please have an option to have the flyouts NOT appear on top of my pic... I like to use my mouse and point to details within my pics without anything getting in my way... just have the flyout (if we must have em) pop out to the right or something.
please leave an option to have cooresponding links/buttons below the pic to execute features that are currently only available via the flyout. (why have blank space where the links/buttons used to be?)
what about stats?
hmm... I was just playing around with the beta and a thought occured to me... what's this going to do to our stats? Let's say today that a viewer opens a gallery with two pages of thumbs 9 thumbs each, and likes images 5,7,9, and 14, so they click on them to see the larger view. Today we would see in our stats:
1 thumbnail load for every image;
1 "default size" load for images 1 and 10 (first image on each page);
and
1 "default size" load for images 5, 7, 9 and 14 (the ones they loaded manually)
If you're familiar with looking at the stats on a per image basis, you almost mentally subtract the thumbnail count from the "default size" count for every Nth image, knowing that it was the one that autoloaded when they opened the page.
With the variable number of thumbnails now, that's going to be a bit harder... but that's not the one that caused me to post.
Now that the browser is loading all of the images on the page in the background, how will we be able to see the images that stand out enough for folks to click on the thumbnail and see a larger view? I've always liked that as a feedback mechanism... "oh, they found images 3 and 4 20 times more 'I want to see that closer!' than images 2 and 6." To the point of on at least one occasion, putting an intentionally bland or unrelated image as #1 on the page, just because I wanted to know, "which of these did they find interesting enough to look at closer?" Are we going to loose that?
SmugMug Sorcerer - Engineering Team Champion for Commerce, Finance, Security, and Data Support http://wall-art.smugmug.com/
please have an option to have the flyouts NOT appear on top of my pic... I like to use my mouse and point to details within my pics without anything getting in my way... just have the flyout (if we must have em) pop out to the right or something.
same here! as much as I like this new smugmug style, that popup would likely drive me to change to a different style whenever I was using a gallery to show someone else some design alternatives, or documentary images... anytime I would tend to use the mouse pointer to draw attention to part of the image. (the photorank popup is still annoying then, but only when you're in a gallery that has it enabled... since I can't directly access the output from that to know what folks are thinking that way, I tend to turn it off when ever I'm using a gallery for this type of thing.)
please leave an option to have cooresponding links/buttons below the pic to execute features that are currently only available via the flyout. (why have blank space where the links/buttons used to be?)
I *think* one of the things they're trying to address is to make the default end viewer experience *cleaner*. I've certainly heard a time or two from folks that the pages were very busy, with a lot of links all over the place. Some times you want that... other times you don't. Since this is the *default* view of smugmug for the hundreds of people that come to view images, I think they're trying to aim for that user... which is just fine by me. The more advanced users (i.e. not {my,your} {grand}parents) can switch to a view style that does what they want (like critique or journal) or get to the information through a more advanced UI (the floater).
SmugMug Sorcerer - Engineering Team Champion for Commerce, Finance, Security, and Data Support http://wall-art.smugmug.com/
a couple more observations
continuing my list of "oddities" from post #75 in this thread.
browser navigation button theft. ok, this one is weird, and is going to really annoy me long term if not fixed. My mouse, like many, has navigation "forward" and "back" thumb buttons on the side. Normally, in a web browser these are "forward" and "back" history navigation buttons. I make pretty heavy use of these, especially when navigating smugmug galleries. But you've somehow captured *half* of them. The "forward" navigation button acts just like the right arrow key and walks through the images in the gallery (this I actually like a LOT ). But the "backward" navigation button is now dead in the galleries. so you're somehow intercepting it, but not acting on it. this has gotta be a bug....
SmugMug Sorcerer - Engineering Team Champion for Commerce, Finance, Security, and Data Support http://wall-art.smugmug.com/
hmm... I was just playing around with the beta and a thought occured to me... what's this going to do to our stats? Let's say today that a viewer opens a gallery with two pages of thumbs 9 thumbs each, and likes images 5,7,9, and 14, so they click on them to see the larger view. Today we would see in our stats:
1 thumbnail load for every image;
1 "default size" load for images 1 and 10 (first image on each page);
and
1 "default size" load for images 5, 7, 9 and 14 (the ones they loaded manually)
If you're familiar with looking at the stats on a per image basis, you almost mentally subtract the thumbnail count from the "default size" count for every Nth image, knowing that it was the one that autoloaded when they opened the page.
With the variable number of thumbnails now, that's going to be a bit harder... but that's not the one that caused me to post.
Now that the browser is loading all of the images on the page in the background, how will we be able to see the images that stand out enough for folks to click on the thumbnail and see a larger view? I've always liked that as a feedback mechanism... "oh, they found images 3 and 4 20 times more 'I want to see that closer!' than images 2 and 6." To the point of on at least one occasion, putting an intentionally bland or unrelated image as #1 on the page, just because I wanted to know, "which of these did they find interesting enough to look at closer?" Are we going to loose that?
I've been thinking about a way to be able to do some fun things with the comments. Would it be possible since you're in tweaking around with the code to add a couple of new classes to the #comments .box. If you could add in addition to "box" could you add "even" (or "odd" depending on the comment number) and if the site owner makes a comment can you add a class for that - perhaps "you" or something.
Y'all don't want to hear me, you just want to dance.
The flyout over the image is nice but it's getting old already. With all the
empty space under the large photo why not have it flyout/dropdown from the
bottom into that area at least in SmugMug style?
AL
We don't intercept those buttons, in fact - they are very hard to inttercept because your mouse forward button may correspons to mouse button 4, while on mine it is mouse button 5 (and so on and so forth).
What you are seeing is your mouse to issue the browser back and forward commands (which we can't intercept either), which we don't intercept - but we DO have a history object that helps determine what next and back should be.
Bottom line - if you start out in a fresh browser window and go to any gallery and try to use your mouse button to go forward, you should be unable to since you have no browsing history - is this true? If not, then we do have a problem
continuing my list of "oddities" from post #75 in this thread.
browser navigation button theft. ok, this one is weird, and is going to really annoy me long term if not fixed. My mouse, like many, has navigation "forward" and "back" thumb buttons on the side. Normally, in a web browser these are "forward" and "back" history navigation buttons. I make pretty heavy use of these, especially when navigating smugmug galleries. But you've somehow captured *half* of them. The "forward" navigation button acts just like the right arrow key and walks through the images in the gallery (this I actually like a LOT ). But the "backward" navigation button is now dead in the galleries. so you're somehow intercepting it, but not acting on it. this has gotta be a bug....
Wasted space usage...
I agree with the many who would prefer to see the slide-out/pop-up go BELOW the image and not onto the image at all. Something tells me that's not possible, but...
Another thing is it would be nice to have the Slideshow option on the slide-out/pop-up thingy. I hate wasting a whole line on precious above-image and below nav-bar/banner space with just one little widget for selecting the viewing style. Real bummer. I know I can shut it off completely, but I really just want to use the smugmug viewing style with a simple option for doing a full-screen slideshow. In leui of that, I will likely just shut off the viewing option widget altogether, but I hate to do that.
I agree with the many who would prefer to see the slide-out/pop-up go BELOW the image and not onto the image at all.
Consider this 5thed, 6thed, and probably 7thed and 8thed.
For that matter, I'd like the exif info pinned below the image, in a smooth, organized slideout thing (much like the above mentioned window). Since there is space, and I really cant stand the photoshop/mac os, windows all over the place, style that the current beta exif window is set up as. I hate it when things are covered up for no reason other than it wasnt seen fit to figure out a nice organized ui. It is just mac os style clutter. Or at least it should naturally dock in one place and be movable elsewhere.
Then, they can both stay there, in an either closed or open state, and always be in the same place, especially if they arnt docked to the bottom of the image, but to the bottom of the image display block, and users can choose whether to have the tools/info open. Perhaps the tools and exif can be a sort of tabbed thing on the bottom too, much more organized and usable. With the correct visual clues that something drops down, people wont need the totally unintuitive hover interface.
(side rant to all "web 2.0" developers, apple developers, and "modern" interface developers in general: this is not how the mouse was designed, I dont expect functionality to happen when i dont provide input. mice often move without my intent, mice very rarely click without my intent)
Lastly, I noticed when images have a different vertical size, the borders around certain elements move around when you change images. That is another pet peeve of mine, when things move around when central content changes and there is really no reason for it, it is distracting.
...
Lastly, I noticed when images have a different vertical size, the borders around certain elements move around when you change images. That is another pet peeve of mine, when things move around when central content changes and there is really no reason for it, it is distracting.
-r
Great idea, lock the vertical height of the large image box so it doesn't push
and pull elements below.
Al
Love the ajax photo changes and speeding improvement.
I like the popup menu...very local.live
Loke the syplistic and clean layout
Only thing that i don't like is the fixed width...i run 1920x1200 and hate to see that wasted space
Love the ajax photo changes and speeding improvement.
I like the popup menu...very local.live
Loke the syplistic and clean layout
Only thing that i don't like is the fixed width...i run 1920x1200 and hate to see that wasted space
Hi Bronz,
Thanks for posting, and welcome to dgrin!
Stay tuned for your empty-space problem, we are working on it.
We don't intercept those buttons, in fact - they are very hard to inttercept because your mouse forward button may correspons to mouse button 4, while on mine it is mouse button 5 (and so on and so forth).
Yep, I know how hard it is programatically, hence why I was surprised you were able to impact it in any way.
What you are seeing is your mouse to issue the browser back and forward commands (which we can't intercept either), which we don't intercept
The behavior of the mouse buttons, in the beta galleries, does not match the behavior of the browser history forward/back toolbar buttons, keyboard shortcuts, or menu entries. All three of those behave *exactly* as you would expect. In current production smugmug galleries, the mouse buttons also behave exactly the same as those three options.
- but we DO have a history object that helps determine what next and back should be.
Bottom line - if you start out in a fresh browser window and go to any gallery and try to use your mouse button to go forward, you should be unable to since you have no browsing history - is this true? If not, then we do have a problem
Recreation process:
exit and restart browser (firefox 2.0.0.1 on Mac OS/X 10.4.9)
click browser forward toolbar button (disabled, but still depresses)
see nothing happen
I can reproduce this over and over... just done it twice, on two separate machines. The mouse in question is a logitech MX700 cordless optical, the logitech control panel is configured to send a keystroke for those buttons, they're configured for ⌘-← and ⌘-→ (in other words, left and right arrows, with the apple modifier). This almost explains why it's acting the way it does, as the right and left arrows are the ones you guy tap into. But it still doesn't explain why only one works.
SmugMug Sorcerer - Engineering Team Champion for Commerce, Finance, Security, and Data Support http://wall-art.smugmug.com/
[*]see image 1
[*]click forward button on mouse
[*]see image move to next image, image 2[/LIST]
Well, there is the problem. You are not using our history object, since you have not visited anything after image 1. So it looks like your mouse forward button is set up to mimic shift+arrow right - which is our shortcut to go forward one image, instead of your forward mouse button actually forcing the browser to go forward in history. What mouse are you using?
Well, there is the problem. You are not using our history object, since you have not visited anything after image 1. So it looks like your mouse forward button is set up to mimic shift+arrow right - which is our shortcut to go forward one image, instead of your forward mouse button actually forcing the browser to go forward in history. What mouse are you using?
correction: shift+arrow right will move you forward one page, not one image.
Mixing Gallery and Photo "Comments"
The new navigation arrow functionality is a vast improvement! IMHO, I would have preferred arrow-down or page-down to get to the Next Page in a gallery, but Shift + Arrow works functionally as well, so I'm a happy camper on the navigation side.
I like the simplified Comment entry format (choose between Gallery or Photo comment.)
BUT!!!!...I did discover something which I hope you'll change: the comment display format is entirely chronological, so if the last comment made was about the entire gallery, it is seen/listed first...thus pushing the PHOTO comments on a particular photo down lower in the stack...making it quite difficult to easily differentiate, or even notice, the photo comment.
Photo Comments should "trump" gallery comments on a particular photo, and all photo comments for that photo should be displayed together, and get "top billing" (still with the most recent listed first).
My suggestions about the new UI
Kudos to doing the in-place refreshes! My suggestions, some touched on by others:
1. None of these pics in the demo have captions. An issue I have with current smugmug is the captions are too hard to notice - buried in with the other below pic info. Will they be easier to see now?
2. I'd love to see an update your slideshow feature which a) Doesn't show captions easily, b) is DOG slow on my computer. c) doesn't respect 2 line Start Bars in Windows XP (draws underneath it). FlickR smokes you on this.
3. Agree the popup shouldn't happen over the pic. Two issues with that, 1. It too easily distracts the viewer/mars image and 2. you don't know the feature is there until you mouse over the pic. Users need to see other ways to change sizes, save pics etc. without being expected to mouse over the image. I wouldn't even think to try that. I'd rather see a flyout underneath, especially one triggered by buttons/graphic indicating there are actions a user can take on the pic.
4. Does anyone use the rating feature? I don't. Just curious if they did, and if so, if 5 stars would be more useful?
5. Wish there was a large size view with thumbnails (maybe on bottom?). I find myself frequently changing image size to large and going next, next, next, since the default image size is too small (though is it bigger than before? good!)
6. Do people mostly use the thumbnails on left, pic on right view to browse pics? If so, they can't see comments (nor can I, the owner). You only see that there are x comments, and have to click to see them. Might be cool to put the comments below each pic on the right, perhaps scrolled down a bit, away from the captions?
Kudos to doing the in-place refreshes! My suggestions, some touched on by others:
1. None of these pics in the demo have captions. An issue I have with current smugmug is the captions are too hard to notice - buried in with the other below pic info. Will they be easier to see now?
"Obvious/Simple" works (always)..."slick" (only sometimes).
I personally like the hover/flyout in the new layout (the one that has the photo rating, the available photo size options, etc.). Some problems with it, though:
1. My 80 year old aunt will likely not even discover it.
2. If she does, "photo sizes...small, medium, large, original" won't mean anything to her. It's not abundantly clear that the "message" means "If you want to VIEW a larger/smaller version of THIS picture, click HERE". She'll think it must have something to do with ORDERING a photo of a particular size.
3. If does she manage to select the "large" viewing option, and right arrows her way to see several more, she likely will not figure out how to get back to a default viewing size or page. The flyout only shows the rating icon at this point. I eventually figured out how to get back...click on the photo or the tiny "x"...but only after accidently logging out altogether when I tried the Big "X" on the window.
I know some (programmers and computer saavvy types) will just pooh-pooh this ("Auntie ought to get a life"), but I had a bit of trouble with it myself because it wasn't obvious... and if I did, so will a lot of other people, I'm sure. Underestimating the impact on those who are intimidated by computers in the first place would be short-sighted. The direct impact on user friendliness must be a programmers nightmare...but must NEVER be the user's fault, right?
Comments
That was me a year ago. I know the feeling.
Swim for Them | WellmanHouse.net | AlbumFetcher | SmugShowBuilder
It is, and I thank you very much!
Stephen Skoutas
http://stephenskoutas.com
sskoutas@gmail.com Certe, toto, sentio nos in kansate non iam adesse
Please feel free to retouch and repost my images. Critique, Suggestions, and Technique tips always welcomed.
Ditto. And ditto.
hmm... I was just playing around with the beta and a thought occured to me... what's this going to do to our stats? Let's say today that a viewer opens a gallery with two pages of thumbs 9 thumbs each, and likes images 5,7,9, and 14, so they click on them to see the larger view. Today we would see in our stats:
1 thumbnail load for every image;
1 "default size" load for images 1 and 10 (first image on each page);
and
1 "default size" load for images 5, 7, 9 and 14 (the ones they loaded manually)
If you're familiar with looking at the stats on a per image basis, you almost mentally subtract the thumbnail count from the "default size" count for every Nth image, knowing that it was the one that autoloaded when they opened the page.
With the variable number of thumbnails now, that's going to be a bit harder... but that's not the one that caused me to post.
Now that the browser is loading all of the images on the page in the background, how will we be able to see the images that stand out enough for folks to click on the thumbnail and see a larger view? I've always liked that as a feedback mechanism... "oh, they found images 3 and 4 20 times more 'I want to see that closer!' than images 2 and 6." To the point of on at least one occasion, putting an intentionally bland or unrelated image as #1 on the page, just because I wanted to know, "which of these did they find interesting enough to look at closer?" Are we going to loose that?
http://wall-art.smugmug.com/
same here! as much as I like this new smugmug style, that popup would likely drive me to change to a different style whenever I was using a gallery to show someone else some design alternatives, or documentary images... anytime I would tend to use the mouse pointer to draw attention to part of the image. (the photorank popup is still annoying then, but only when you're in a gallery that has it enabled... since I can't directly access the output from that to know what folks are thinking that way, I tend to turn it off when ever I'm using a gallery for this type of thing.)
I *think* one of the things they're trying to address is to make the default end viewer experience *cleaner*. I've certainly heard a time or two from folks that the pages were very busy, with a lot of links all over the place. Some times you want that... other times you don't. Since this is the *default* view of smugmug for the hundreds of people that come to view images, I think they're trying to aim for that user... which is just fine by me. The more advanced users (i.e. not {my,your} {grand}parents) can switch to a view style that does what they want (like critique or journal) or get to the information through a more advanced UI (the floater).
http://wall-art.smugmug.com/
continuing my list of "oddities" from post #75 in this thread.
http://wall-art.smugmug.com/
http://www.dgrin.com/showthread.php?t=51267
Also some discussion here:
http://smugmug.jot.com/Beta
Portfolio • Workshops • Facebook • Twitter
You can set the delay:
http://smugmug.jot.com/Beta
Portfolio • Workshops • Facebook • Twitter
That feature is wonderful! I'd been thinking 1s would be perfect. Looks like I'll be able to do just that. Thanks!
Swim for Them | WellmanHouse.net | AlbumFetcher | SmugShowBuilder
wow, how did I miss that?!
http://wall-art.smugmug.com/
http://photos.mikelanestudios.com/
SmugMug API Developer
My Photos
page where you can copy the exif data.
A
My Website index | My Blog
http://photos.mikelanestudios.com/
empty space under the large photo why not have it flyout/dropdown from the
bottom into that area at least in SmugMug style?
AL
My Website index | My Blog
What you are seeing is your mouse to issue the browser back and forward commands (which we can't intercept either), which we don't intercept - but we DO have a history object that helps determine what next and back should be.
Bottom line - if you start out in a fresh browser window and go to any gallery and try to use your mouse button to go forward, you should be unable to since you have no browsing history - is this true? If not, then we do have a problem
bah, browser throbbies are so last year anyhow.
http://photos.mikelanestudios.com/
I agree with the many who would prefer to see the slide-out/pop-up go BELOW the image and not onto the image at all. Something tells me that's not possible, but...
Another thing is it would be nice to have the Slideshow option on the slide-out/pop-up thingy. I hate wasting a whole line on precious above-image and below nav-bar/banner space with just one little widget for selecting the viewing style. Real bummer. I know I can shut it off completely, but I really just want to use the smugmug viewing style with a simple option for doing a full-screen slideshow. In leui of that, I will likely just shut off the viewing option widget altogether, but I hate to do that.
Consider this 5thed, 6thed, and probably 7thed and 8thed.
For that matter, I'd like the exif info pinned below the image, in a smooth, organized slideout thing (much like the above mentioned window). Since there is space, and I really cant stand the photoshop/mac os, windows all over the place, style that the current beta exif window is set up as. I hate it when things are covered up for no reason other than it wasnt seen fit to figure out a nice organized ui. It is just mac os style clutter. Or at least it should naturally dock in one place and be movable elsewhere.
Then, they can both stay there, in an either closed or open state, and always be in the same place, especially if they arnt docked to the bottom of the image, but to the bottom of the image display block, and users can choose whether to have the tools/info open. Perhaps the tools and exif can be a sort of tabbed thing on the bottom too, much more organized and usable. With the correct visual clues that something drops down, people wont need the totally unintuitive hover interface.
(side rant to all "web 2.0" developers, apple developers, and "modern" interface developers in general: this is not how the mouse was designed, I dont expect functionality to happen when i dont provide input. mice often move without my intent, mice very rarely click without my intent)
Lastly, I noticed when images have a different vertical size, the borders around certain elements move around when you change images. That is another pet peeve of mine, when things move around when central content changes and there is really no reason for it, it is distracting.
-r
and pull elements below.
Al
My Website index | My Blog
I like the popup menu...very local.live
Loke the syplistic and clean layout
Only thing that i don't like is the fixed width...i run 1920x1200 and hate to see that wasted space
Thanks for posting, and welcome to dgrin!
Stay tuned for your empty-space problem, we are working on it.
www.ivarborst.nl & smugmug
Yep, I know how hard it is programatically, hence why I was surprised you were able to impact it in any way.
The behavior of the mouse buttons, in the beta galleries, does not match the behavior of the browser history forward/back toolbar buttons, keyboard shortcuts, or menu entries. All three of those behave *exactly* as you would expect. In current production smugmug galleries, the mouse buttons also behave exactly the same as those three options.
Recreation process:
I can reproduce this over and over... just done it twice, on two separate machines. The mouse in question is a logitech MX700 cordless optical, the logitech control panel is configured to send a keystroke for those buttons, they're configured for ⌘-← and ⌘-→ (in other words, left and right arrows, with the apple modifier). This almost explains why it's acting the way it does, as the right and left arrows are the ones you guy tap into. But it still doesn't explain why only one works.
http://wall-art.smugmug.com/
Well, there is the problem. You are not using our history object, since you have not visited anything after image 1. So it looks like your mouse forward button is set up to mimic shift+arrow right - which is our shortcut to go forward one image, instead of your forward mouse button actually forcing the browser to go forward in history. What mouse are you using?
he's using the logitech MX700 cordless optical
The new navigation arrow functionality is a vast improvement! IMHO, I would have preferred arrow-down or page-down to get to the Next Page in a gallery, but Shift + Arrow works functionally as well, so I'm a happy camper on the navigation side.
I like the simplified Comment entry format (choose between Gallery or Photo comment.)
BUT!!!!...I did discover something which I hope you'll change: the comment display format is entirely chronological, so if the last comment made was about the entire gallery, it is seen/listed first...thus pushing the PHOTO comments on a particular photo down lower in the stack...making it quite difficult to easily differentiate, or even notice, the photo comment.
Photo Comments should "trump" gallery comments on a particular photo, and all photo comments for that photo should be displayed together, and get "top billing" (still with the most recent listed first).
Kudos to doing the in-place refreshes! My suggestions, some touched on by others:
1. None of these pics in the demo have captions. An issue I have with current smugmug is the captions are too hard to notice - buried in with the other below pic info. Will they be easier to see now?
2. I'd love to see an update your slideshow feature which a) Doesn't show captions easily, b) is DOG slow on my computer. c) doesn't respect 2 line Start Bars in Windows XP (draws underneath it). FlickR smokes you on this.
3. Agree the popup shouldn't happen over the pic. Two issues with that, 1. It too easily distracts the viewer/mars image and 2. you don't know the feature is there until you mouse over the pic. Users need to see other ways to change sizes, save pics etc. without being expected to mouse over the image. I wouldn't even think to try that. I'd rather see a flyout underneath, especially one triggered by buttons/graphic indicating there are actions a user can take on the pic.
4. Does anyone use the rating feature? I don't. Just curious if they did, and if so, if 5 stars would be more useful?
5. Wish there was a large size view with thumbnails (maybe on bottom?). I find myself frequently changing image size to large and going next, next, next, since the default image size is too small (though is it bigger than before? good!)
6. Do people mostly use the thumbnails on left, pic on right view to browse pics? If so, they can't see comments (nor can I, the owner). You only see that there are x comments, and have to click to see them. Might be cool to put the comments below each pic on the right, perhaps scrolled down a bit, away from the captions?
and, you can make your own captions on your own beta site, too
Portfolio • Workshops • Facebook • Twitter
I personally like the hover/flyout in the new layout (the one that has the photo rating, the available photo size options, etc.). Some problems with it, though:
1. My 80 year old aunt will likely not even discover it.
2. If she does, "photo sizes...small, medium, large, original" won't mean anything to her. It's not abundantly clear that the "message" means "If you want to VIEW a larger/smaller version of THIS picture, click HERE". She'll think it must have something to do with ORDERING a photo of a particular size.
3. If does she manage to select the "large" viewing option, and right arrows her way to see several more, she likely will not figure out how to get back to a default viewing size or page. The flyout only shows the rating icon at this point. I eventually figured out how to get back...click on the photo or the tiny "x"...but only after accidently logging out altogether when I tried the Big "X" on the window.
I know some (programmers and computer saavvy types) will just pooh-pooh this ("Auntie ought to get a life"), but I had a bit of trouble with it myself because it wasn't obvious... and if I did, so will a lot of other people, I'm sure. Underestimating the impact on those who are intimidated by computers in the first place would be short-sighted. The direct impact on user friendliness must be a programmers nightmare...but must NEVER be the user's fault, right?