waste your time trying to make a piece of shit behave. It’s incumbent upon the users to equip themselves with working tools, and Mozilla/Firefox have been superior — and free — for ten years.
Pragmatist Schwab sez: Offer an alternate stylesheet that IE won’t barf on, and have this be selectable through user preferences, or a cookie. This stylesheet would have substantially diminished gloss, but it would still be functional. The CSS Zen Garden may offer hints on how to approach this.
Schwab
April 2nd, 2007 13:46
General style comments on the prototype:
The caption font appears too small on my browser. Granted, this appears to be a chronic problem with Linux, Firefox, and the way I have things set up. I’ll have to try it at home on my Windoze box…
The entire right-hand side of the page is “wasted” space. What are you planning on putting here?
JavaScript to cycle through the captions: From a usability standpoint, I’m not sure. It’ll certainly reduce the load on your servers (although I’d still very much like a way to craft a URL that will resolve to a single caption, to highlight those I especially like on other fora). I think there’s a way you can get CSS to do this kind of content cycling for you without having to push code.
The styling is very minimalist. I don’t see what you could take away to get it to fit in 800×600. Perhaps you could have a user preference or cookie for the Display Impaired that triggers a scaled <IMG> tag, which might make a little more room?
Schwab
April 2nd, 2007 14:27
I appreciate the thorough look, but man do bug reports on unfinished prototypes get under my skin. Yes, it’s “wasted” space, because there’s “nothing there yet”. And yes, linking to a specific caption is a requirement. That page is just what I have so far.
Also, you can’t do that kind of rotation with only CSS, at least not any way that’s widely supported. If I could figure out how, I’d have a small slide animation to make the list move rather than jump, but that might be beyond me.
What I can take away from it is picture size, which is what I asked. I’m not sure if the 400×400 is just too big or not.
April 2nd, 2007 15:26
Frankly, that picture size seems perfectly fine on my work computer. I didn’t have any trouble with scrolling, either, and I’m using IE.
April 2nd, 2007 15:44
Doesn’t it take a while for you, or lose clicks, or something? When I try it in IE, I have to wait a half second before I can click again. In Firefox, I can clickclickclickclick and it moves each time as I expect, but IE insists on taking its time.
I have something I can optimize there, but I wonder if IE will care anyway…mm, I’ll have to try it out.
April 2nd, 2007 16:23
Using Safari, with tabs open and the bookmark bar enabled, it’s taking up quite a lot of vertical space. Like, enough space that to see all four quotes, I have to scroll past the top of the picture. I have a dock taking up my real estate, though.
As for the Javascript, it works fine and snappy on my end.
April 2nd, 2007 17:20
Huh, you’re right. In Firefox, it’s as fast as I can click. In IE, it gets laggy; not so much as to cause a massive problem, but more just an annoyance. But, then again, IE users should be used to annoyances, no?
April 2nd, 2007 17:36
I like the layout. Very clean and straightforward.
Looking forward to having my captions rejected very soon.
April 2nd, 2007 18:48
I didn’t seem to have any problems at all with it. clickclickclick I can check again tomorrow if you like.
April 3rd, 2007 09:10
Hey Ewhac: Perhaps you’d be so kind as to email my IT department requesting that they allow us to put whatever we damn well please on our systems. I know you’ll make the difference the rest of us haven’t.
And in IE 6, everything works well, moves fast, seems more responsive than sone of the apps they have let us install. A few cosmetic flaws but I’m sure they’re much more annoying to you than to the rest of us.
April 4th, 2007 11:50
The larger images are nice, but won’t it cost you more to provide more data?
April 4th, 2007 14:23
Eh, no longer an issue, really. I used to care more when 1) I was hosting my site on my home net and 2) the site was popular enough that bandwidth was a concern. Dreamhost gives me an insane amount of bandwidth, and I’d hit a CPU issue long, long before a bandwidth one.
April 4th, 2007 15:13
I double-checked today (crazy busy yesterday), and I got the glitch at first, but then it seemed to go away. I don’t know what to tell you. All I know is that it really doesn’t seem to be an issue in IE that makes it hard to read, so I wouldn’t worry about it if I were you.
April 4th, 2007 16:54
So all the previous A-1 stuff is gone gone gone?
April 4th, 2007 18:37
Oh hell no, it takes a major disaster for me to throw anything out. The problem there is that the programs won’t work in my current setup, and fixing them at this stage seems like wasted work.
I will get them up eventually, tho. (much like the todd archive, grumble mutter…)
April 5th, 2007 22:57
The new A1 works fine for me in IE. I have all the other browsers, so whatever happens is cool.
I haven’t thought about TODD in years. You know, to this day if you type in “Milburn Junior High School”, an old TODD caption of mine is quoted (stolen) on somebody’s FAQ page…
“TAKE ME NOW, LORD JESUS, THERE’S A DOG THE SIZE OF MILBURN JUNIOR HIGH SCHOOL IN MY TREE!”
April 9th, 2007 15:28
TODD as it stands now — a “completed” artifact — is fun. But its static nature today fails to impart what made it truly enjoyable for me, which was watching the whole thing unfold. “Can they possibly come up with more variations on the same joke?” Yes, Virginia, they can. And they did. And seeing the whole thing happen was enormous fun.
April 9th, 2007 15:29
Progress report?
Need any help?
April 10th, 2007 22:15
Gah, tell me about it. IE is the bane of any web developer’s existence. I think there just needs to be a mass movement of web developers who set up sites to detect IE and display a “GET FIREFOX TO VIEW THIS SITE” page instead of the actual content. If it decreases IE’s browser use share even a fraction, I’m all for it.
Anyone who argues the quality of private ventures over open, public efforts need only look at Firefox versus IE and Safari for ample illustration of why they’re wrong.
April 10th, 2007 22:20
Oh, by the way, I’m baffled as to why a browser that’s, what, half a decade old? is still expected to be supported as a “current technology”. Pfft.