SmugMug BETA RC1 - Jan 10th, 2007

[onethumb]

UPDATED: We're now on to RC2 (http://www.dgrin.com/showthread.php?p=465748)! Check it out!

Ok, we have a new release up, and I think this one is nearly good to go. There's only one major thing I know of holding it up, so we're going to send a message to all SmugMug customers and really digest everyone's feedback.

The big new thing in this release is that our hit tracking has vastly improved. You'll now see *every* hit on *every* photo, even repeated views, so you can truly see which photos are being visited more often.

There are lots of other fixes too, all the details are over on the Beta page at the Wiki (http://smugmug.jot.com/Beta).

The great thing is that once this huge change is out the door, we can rapidly innovate on top of it once again and bring out lots of great features we have in the works. So please help us work the last of the bugs out so we can get on with making SmugMug even better. :)

Thanks!

Oh, and here are the previous threads on the Beta project for any historians in the crowd: first (http://dgrin.com/showthread.php?t=48471) and second (http://www.dgrin.com/showthread.php?p=445914).

[devbobo]

sweet...great work guys :barb

[Allen]

...
The big new thing in this release is that our hit tracking has vastly improved. You'll now see *every* hit on *every* photo, even repeated views, so you can truly see which photos are being visited more often.
...
Great new!:clap:clap:clap This part especially.
Going in to try it now.
Al

[Allen]

Looks like there's a keyword generating monster out there. I hope they're not
being generated from the caption, could be quite a mess. It even included
part of the html code.
http://atsmithbeta.beta.smugmug.net/gallery/76#2896

Al

[Andy]

There are some color fixes we are in the process of making, to some themes, with respect to the pagepicker numbers and titles. These are in the works, and will soon be applied to the http://beta.smugmug.net

Sorry for the small delay on these :D

[jfriend]

Do we have to create a new beta account and upload new photos or do the photos from our previous beta account now work with the latest beta code?

[devbobo]

Do we have to create a new beta account and upload new photos or do the photos from our previous beta account now work with the latest beta code?

your previous beta account will work fine. :thumb

[jfriend]

Will Statcounter hit counting statistics work with the new design?

[Mike Lane]

Did I notice that the thumbs of my snappy shots which aren't particularly well exposed loaded normal and then got a brightness/color fix added to them?

Maybe I'm just going mad. :crazy


I've got to say that I really like this release. Release Candidates are sooooo Web 2.5. Web 2.0 is the forever-in-beta release, you guys are really pushing the edge. Just think when you actually release it, you'll probably be web 3.0!

More praise for the team: Thanks for working so hard on something that actually makes a noticeable difference for smugmuggers. Thanks for taking feedback and turning it into gold.

I'm still testing but so far it's like butter. Not margerine. Butter. The kind that's white that your mom cooked with but tasted really good on french toast and english muffins. The kind of butter that made you look forward to having breakfast in the morning even more than your lucky charms. All I'm saying is that it's sweet, sweet deliciousness.

[scwalter]

Overall it feels faster, but the current location of the flyout thing just doesn't do it for me and I hope there is a way to permanently dock it where the old stuff used to be or revert back to the old way. When viewing standard 3:2 images in landscape with the smugmug style, there is now a huge area of wasted space below the picture, where the camera info, size picker, save photo link used to be. According to my measurements, it's about 600px x 175 px.

Would it be possible to have the flyout extend beyond the picture into this wasted area rather than over the image? Perhaps add a push-pin control that would make it sticky...even between sessions? For portrait pictures, perhaps extend it to the right or left of the picture?

-Scott

[onethumb]

Looks like there's a keyword generating monster out there. I hope they're not
being generated from the caption, could be quite a mess. It even included
part of the html code.
http://atsmithbeta.beta.smugmug.net/gallery/76#2896

Al

Keywords aren't generated from the caption, no. So either you've uncovered a bug or you're mistaking correct functionality for broken. :)

We generate keywords from 3 sources: manually added, filename extraction, and metadata (IPTC/EXIF/etc).

If that's not what you're seeing, please post more info about what you did and what happened so we can track it down.

Don

[Andy]

Will Statcounter hit counting statistics work with the new design?
Hi John, I'm on a short vacation with the family - but could you possible set up a new statcounter account and give it a try? That'd be the way to do it :thumb

[digitalpins]

wow looks great I love the hoover over the picture feature where a window pops up and you can select to see the photos info or select what size you want. Also I like being able to use the arrow keys to go through the pictures.


edited for something I noticed.....

Just noticed that where you change the style I changed it to smugmug small and now that cool hoover feature does not work... looks like it only works with the smugmug style for now..

[bwg]

wow looks great I love the hoover over the picture feature where a window pops up and you can select to see the photos info or select what size you want. Also I like being able to use the arrow keys to go through the pictures.


edited for something I noticed.....

Just noticed that where you change the style I changed it to smugmug small and now that cool hoover feature does not work... looks like it only works with the smugmug style for now..we are implementing the new features in smugmug style only at this time.

[bwg]

Overall it feels faster, but the current location of the flyout thing just doesn't do it for me and I hope there is a way to permanently dock it where the old stuff used to be or revert back to the old way. When viewing standard 3:2 images in landscape with the smugmug style, there is now a huge area of wasted space below the picture, where the camera info, size picker, save photo link used to be. According to my measurements, it's about 600px x 175 px.

Would it be possible to have the flyout extend beyond the picture into this wasted area rather than over the image? Perhaps add a push-pin control that would make it sticky...even between sessions? For portrait pictures, perhaps extend it to the right or left of the picture?

-ScottScott, the info flyout is draggable and remembers its position between sessions. Drag it where you want and it'll stay there.

[digitalpins]

Scott, the info flyout is draggable and remembers its position between sessions. Drag it where you want and it'll stay there.

thats cool but I am in safari right now and I can drag that cool info flyout

[3rdPlanetPhotography]

How do I get a beta account?

:scratch

NEVERMIND.... I found it ;)

[bwg]

thats cool but I am in safari right now and I can drag that cool info flyout:scratch You should be able to drag it. I'm misunderstanding you I think.

[digitalpins]

nope I can not drag it all..... I also tried draging it in Firefox as well on my mac

I also played around with customizing the site and that works out just fine with a quick cut and paste from my main site only thing is my header is not centering but that could be me maybe I missed something....

as of right now I cant get the bulk zoom to work in the customizing but everything else in the customizing is great... really like the updates

[3rdPlanetPhotography]

Very impressed.... I hope the new stuff gets to custom styles soon :)

[bwg]

nope I can not drag it all..... I also tried draging it in Firefox as well on my mac

I also played around with customizing the site and that works out just fine with a quick cut and paste from my main site only thing is my header is not centering but that could be me maybe I missed something....

as of right now I cant get the bulk zoom to work in the customizing but everything else in the customizing is great... really like the updatesok, before you said you CAN drag it. You're sure you're in smugmug style?

what's your beta url?

[Allen]

Keywords aren't generated from the caption, no. So either you've uncovered a bug or you're mistaking correct functionality for broken. :)

We generate keywords from 3 sources: manually added, filename extraction, and metadata (IPTC/EXIF/etc).

If that's not what you're seeing, please post more info about what you did and what happened so we can track it down.

Don The photo I referenced had garbage for a caption and no KW's. So with the
switch to the new beta, keywords magically appeared.

This was the original caption, just garbage playing around.
<center>fg afdg ardfg adfg adfg adfg adfg adfg adfg adfg</center>

New beta load with magically appearing keywords.
New keywords in edit box. (only green ones are visible after save)
<center>fg afdg ardfg adfg adfg adfg adfg adfg adfg adfg </center>
Even picked up the html text.

So you can see it picked up the complete old caption.:huh

Bad bug, bad bug. Imagine if someone has a whole paragraph of text in their
caption like they could have in Journal style.

AL

Edit: If there was already a KW it didn't pick up the caption.

[digitalpins]

ok, before you said you CAN drag it. You're sure you're in smugmug style?

what's your beta url?

my smugmug style is "smugmug & black"


now it works i get it now
sorry about that

[onethumb]

The photo I referenced had garbage for a caption and no KW's. So with the
switch to the new beta, keywords magically appeared.

This was the original caption, just garbage playing around.
<center>fg afdg ardfg adfg adfg adfg adfg adfg adfg adfg</center>

New beta load with magically appearing keywords.
New keywords in edit box. (only green ones are visible after save)
<center>fg afdg ardfg adfg adfg adfg adfg adfg adfg adfg </center>
Even picked up the html text.

So you can see it picked up the complete old caption.:huh

Bad bug, bad bug. Imagine if someone has a whole paragraph of text in their
caption like they could have in Journal style.

AL

Edit: If there was already a KW it didn't pick up the caption.

I'm sorry, Allen, but I just can't replicate this. What's more, this particular code hasn't been touched, so you'd see this behavior on the live site, too.

Can you please try again and let me know what steps you took? Are you sure you weren't using the bulk tool and accidentally added it to both caption and keywords?

Can anyone else verify this?

Don

[Allen]

I'm sorry, Allen, but I just can't replicate this. What's more, this particular code hasn't been touched, so you'd see this behavior on the live site, too.

Can you please try again and let me know what steps you took? Are you sure you weren't using the bulk tool and accidentally added it to both caption and keywords?

Can anyone else verify this?

Don
I did nuttin':D The caption on that photo with no KW's was there in
previous beta and just showed up in the new beta with the KW's.

Al

[3rdPlanetPhotography]

Where's the watermarking?
:scratch

[wellman]

Zoinks! Looks great! Anxiously awaiting the live release. :thumb

[jfriend]

Hi John, I'm on a short vacation with the family - but could you possible set up a new statcounter account and give it a try? That'd be the way to do it :thumb

Knowing a bit how the new JavaScript driven code probably works, I suspected there would be a problem with Statcounter (and probably Google Analytics too). I tried my beta account with Statcounter and it appears to record the first gallery page, but not record it when users click on a particular thumb. So, it's pretty much completely busted. I can't tell what images users are looking at anymore.

There are several different ways to install Statcounter, so in case that matters, I chose to just copy their block of code into my footer. You can see it at http://jfriend.beta.smugmug.net.

Since the whole point of the speedup is to prevent full page loads when navigating and Statcounter triggers itself on a new page load, it's likely not trivial to make StatCounter work again. A StatCounter-specific hack would be to detect it's presence and call it's Javascript trigger function each time you pseudo-load a new image without reloading the page. Probably could do the same for Google-Analytics.

[onethumb]

Knowing a bit how the new JavaScript driven code probably works, I suspected there would be a problem with Statcounter (and probably Google Analytics too). I tried my beta account with Statcounter and it appears to record the first gallery page, but not record it when users click on a particular thumb. So, it's pretty much completely busted. I can't tell what images users are looking at anymore.

There are several different ways to install Statcounter, so in case that matters, I chose to just copy their block of code into my footer. You can see it at http://jfriend.beta.smugmug.net.

Since the whole point of the speedup is to prevent full page loads when navigating and Statcounter triggers itself on a new page load, it's likely not trivial to make StatCounter work again. A StatCounter-specific hack would be to detect it's presence and call it's Javascript trigger function each time you pseudo-load a new image without reloading the page. Probably could do the same for Google-Analytics.

Let's be clear here - SmugMug's new stats tracking (in BETA) now shows you exactly how many views each photo has had.

So you lose page tracking, but you gain image tracking. That may not be enough if you're looking for actual web logs, but if you're looking for which photos get viewed the most, that's now built-in. (It wasn't before). So basically the biggest reason people use StatCounter (at least based on the feedback we've received) is now a non-issue.

I'm working on more robust page tracking to be built-in on SmugMug so Analytics and the like aren't necessary, but I'd love to hear some feedback (start another thread, maybe? Let's not pollute this thread.) on exactly what you'd like to see.

Don

[richW]

Where's the watermarking?
:scratch Watermarking is working for me. It's still in the photo tools and control panel (http://beta.smugmug.net/homepage/watermarks.mg) for me.:dunno

[devbobo]

Stats discussion has been moved to here (http://www.dgrin.com/showthread.php?t=51267)

[Ben]

:scratch You should be able to drag it. I'm misunderstanding you I think.

Pretty sure he is talking about the image pop-over, not the EXIF window. :D

[bwg]

Pretty sure he is talking about the image pop-over, not the EXIF window. :Dyeah, he got himself straightened out.

thank you for your support.

[jfriend]

Have you looked at how this new UI works on a non-broadband link?

I ran an unintentional experiment today. I was uploading 60 photos to my Smugmug account which tends to pretty much saturate my DSL connection and make it pretty darn slow for regular internet browsing. While that was going on in the background, I happened to be playing with my beta account. I thought it was completely busted and not loading new images that I selected at all and it was giving me absolutely no visual feedback. I would select a new thumb to view and "nothing" would happen.

As it turns out, something was probably happening. I think it was busy trying to pre-load a bunch of images and because a whole bunch of images were in flight already and the connection was slow, it was taking a long time to respond to a user action. In the old design, I'd get the typical browser busy signal (flying windows in IE, rotating circles in Firefox). In the new design, I see nothing. This made me wonder what happens for users on a slow connection. Does this new UI work for them at all?

At the very least, I think you would want to make some sort of progress indicator so the user can see that the app is responding to their input. You may also want to dial-back the amount of data that's inflight at once if the connection is slow (if you can figure that out) so that more bandwidth can be available to respond to the user's action.

Works fine on a normal DSL connection. Doesn't work well on a slow DSL connection which I presume means it doesn't work well on a dial-up connection.

[onethumb]

Have you looked at how this new UI works on a non-broadband link?

I ran an unintentional experiment today. I was uploading 60 photos to my Smugmug account which tends to pretty much saturate my DSL connection and make it pretty darn slow for regular internet browsing. While that was going on in the background, I happened to be playing with my beta account. I thought it was completely busted and not loading new images that I selected at all and it was giving me absolutely no visual feedback. I would select a new thumb to view and "nothing" would happen.

As it turns out, something was probably happening. I think it was busy trying to pre-load a bunch of images and because a whole bunch of images were in flight already and the connection was slow, it was taking a long time to respond to a user action. In the old design, I'd get the typical browser busy signal (flying windows in IE, rotating circles in Firefox). In the new design, I see nothing. This made me wonder what happens for users on a slow connection. Does this new UI work for them at all?

At the very least, I think you would want to make some sort of progress indicator so the user can see that the app is responding to their input. You may also want to dial-back the amount of data that's inflight at once if the connection is slow (if you can figure that out) so that more bandwidth can be available to respond to the user's action.

Works fine on a normal DSL connection. Doesn't work well on a slow DSL connection which I presume means it doesn't work well on a dial-up connection.

We've done some testing, yes. We generally reserve "lanes" of communication for clicks to take precedence, so the browser isn't totally bogged down doing something else. Precaching isn't done in such a way as to monopolize the browser's resources.

I've certainly tested using a bottlenecked broadband connection due to uploads, and it seemed fine to me. Better than fine, really.

But we'll take a closer look and make sure we didn't overlook something.

Don

[onethumb]

Made some updates and changes (http://smugmug.jot.com/Beta). Hope you like them.

We're getting close enough I can smell it... Keep the feedback coming!

Don

[Baldy]

Since the whole point of the speedup is to prevent full page loads when navigating and Statcounter triggers itself on a new page load, it's likely not trivial to make StatCounter work again. A StatCounter-specific hack would be to detect it's presence and call it's Javascript trigger function each time you pseudo-load a new image without reloading the page. Probably could do the same for Google-Analytics.:bow :bow :bow

For someone who does this as a hobby on the side, you have an amazing eye for stuff that matters.

[wellman]

Made some updates and changes (http://smugmug.jot.com/Beta). Hope you like them.

We're getting close enough I can smell it... Keep the feedback coming!

Don

At one point there had been talk about doing some mouseover goodness with the flyout - maybe underlining texty things and giving backlight to the icon things. For goodness sake don't delay the release if that's in the pipe, but I was wondering if it was in fact in the pipe. :D

[ethemoon]

The slowness was driving me crazy and now it is much more pleasurable.. now i can view a lot more photo's and see more work. I would get tired of waiting and leave the site in spurts. I also will read more comments because their there.One thing that you have not changed that is annoying is that in slide show,i have to keep checking off the fade and info boxes everytime i see a new slide show.it would be nice if it remembered.it gets repeditive.:D

p.s. I love your new update.. you will gain a lot more customers because of that. Good work.. and by the way mr. ceo... your pretty cute!

[j photog]

ok ok...i'm going to not look so smart here. so do i have to redo my account into this BETA thingy? :rolleyes

[digitalpins]

No you dont have to redo your whole site, this has nothing to do with your main site. Just create a new account through the blog link listed, its only for test any way. just upload a few images I uploaded only four and then just copy some of your customization from your site and just test to see if it works.

Thats all I did and it works just fine. The smugmug blog says its going to be deleted any way later on

[j photog]

No you dont have to redo your whole site, this has nothing to do with your main site. Just create a new account through the blog link listed, its only for test any way. just upload a few images I uploaded only four and then just copy some of your customization from your site and just test to see if it works.

Thats all I did and it works just fine. The smugmug blog says its going to be deleted any way later on

thanks digitalpins!

[corbosman]

One thing I wish one could do is limit the image size to 1 specific size. I can turn off original and large, but I cant turn off small or medium. In the old site I could use a bit of javascript to force medium size on all images. Can I do something similar in the new style? The fly-out with the image sizes makes me think it isnt...

Will it be possible to use the old style photo rank popup? Im personally not to keen on all that moving around stuff :)

Cor

[richW]

Along the same lines Allen had. http://www.dgrin.com/showpost.php?p=459448&postcount=22
Today I checked my beta site and found the captions on two images have been changed.
It looks like there is a problem with the apostrophes.
I have not done any edits on those two captions, the captions came from the image's IPTC info.
The images have been up on the beta site since December.
Problem images:
http://richw.beta.smugmug.net/gallery/32#5166
http://richw.beta.smugmug.net/gallery/32#4955

Originals:
http://photos.lmsportspix.com/gallery/1425061/1/67673891/Medium
http://photos.lmsportspix.com/gallery/1425061/1/67673066/Medium

[richW]

I just uploaded a copy of one of the problem images. I added additional caption information. This is the caption i put in the IPTC using IrfanView.
2006 Los Angeles County Peace Officer’s Memorial.
Held at the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Training Center in Whittier California. May 3, 2006.
This is a copy. Uploaded Jan. 12 at 1207hrs. Viewing on the site the apostrophe has been removed.
http://richw.beta.smugmug.net/gallery/32#6378

[3rdPlanetPhotography]

ahhh I cannot see all the features because I don't have a PRO account on the beta. I'm still a schmuck on there :D

[richW]

ahhh I cannot see all the features because I don't have a PRO account on the beta. I'm still a schmuck on there :D Go into your beta site control panel and upgrade (https://beta.smugmug.net/homepage/settings.mg?settings=upgrade)to pro. http://www.smugmug.com/help/online-picture-album

[3rdPlanetPhotography]

RichW it wants my Credit Card info. I don't think I should put my credit card information in the beta because I'm getting an invalid certificate error.

:scratch

Go into your beta site control panel and upgrade (https://beta.smugmug.net/homepage/settings.mg?settings=upgrade)to pro. http://www.smugmug.com/help/online-picture-album

[Allen]

RichW it wants my Credit Card info. I don't think I should put my credit card information in the beta because I'm getting an invalid certificate error.

:scratch I'm getting this.
Your credit card on file has expired. Please update it in your Billing settings and try again.

Maybe it don't like us midwesterners,
Al

[3rdPlanetPhotography]

Yes I have the same. Are we expected to put in our actuall CC info in the beta site?


I'm getting this.
Your credit card on file has expired. Please update it in your Billing settings and try again.
Al

[jfriend]

Various UI thoughts:
Need loading feedback. Smugmug viewing style: In cases where the L version of the image is not pre-cached yet and you click on it's thumb, you really need some sort of feedback that it's being loaded. Becuase it's JS loading it, the normal browser "loading" UI is not active. If it takes more than a second (which it can do if you're on a slow connection, you're on a busy connection or Smugmug is just not responding quickly), then you think that nothing is happening. In all the other places of the design you doing a "Loading..." animation to show the user that something is being loaded. Here, in the main UI, there is no feedback. IMO, there should be something.
Flexible number of thumbnails based on screen size. I'm hoping you are planning this for a follow-on release, but a huge benefit that I want out of the new JS-controlled UI is that you can put more thumbs on a big screen and simplify navigation/viewing a lot.
Fix info palette. The photo info palette just doesn't work for me. Because of the way you lay out the window (you center the smugmug style in the browser window), it's next to impossible for me to find a place to park the floating palette that doesn't overlap something. In fact, because of the centering, I need double the extra space on the sides to find room for it. So, the modeless benefits of it are completely lost. I'd rather have it in a separate window (like it was before) or weaved into the actual layout of the page below the photo. Per my comments on the earlier beta, a few simple graphic presentation improvements (divider lines between sections of info, combine a few pieces of info onto the same line) like this
http://jfriend.smugmug.com/photos/115439573-O.jpg
would make the info palette massively easier to scan and find info on.
Pop-up toolbar not discoverable. I still believe you should offer an icon somewhere near the large photo that invites a user to click on it which will pop up the toolbar. When a first time user sees a Smugmug screen, they will have NO idea how to change sizes, download originals or see EXIF info. They will assume that stuff can't be done. They will have to accidentally discover it. That's not generally a good UI design principle to rely on accidental discovery.
Vertical shots lay out funny. I still think that vertical shots lay out really funny in the Smugmug style. You center them left/right, but you left align the caption and keywords. These shouldn't be opposite. Pick the same for both. I'd rather see left aligned for both since I don't like the main image being moved away from the thumbs because of it's centering. But, just being consistent either way is better than the way it is now.
Page navigation glyph looks funny. The page navigation glyph (down arrow in a gray circle) just looks funny to me. I'd rather see you put it after the second number than in between the two numbers. Here you are following the discoverability recommendation of putting an icon near something that brings up a pop-up (like I recommend for the main pop-up menu over the main image). But, I just don't like it's location. Wouldn't it look a lot better visually to put it after the second number: Page 3 of 4 [[icon here]]. Also, I'd make the entire "Page x of y" space be active for the navigation popup. Why limit it to just the first number.
Need more visible keyboard focus in the thumbs. Now that you support keyboard navigation, I think you need a more visible indicator of which photo thumb has the keyboard focus. Right now it appears to be a one pixel border that changes from white to green. It's really hard to discern. If you're trying to figure out which arrow key to go to next, you often want to know where you are in the page and can't find it. The keyboard focus indication also looks the same as the state when the mouse is hovering over it so you can have two thumbs that look identical, but only one is the actual keyboard state.
Share button should do a popup window. It seems odd and kind of like an incomplete design that so many parts of the UI now bring up a sub-window that floats over the original page, but the share button takes you to a whole different page and requires you to press back to get back to where you were. I like that the themes button just pops up a little menu and you either pick the theme you want or you close that palette. I'd like the share button to do the same thing. After all the share button isn't really taking you somewhere else, it's just trying to show you info related to your current page, so it would be great to put it in a pop up window. Then, you could use Javascript to let the user click on the link they want and just copy that to the clipboard for them rather that requiring them to do Copy Link Location from their browser. Cleaner presentation, easier and quicker to use. One of your competitors has a very nice implementation of this feature similar to what I'm asking for.
Keyboard navigation can cause the pop-up toolbar to show over the main photo. Because the vertical and portrait main photos occupy different screen space, it's possible for a keyboard navigation from one orientation photo to the other to cause the mouse to suddenly be over the main photo and for the toolbar to popup and go away as you do keyboard navigation. When this happens, it feels really bizarre. One solution would be to not pop up the toolbar if the mouse is over the image when it's first shown until the mouse is actually moved above some threshold. This would keep it from popping up during keyboard navigation.
Thumbnail alignment. This may be a personal opinion thing, but I've never liked how thumbnails are aligned when you have mixed portrait and landscape thumbs. They appear to be left/right centered and top aligned in the up/down direction. This leads to a very jumbled look when you have a mix or portrait and landscape thumbs. I think they would look a lot better if they were aligned to the bottom-left corner. Then, columns would all line up on the left edge and rows would all line up on the bottom edge. You'd feel like it was a grid.
Problem in single image screen. If you are in the smugmug style and you click on the main image, it takes you to the single image viewing page. If you then click on the next arrow, it loads the next image. But, something weird is going on because it keeps the "Loading..." status up on screen long after the current image is displayed. It must be loading something else. The problem with this extra delay is you can't click next until the "Loading..." thing goes away. So, this makes do next, next, next a lot slower than it should be in the single image view. Sometimes, this delay is as long as 5 seconds after the image is fully shown (and that's on a T1 line).
No toolbar in the single image screen - missing functionality in that screen. Once you're in the single image screen, you expect to be able to access the same functions you could access in the thumbnailed Smugmug style. You expect to be able to change sizes (you can do that at the top of the screen. But, you also expect you can save the photo or see the EXIF data. You can't do either of these from this screen.That's it for now. My personality doesn't generally supply many kudos for all the things you've gotten right in this latest release, so please don't feel like all I'm doing is complaining. I'm just trying to give you as much feedback as I can so you can make it ever better than it is.

[onethumb]

Various UI thoughts:
Need loading feedback. Smugmug viewing style: In cases where the L version of the image is not pre-cached yet and you click on it's thumb, you really need some sort of feedback that it's being loaded. Becuase it's JS loading it, the normal browser "loading" UI is not active. If it takes more than a second (which it can do if you're on a slow connection, you're on a busy connection or Smugmug is just not responding quickly), then you think that nothing is happening. In all the other places of the design you doing a "Loading..." animation to show the user that something is being loaded. Here, in the main UI, there is no feedback. IMO, there should be something.
Flexible number of thumbnails based on screen size. I'm hoping you are planning this for a follow-on release, but a huge benefit that I want out of the new JS-controlled UI is that you can put more thumbs on a big screen and simplify navigation/viewing a lot.
Fix info palette. The photo info palette just doesn't work for me. Because of the way you lay out the window (you center the smugmug style in the browser window), it's next to impossible for me to find a place to park the floating palette that doesn't overlap something. In fact, because of the centering, I need double the extra space on the sides to find room for it. So, the modeless benefits of it are completely lost. I'd rather have it in a separate window (like it was before) or weaved into the actual layout of the page below the photo. Per my comments on the earlier beta, a few simple graphic presentation improvements (divider lines between sections of info, combine a few pieces of info onto the same line) like this
http://jfriend.smugmug.com/photos/115439573-O.jpg
would make the info palette massively easier to scan and find info on.
Pop-up toolbar not discoverable. I still believe you should offer an icon somewhere near the large photo that invites a user to click on it which will pop up the toolbar. When a first time user sees a Smugmug screen, they will have NO idea how to change sizes, download originals or see EXIF info. They will assume that stuff can't be done. They will have to accidentally discover it. That's not generally a good UI design principle to rely on accidental discovery.
Vertical shots lay out funny. I still think that vertical shots lay out really funny in the Smugmug style. You center them left/right, but you left align the caption and keywords. These shouldn't be opposite. Pick the same for both. I'd rather see left aligned for both since I don't like the main image being moved away from the thumbs because of it's centering. But, just being consistent either way is better than the way it is now.
Page navigation glyph looks funny. The page navigation glyph (down arrow in a gray circle) just looks funny to me. I'd rather see you put it after the second number than in between the two numbers. Here you are following the discoverability recommendation of putting an icon near something that brings up a pop-up (like I recommend for the main pop-up menu over the main image). But, I just don't like it's location. Wouldn't it look a lot better visually to put it after the second number: Page 3 of 4 [[icon here]]. Also, I'd make the entire "Page x of y" space be active for the navigation popup. Why limit it to just the first number.
Need more visible keyboard focus in the thumbs. Now that you support keyboard navigation, I think you need a more visible indicator of which photo thumb has the keyboard focus. Right now it appears to be a one pixel border that changes from white to green. It's really hard to discern. If you're trying to figure out which arrow key to go to next, you often want to know where you are in the page and can't find it. The keyboard focus indication also looks the same as the state when the mouse is hovering over it so you can have two thumbs that look identical, but only one is the actual keyboard state.
Share button should do a popup window. It seems odd and kind of like an incomplete design that so many parts of the UI now bring up a sub-window that floats over the original page, but the share button takes you to a whole different page and requires you to press back to get back to where you were. I like that the themes button just pops up a little menu and you either pick the theme you want or you close that palette. I'd like the share button to do the same thing. After all the share button isn't really taking you somewhere else, it's just trying to show you info related to your current page, so it would be great to put it in a pop up window. Then, you could use Javascript to let the user click on the link they want and just copy that to the clipboard for them rather that requiring them to do Copy Link Location from their browser. Cleaner presentation, easier and quicker to use. One of your competitors has a very nice implementation of this feature similar to what I'm asking for.
Keyboard navigation can cause the pop-up toolbar to show over the main photo. Because the vertical and portrait main photos occupy different screen space, it's possible for a keyboard navigation from one orientation photo to the other to cause the mouse to suddenly be over the main photo and for the toolbar to popup and go away as you do keyboard navigation. When this happens, it feels really bizarre. One solution would be to not pop up the toolbar if the mouse is over the image when it's first shown until the mouse is actually moved above some threshold. This would keep it from popping up during keyboard navigation.
Thumbnail alignment. This may be a personal opinion thing, but I've never liked how thumbnails are aligned when you have mixed portrait and landscape thumbs. They appear to be left/right centered and top aligned in the up/down direction. This leads to a very jumbled look when you have a mix or portrait and landscape thumbs. I think they would look a lot better if they were aligned to the bottom-left corner. Then, columns would all line up on the left edge and rows would all line up on the bottom edge. You'd feel like it was a grid.
Problem in single image screen. If you are in the smugmug style and you click on the main image, it takes you to the single image viewing page. If you then click on the next arrow, it loads the next image. But, something weird is going on because it keeps the "Loading..." status up on screen long after the current image is displayed. It must be loading something else. The problem with this extra delay is you can't click next until the "Loading..." thing goes away. So, this makes do next, next, next a lot slower than it should be in the single image view. Sometimes, this delay is as long as 5 seconds after the image is fully shown (and that's on a T1 line).
No toolbar in the single image screen - missing functionality in that screen. Once you're in the single image screen, you expect to be able to access the same functions you could access in the thumbnailed Smugmug style. You expect to be able to change sizes (you can do that at the top of the screen. But, you also expect you can save the photo or see the EXIF data. You can't do either of these from this screen.That's it for now. My personality doesn't generally supply many kudos for all the things you've gotten right in this latest release, so please don't feel like all I'm doing is complaining. I'm just trying to give you as much feedback as I can so you can make it ever better than it is.

This continues to be like gold.

Many of these are scheduled for future releases. We like to release-early-release-often and we're upset, internally, over how long it's taken to get this far.

Look for more shortly after release.

Don

[Aussieroo]

I have skimmed all these replies and not seen any comments on this but if there have been and I have missed please forgive me for the repetition.

Is there any upgrade to the Comments and notification section being made. 2 things come to mind. When leaving a comment under an individual photo they seem to stay under any photo regardless of which one you are looking at making it confusing which photo is being refered to. And secondly when one leaves a comment on another persons gallery, when the owner replies you have no idea they have made a reply and youy need to remember which photo it was and continue to return in case a reply requires a further reply. Are you planning on making it possible for email notifications to be sent when an owner relies to one of your comments on their galleries?

Otherwise I love the pre-loading and speed and other things seemed to have been covered by everyone elses comments. Thanks for your efforts looking good for the future.

[dem]

I dislike how choosing "Large" from the flyout just pops up lightbox now. I preferred the previous behavior where you could still see the rest of the gallery page and associated links, controls, and info (like keywords, purchase, share, map, next page, etc.).

[Andy]

I dislike how choosing "Large" from the flyout just pops up lightbox now. I preferred the previous behavior where you could still see the rest of the gallery page and associated links, controls, and info (like keywords, purchase, share, map, next page, etc.).You can, just do it from any of the other viewing styles :deal

[GREAPER]

I do not want to see my site adjusting the number of thumbs on the page based on screen size.

I dont know about anyone else, but I have clients tell me all the time that they like the second one on the third page. They do this even when I make the file name the caption. If they have a different number of thumbs per page than I do, I will have a pretty rough time of it. Just my thoughts.

Also on the medium sized image, the mouseover window shows a "Save this image" option. I certainly hope I will be able to turn that OFF.

[jfriend]

I do not want to see my site adjusting the number of thumbs on the page based on screen size.

I dont know about anyone else, but I have clients tell me all the time that they like the second one on the third page. They do this even when I make the file name the caption. If they have a different number of thumbs per page than I do, I will have a pretty rough time of it. Just my thoughts.

Also on the medium sized image, the mouseover window shows a "Save this image" option. I certainly hope I will be able to turn that OFF.

I also have people describe images by position. Rather than handicap everyone's viewing experience to solve this problem, I wish each thumbnail could have a tiny little number somehow by it that made it easier for viewers to refer to it. Maybe the number only shows when the mouse is over that thumb. I haven't thought about how you'd present it. If they could tell me "I want image number 14 in the waterskiing gallery", that would be a whole lot better for everyone than the third one on the fourth page and would allow for the dynamic viewing that is really useful to all viewers.

"Save this image" always saves the original, not the medium no matter what size you are viewing. That's the same as the "Save Photo" link did in the old design. If you disable access to originals, it makes the "save" function go away completely.

[Andy]

Also on the medium sized image, the mouseover window shows a "Save this image" option. I certainly hope I will be able to turn that OFF.
Did you make your own site on beta? You can then turn this off, in gallery customization, just like on the live site :deal

[3rdPlanetPhotography]

Do we have to put our CC info in the beta site to get a pro account? I was just leary of CC info on a beta site.

:thumb

Yes I have the same. Are we expected to put in our actuall CC info in the beta site?

[Matthew Saville]

Hmm, the little pop-out info stuff kinda smells like Zenfolio. Personally, I'm not a fan of things happening without clicking. Sometimes it's annoying. But I'm sure I'm quite alone on this, so I'll learn to love it.

Other than that, yes please do make a "loading" thingie to let people know that their image is on the way. I LOVE how the page doesn't refresh, whether or not it's faster I can't tell but it annoyd the heck out of me to have to scroll back down each time I clicked on a new image in Smugmug style. In fact I requested that pages not fully re-load about a year ago. It's so nice to see the continued work you guys put into this site! I swear, after each release I think to myself, "wow, it can't possibly get any better than this, Don and family must just be kicking back and letting the income roll..." ...and then you go and make it even more perfect.

Thanks guys, keep up the good work. I recommend Smugmug to everyone I know, it is the best service on the market. Now all I need is panoramic prints and finishing services, then my life will be complete...

-Matt-

[Andy]

Do we have to put our CC info in the beta site to get a pro account? I was just leary of CC info on a beta site.

:thumbYou do not.

[Andy]

Do we have to put our CC info in the beta site to get a pro account? I was just leary of CC info on a beta site.

:thumbyours is a pro account now.

[nalvarez]

Are there any plans to add larger standard viewing sizes? I'm often left wanting to view my images or other's images in a size that's slightly larger than the current "large" but smaller than the "full screen" size. A size like
6"X9" would be a great viewing size!! Currently L size is about 6 1/2 X 4 1/2". thanks!

[{JT}]

If you look at your original caption, you will notice that the apostrophe is really a non-ascii character (you probably wrote the caption in Word or another editor). HTML does not like non-ascii characters and can do strange things in browsers.

I just uploaded a copy of one of the problem images. I added additional caption information. This is the caption i put in the IPTC using IrfanView.
Viewing on the site the apostrophe has been removed.
http://richw.beta.smugmug.net/gallery/32#6378

[Allen]

If you look at your original caption, you will notice that the apostrophe is really a non-ascii character (you probably wrote the caption in Word or another editor). HTML does not like non-ascii characters and can do strange things in browsers.
Good reason for word > notepad > smug :D
Al

[richW]

If you look at your original caption, you will notice that the apostrophe is really a non-ascii character (you probably wrote the caption in Word or another editor). HTML does not like non-ascii characters and can do strange things in browsers.

Thanks JT...

[rdlugosz]

looks great!

[jerryr]

Hi - combined it a bunch of code on my beta site (was primarily concerned about the customized javascript I have for drop-downs, paypal, etc..) and everything is functioning great - good work team !!! (I will test a little more of course)

:) jr

[FAU4U]

There are some color fixes we are in the process of making, to some themes, with respect to the pagepicker numbers and titles. These are in the works, and will soon be applied to the http://beta.smugmug.net

Sorry for the small delay on these :D


Hi ANdy,

1). OK, so what is the ID and password, I see the squeaky, but dont see the Pw...

2). What is the anticipated rollout date?

3). My biggest gripe with this wonderful Smugmug image engine, is the size of the thumbnails, they need to be 150pixel quares , not 100 pixels. When the design was originaly done screen resolutions were mostly 800 -1000 pixels, now screesn are growing the the thumbs are a bit too small.. or have a large thumb choice for the standard Smugmug 15 image screen...
And the large is not quite large enough to fill the screen, without pixelation when one choosed the slide-show.

4). For the monthly Statistics, I Wish there was a table view, with rows and columns, of the monthly statistics rather than just the graphs... and being to drill down to the image statistics.;

Happy new year and great job.

We average over 600,000 page hits a month from 120 countries, and we get a log of great comments on www.416-1100.com so there is no big complaints.

JimW

[Andy]

Hi ANdy,

1). OK, so what is the ID and password, I see the squeaky, but dont see the Pw...
Look in your control panel, system messages from us on your SmugMug site, there is a username and password there for you to use :deal

[3rdPlanetPhotography]

Thanks boss... it said my CC info was invalid before. I'll go play now.


yours is a pro account now.

[brjphoto]

When is the expected roll-out date? Are we talking days, weeks, or months? Just wondering because I was going to create a page to help my clients navigate their galleries, but if the interface is going to change this week, I don't want to invest too much time. If the interface change is still weeks/months away, then I will go ahead and get to work.

That being said, I like it. Some of the other users have made good comments, so I will just wait in anticipation.

Thanks.

[kriyababaji]

The only thing i would add if someone hasn't already mentioned it would be to have the up and down arrow keys move you vertically through the gallery of images instead of only left or right.

thanks for you commitment to us.

shane mcdermott

[devbobo]

When is the expected roll-out date? Are we talking days, weeks, or months? Just wondering because I was going to create a page to help my clients navigate their galleries, but if the interface is going to change this week, I don't want to invest too much time. If the interface change is still weeks/months away, then I will go ahead and get to work.

That being said, I like it. Some of the other users have made good comments, so I will just wait in anticipation.

Thanks.

I can't speak for smugmug, but i suggest that you might want to wait.

[cabbey]

five observations:

comment pages are broken currently. Any gallery with more than one page of comments seems to re-render the first page worth of comments for all pages. But it still truncates the last page at the right number.
photo information dialog seems rough, unpolished. Clearly a fair amount of polish went into the new design, especially the fading in/out of images (could a cross fade be done to speed it up?) however the photo details box doesn't seem to have gotten much loving, especially in the code that resizes it when the amount of photo details change. After it slid on screen, I expected it to grow/shrink to accomidate the new content. (grow before the content changes, shrink after it changes.) Instead it just pops to the new size. You can actually catch it rendering the new text over the top of the new photo, before it paints the background larger currently... kinda funny if your a nerd like me, kinda looks tacky to others (so says the wife).
no platform dependent icons!!! Can we please get rid of the windows XP theme'd "close" icon on the photobox? the smugmug theme'd lightbox version with [X] is just perfect.
photo info box sometimes gets weird position. As near as I can tell, this happens sometimes when you change BACK to a smugmug tab from another tab, and the top of the image is scrolled off the top of the page. I've been able to do this twice now, first time I thought I was hallucinating. It stays there as you scroll around the page too:
http://cabbey.smugmug.com/photos/123150942-S.jpg (http://cabbey.smugmug.com/photos/123150942-O.jpg)
popup is inconsistent when using arrow navigation. If I use the arrow keys to move between photos (smashing good idea!) and happen to have left my cursor in the image area, then it disappears when I start navigating through the images, BUT it's position must somehow still matter, as the pop up photo controls continually pop into and out of place as I go from image to image. Perhaps, like the photo info box, they could just STAY there while replacing images under it? (and if you happen to have left your mouse just at the BOTTOM edge of a tall image, then navigate into a shorter image with the keys, it seems to go away for good, only to return when you navigate into a taller image... leaving you to wonder what the key is that some images get it and others don't.... very confusing until I figured that bit out!)

[RichS]

Are there any plans to add larger standard viewing sizes? I'm often left wanting to view my images or other's images in a size that's slightly larger than the current "large" but smaller than the "full screen" size. A size like
6"X9" would be a great viewing size!! Currently L size is about 6 1/2 X 4 1/2". thanks!

I have the same comment. On a 1680x1050 20" monitor a portrait image takes up less than 10% of the screen real estate. All of the thumbnails, controls, images, etc. together take up about 1/2 the available viewing area.

And I think I still much prefer having the size, exif, save, etc. functions under the image, instead of popping it up over and obscuring 15-20% of the image, often accidentally. Can it fly out to the right of the image? Or below it?

[Andy]

I have the same comment. On a 1680x1050 20" monitor a portrait image takes up less than 10% of the screen real estate. All of the thumbnails, controls, images, etc. together take up about 1/2 the available viewing area.
We'll get there :deal

http://www.dgrin.com/showthread.php?t=32241
Add your voice to that thread.

:wave welcome!

[FAU4U]

[
I have to agree with the present postings, the pixel dimensions of T, S, M, L need updating, as monitor resolutions have increased dramatically since these sizes were decided yearws ago. And since there is an overhaul in process, may as well get on with this too. :deal

For example:

Change Sm Thumbs from 100pix to 150pix
Change Thumbs from 150pix to 250pix
Change Small from 300pix to 500pix
Change Medium from 450pix to 650pix
Change Large from 600pix to 800pix
Create a new XLarge at 1200pix

JimW


quote=Andy]We'll get there :deal

http://www.dgrin.com/showthread.php?t=32241
Add your voice to that thread.

:wave welcome![/quote]

[devbobo]

Hey Guys,

I am almost positive that I bugged this in one of the previous threads.

If you are using 'useLightbox = false;' in customisation, if you click the main image the browser attempts to open a new window to display the image...however, if you have a popup blocker the window fails to open.

Firebug reports...

smugmug-200701112... (line 870)
10:15:18 AM (20ms): global: newWin has no properties (http://devbobo.beta.smugmug.net/include/js/smugmug-20070111215919.js, line 870)
newWin has no properties
[Break on this error] newWin.focus();

But the major problem is that SM continues to attempt to open the window constantly.

Check it out in this gallery (http://devbobo.beta.smugmug.net/gallery/61).

Cheers,

David

[wellman]

I'm guessing you guys would have rather spent the night toasting your new successes on the beta stuff than fussing with silly old hardware, so I'll help you out.

The new auto-resizing smugmug and the spinny circle thing ROCK! I'm thinking this feature will come in mighty handy when SmugMug XL is released. :D

Question... Will there be such thing as "smugmug small" anymore, or will there just be one auto-resizing smugmug?

Great work again, guys. Anxiously awaiting the rollout!
-Greg

[Andy]

The new auto-resizing smugmug and the spinny circle thing ROCK! I'm thinking this feature will come in mighty handy when SmugMug XL is released. :D
:nod indeed :nod

Question... Will there be such thing as "smugmug small" anymore,
No
or will there just be one auto-resizing smugmug? Yes.


Great work again, guys. Anxiously awaiting the rollout!
-Greg:thumb me too. Sorry for the short replies, I was up late with JT working out a few kinks on this feature and now I gotta pack and head back to NYC - vacation over :cry

[wellman]

Sorry for the short replies, I was up late with JT working out a few kinks on this feature and now I gotta pack and head back to NYC - vacation over :cry

No worries - safe travels.

[devbobo]

The new auto-resizing smugmug and the spinny circle thing ROCK! I'm thinking this feature will come in mighty handy when SmugMug XL is released. :D

WOW !!!! i missed this earlier ...sweet as :clap:clap:clap:clap:clap:clap

Question... Will there be such thing as "smugmug small" anymore, or will there just be one auto-resizing smugmug?


I reckon "smugmug small" may still be a possibility since it has a different number of thumbnails...but I could be wrong :dunno

[Andy]

WOW !!!! i missed this earlier ...sweet as :clap:clap:clap:clap:clap:clap


Yeah, JT rocks. JT's got a javascript variable, too, so that if a power or pro customer, designs the page to be smugmug-wide, and insists on having 15 thumbs and medium main image all the time, then you can override the shift to 9 thumbs and small main image. I just don't know the variable, JT will post it later.

[Mike Lane]

Question... Will there be such thing as "smugmug small" anymore,

No

In a sense there is ... at least right now ... though right? When you resize to a small screen you get an ajaxified loading of the smugmug small gallery style complete with the smugmug_small body tag class and all. That's good, very good!

[sskoutas]

No you dont have to redo your whole site, this has nothing to do with your main site. Just create a new account through the blog link listed, its only for test any way. just upload a few images I uploaded only four and then just copy some of your customization from your site and just test to see if it works.

Thats all I did and it works just fine. The smugmug blog says its going to be deleted any way later on
OK, I'll ask. I'm new to smugmug and therefore have not been through an upgrade before. When this goes live, it will be affecting the smugmug style, right? Does that mean that I've got to re-code all of the customization that's on my current site when the beta goes live?

[bwg]

OK, I'll ask. I'm new to smugmug and therefore have not been through an upgrade before. When this goes live, it will be affecting the smugmug style, right? Does that mean that I've got to re-code all of the customization that's on my current site when the beta goes live?We've done our best to make sure this is not the case, but your best bet is to get yourself a beta account and make sure. Go to your control panel and check your system messages, all the info for setting up a beta account is in there.

I have fairly extensive customization on my site and when I tested it out on the beta site everything worked perfectly. I have yet to hear from anyone who had to make any changes to their site because of the new features.

[dmc]

I've been quiet for a while...

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?)

hopefully you are considering adding some features to the journal style... it, already has "pre-fetching" and I can zoom through my pics way faster than clicking on each thumbnail one at a time (ok,ok, you can use the arrow keys too)... it truely is the easiest way to view lots of pics (in my opinion of course.. :wink) I've already added features (ie Journal Large) to my journal style via customization, so it can't be that hard for you guys to improve it...

-option to add comments for a pic
-option to show comments
-option to adjust how many pics per page (not just 10)
-option to select what size pics to display
-option to display selected exif info
-check box to select pics while viewing so I can order prints of those selected.

since you have the beta site going, why not add some cool stuff for us Journal users.... please???

[sskoutas]

We've done our best to make sure this is not the case, but your best bet is to get yourself a beta account and make sure. Go to your control panel and check your system messages, all the info for setting up a beta account is in there.

I have fairly extensive customization on my site and when I tested it out on the beta site everything worked perfectly. I have yet to hear from anyone who had to make any changes to their site because of the new features.
I love being the newbie that everyone can laugh at :barb

OK. I've set up my beta and so far I've only uploaded one image. That then creates a web page that looks exactly like my page did on the first day I came to smugmug. I guess what I'm asking is, do I (or will I) have to re-upload all of my banners, graphics, and images to the beta when it goes live; will I have to recreate my gallery structure; will I have to reload all of my images; [EDIT] will I have to re-key my customization in CSS / javascript etc, and repoint to new image names where applicable?

I doubt it, because I think someone else would have already said something, but I just want to make sure.

Thanks in advance.

[sskoutas]

OK, aside from my more important (for me) questions above, here are my first thoughts:
1.) If you're going to keep the mouse-over pop-up in place, I think the options that pop-up at gallery level (rate, S, M, L, O, info, and save) should also be available as a mouse-over pop up once the user selects S, M, L, or O. Say you pick "S" and it's TOO small... then you've got to close it and pick a larger size from the underlying screen.
2.) I'd LOVE it if the EXIF information could be selected and copied.

That's all I've got so far, but I've only seen the beta for 37 seconds.

[wellman]

I love being the newbie that everyone can laugh at :barb

OK. I've set up my beta and so far I've only uploaded one image. That then creates a web page that looks exactly like my page did on the first day I came to smugmug. I guess what I'm asking is, do I (or will I) have to re-upload all of my banners, graphics, and images to the beta when it goes live; will I have to recreate my gallery structure; will I have to reload all of my images; [EDIT] will I have to re-key my customization in CSS / javascript etc, and repoint to new image names where applicable?

I doubt it, because I think someone else would have already said something, but I just want to make sure.

Thanks in advance.

When SmugMug pushes the beta stuff to the live site, everything will be seamless. You're site will (as Mike Lane says) automagically get all the new functionality. It's technically not a matter of your images being "redone." It's all about how SmugMug's front end displays all your images, which are in its backend databases. Hope that's a little clearer than mud.

As for your customization, it should still work fine. Everything I've heard as that people are having no issues. If you want to be sure, try out your site's customization on your beta account.
-Greg

[wellman]

I love being the newbie that everyone can laugh at :barb


That was me a year ago. I know the feeling. :D

[sskoutas]

Hope that's a little clearer than mud.
-Greg

It is, and I thank you very much!

[RichS]

I've been quiet for a while...

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?)

Ditto. And ditto.

[cabbey]

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?

[cabbey]

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).

[cabbey]

continuing my list of "oddities" from post #75 (http://dgrin.com/showthread.php?p=461586#post461586) 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 :thumb ). But the "backward" navigation button is now dead in the galleries. :huh so you're somehow intercepting it, but not acting on it. :scratch this has gotta be a bug....

[Andy]

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://www.dgrin.com/showthread.php?t=51267

Also some discussion here:
http://smugmug.jot.com/Beta

[Andy]

I've been quiet for a while...

please have an option to have the flyouts NOT appear on top of my pic...

You can set the delay:
http://smugmug.jot.com/Beta

[wellman]

You can set the delay:
http://smugmug.jot.com/Beta

That feature is wonderful! I'd been thinking 1s would be perfect. Looks like I'll be able to do just that. Thanks!:thumb

[cabbey]

http://www.dgrin.com/showthread.php?t=51267

wow, how did I miss that?! :dunno thanks Andy! (and where's my emoticon with the white cane and Ray Charles glasses when I need it??)

[Mike Lane]

You guys have probably already seen this but there is apparently a way to make ajax set the browser throbber to ... um ... throbbing status (http://sandbox.sourcelabs.com/wikiality/throbber).


:lol3 I just said throbbing

[devbobo]

:lol3 I just said throbbing


:lol3 :lol3 :lol3

[Allen]

...
2.) I'd LOVE it if the EXIF information could be selected and copied ....
On the popup click the Photo Details in the upper left corner and it'll open a
page where you can copy the exif data.
A

[Mike Lane]

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.

[Allen]

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

[{JT}]

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 (http://dgrin.com/showthread.php?p=461586#post461586) 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 :thumb ). But the "backward" navigation button is now dead in the galleries. :huh so you're somehow intercepting it, but not acting on it. :scratch this has gotta be a bug....

[{JT}]

Saw it, does not work in Safari :( Plus, adding and removig iframes is a pain ITA with IE and causes stability problems.

You guys have probably already seen this but there is apparently a way to make ajax set the browser throbber to ... um ... throbbing status (http://sandbox.sourcelabs.com/wikiality/throbber).


:lol3 I just said throbbing

[Mike Lane]

Saw it, does not work in Safari :( Plus, adding and removig iframes is a pain ITA with IE and causes stability problems.What, problems w/ safari & IE. Say it ain't so. :huh

bah, browser throbbies are so last year anyhow.

[EZRyder]

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.

[renstar]

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.

-r

[Allen]

...
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

[bronwenz]

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

[ivar]

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 spaceHi Bronz,

Thanks for posting, and welcome to dgrin! :wave

Stay tuned for your empty-space problem, we are working on it (http://www.dgrin.com/showthread.php?t=32241).

[cabbey]

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)
paste in url to smugmug beta gallery: http://beta.smugmug.net/popular/Photography/2/5406#4347
login with beta server userid / password
see image 1
click forward button on mouse
see image move to next image, image 2
click backward button on mouse
see nothing happen
click browser back toolbar button
see previous image, image 1
click browser forward toolbar button
see image 2 again
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.

[{JT}]

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?

[bwg]

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.

he's using the logitech MX700 cordless optical

[papajay]

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).

[bmilner]

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?

[Andy]

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?
http://ajw.beta.smugmug.net/gallery/24#881
and, you can make your own captions on your own beta site, too :thumb

[papajay]

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?

[pmaland]

Originally Posted by EZRyder
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.


And 9thed. I haven't seen anyone from smugmug comment on this, so despite all of the negatives, I'm guessing it's not going to change. Perhaps a poll should be set up so it's obvious how few people like the popup on top of the image.

- Phil

[papajay]

NICE!!!

The only "option", however, is to save (download) a full resolution copy of the original (a 2MB, 3MB, +++ file, perhaps). When selecting the "Save Photo" folder, would optionally offering one or two smaller file size (and therefore lower resolution) images be problematic?

[Andy]

NICE!!!

The only "option", however, is to save (download) a full resolution copy of the original (a 2MB, 3MB, +++ file, perhaps). When selecting the "Save Photo" folder, would optionally offering one or two smaller file size (and therefore lower resolution) images be problematic?
Papa, you can just allow people to drag the -L size to their desk top if you wish.

[Andy]

And 9thed. I haven't seen anyone from smugmug comment on this, so despite all of the negatives, I'm guessing it's not going to change. Perhaps a poll should be set up so it's obvious how few people like the popup on top of the image.

- PhilHi, it's not changing with this release, but we surely thank everyone for their comments!

[renstar]

it's not changing with this release

OK, then in the future, maybe a way to have its location and orientation customizable then?

[Mike Lane]

And 9thed. I haven't seen anyone from smugmug comment on this, so despite all of the negatives, I'm guessing it's not going to change. Perhaps a poll should be set up so it's obvious how few people like the popup on top of the image.

- PhilI for one do like the pop up to be on top of the image.

[DJ-S1]

And 9thed. I haven't seen anyone from smugmug comment on this, so despite all of the negatives, I'm guessing it's not going to change. Perhaps a poll should be set up so it's obvious how few people like the popup on top of the image.

- Phil
Can you be more sarcastic or condescending, please? Perhaps if you hold your breath you'll get this small item changed to your liking. Unless - heaven forbid - TEN people then complain that they liked it the other way! Then Smugmug would be FORCED to change it back - after all, TEN PEOPLE voiced their displeasure!

Come on guys, lighten up. Seriously, if it's that bad move on to Flicker or something. The fact that Smugmug even asks for user opinion speaks volumes. Do we have to savage them over every little nit?

sorry if this comes off too harsh, I'm not in my happy place at the moment...

[papajay]

Papa, you can just allow people to drag the -L size to their desk top if you wish.

Thanks...learn sumthin gnu every day!

[DavidTO]

Hey, I know it's not changing anytime soon, but I put my vote in for leaving the flyout just as it is. I think it's very clear the way it is. The flyout and the photo are linked in a way that no one could misunderstand. THESE actions apply to THIS photo. Perfect. You don't want it in the way of the photo? Then move your fat fingers and get the cursor out of the way. Just my opinion.

[wellman]

I for one do like the pop up to be on top of the image.

:nod Me too.

[jfriend]

Hey, I know it's not changing anytime soon, but I put my vote in for leaving the flyout just as it is. I think it's very clear the way it is. The flyout and the photo are linked in a way that no one could misunderstand. THESE actions apply to THIS photo. Perfect. You don't want it in the way of the photo? Then move your fat fingers and get the cursor out of the way. Just my opinion.

I like the functionality and have no problem with it appearing over the photo. My concerns are:

How do people discover it? There are zero visual cues that it exists. You HAVE to discover it by accident. That is not what any UI design wants for first time users. I have suggested some sort of icon that invites you to click it which helps you discover it.
I don't like it popping up when I didn't move the mouse and interfering with my view. Because of screen layout changes when you go from vertical to horizontal photos, it's possible for keyboard navigation to cause the flyout to be up, then down, then up as you navigate with the keyboard if the mouse in in an unlucky location. I've suggested that it ONLY pop-up if the mouse actually moves some minimum threshold, just when a photo displays under the mouse and that would fix this problem. Not a high priority issue, but annoying when it does occur.
I agree with one of the earlier posters, that you might as well add a few more words in the flyout to make it "View a different photo size" so it's completely obvious what that means. And, while you're at it, you should probably make it more obvious how to get back to the original view after selecting one of those other sizes. I know there's an "X" in that view, but it could be made more obvious (larger or perhaps just use the words "return to main view" since there's plenty of space).
I'd like to see it NOT pop-up when I move the mouse across the image, but don't stop on the image. If you only popped it up when the mouse was over the image and was not still moving rapidly across the image, it wouldn't be visually distracting when you're just moving the mouse over to the scroll bar or some similar destination.
UI nit question. Is there a reason that the pop-up tray doesn't animate out with the items already in the tray so it looks like a fully formed tray is sliding out? Instead it slides out empty, appears to bounce a bit, then fills in the contents of the tray. I think I'd prefer to see it slide out with the contents already in it.

[onethumb]

We're doing a major internal round of testing, pretty much the entire company, right now and for the rest of the day.

If you'd like to join in and help us out, you can find us on SmugChat (http://smugmug.jot.com/SmugChat).

I imagine we'll be there all night. :)

Don

[pmaland]

Can you be more sarcastic or condescending, please? Perhaps if you hold your breath you'll get this small item changed to your liking. Unless - heaven forbid - TEN people then complain that they liked it the other way! Then Smugmug would be FORCED to change it back - after all, TEN PEOPLE voiced their displeasure!

Come on guys, lighten up. Seriously, if it's that bad move on to Flicker or something. The fact that Smugmug even asks for user opinion speaks volumes. Do we have to savage them over every little nit?

sorry if this comes off too harsh, I'm not in my happy place at the moment...

Read through the gallery comments here:

http://hotness.beta.smugmug.net/gallery/243#5909

You'll see a bunch more complaints about the popup over the image. I just don't get why it has to appear OVER THE IMAGE I'M TRYING TO LOOK AT. There's tons of black emptyness below it... it can popup to the left over the thumbnails I'm not interested in at the moment... plenty of people saying the same thing as me.

[Mike Lane]

Read through the gallery comments here:

http://hotness.beta.smugmug.net/gallery/243#5909

You'll see a bunch more complaints about the popup over the image. I just don't get why it has to appear OVER THE IMAGE I'M TRYING TO LOOK AT. There's tons of black emptyness below it... it can popup to the left over the thumbnails I'm not interested in at the moment... plenty of people saying the same thing as me.Well once it goes live I'm quite certain don and the boys & girls will be getting tons of feedback that you're not even aware of that will let them know for certain if the pop up should go over or not. And obviously SM has shown their willingness to listen to and act upon the opinions of its users. So between now and the time the ultimate decision is made, you'll just have to get used to it. :deal

[DonovanJ]

Just wanted to say "Thank you, thank you, thank you!" for the changes in the site. I honestly can't wait!!

For the complainers.... As far as the "pop-up" over the pic goes -- they aren't going to see it unless they mouse over it, trying to see if they can do something to the pic anyway - like right-click save it.

And to all those who keep talking about "wasted space" beneath their pics.... well, I shoot 99% portrait, so there IS NO space beneath the pic, but tons of it to the right, so don't go making generalizations.



(Although in a future release, maybe the position COULD be customizable, or based on screen resolution or something.....)


Thanks again for all the hard work!!

Donovan

[DJ-S1]

Read through the gallery comments here:

http://hotness.beta.smugmug.net/gallery/243#5909

You'll see a bunch more complaints about the popup over the image. I just don't get why it has to appear OVER THE IMAGE I'M TRYING TO LOOK AT. There's tons of black emptyness below it... it can popup to the left over the thumbnails I'm not interested in at the moment... plenty of people saying the same thing as me.
As I said, I was in a bad mood and something in my perception of your tone set me off. I heard it something like "hey, 9 of us don't like this but since you haven't answered our concerns you must be dismissing us. Let's take a large vote so you can see that I am right and there are thousands of us upset about this." I realize that is entirely my own interpretation of your typewritten words (meaning no tone of voice is available for me to factor into my interpretation of your intent).

So, as I said before, sorry to come off harsh.

Moving on, I disagree with your preference to have it pop over the thumbs. I use the thumbs to determine which ones I want to see bigger, so this would be a major pain for me. I just don't mouse over the big photo when I am looking at it. My personal preference would be a flyout that stays hidden unless you click a little arrowed pane on the side of the image. But I know why that is not a good solution for the masses, so I can deal with things as they are.

[papajay]

I like the functionality and have no problem with it appearing over the photo. My concerns are:
How do people discover it? There are zero visual cues that it exists. You HAVE to discover it by accident. That is not what any UI design wants for first time users....
I agree with one of the earlier posters, that you might as well add a few more words in the flyout to make it "View a different photo size" so it's completely obvious what that means. And, while you're at it, you should probably make it more obvious how to get back to the original view after selecting one of those other sizes. I know there's an "X" in that view, but it could be made more obvious (larger or perhaps just use the words "return to main view" since there's plenty of space).


And the earlier poster thanks you for coming out publicly and agreeing! For those who eat, sleep and otherwise deal with all this wonderful technology on a daily basis, of course it's "easy" to understand and it's "completely clear". But the rest of us appreciate plain English instead of icons ad-nauseum or space-saving jargon that doesn't make things entirely clear. Using "return to main view" is pretty darn clear. Big or small, though, an "x" is still, well....just an "x".

Am I happy about the improvements?...YES, very! Are there legitimate points of constructive criticism? YES, definitely...and non-geek users provide some useful criticism because they're not all tied-up in love with the technology for technology's sake. I'm glad Smugmug provides an opportunity to present feedback before locking-in something that's potentially easy to change pre-launch. It often seems more problematic to change post launch.

[Andy]

It often seems more problematic to change post launch. Not always true :D

We puked badly when we first launched lighbox a year ago. We changed it dramatically after a lot of customer feedback.

[papajay]

Originally Posted by papajay
It often seems more problematic to change post launch.

I meant "genericly", not so much Smugmug-specific.


Not always true :D

We puked badly when we first launched lighbox a year ago. We changed it dramatically after a lot of customer feedback.


Another reason why Smugmug has so many loyal customers...your customer feedback system is about as "public" as it gets through Dgrin. It takes some guts to open the doors to criticism, to accept responsibility , and to do something about it when warranted, all in a public forum. :bow

[Andy]

Originally Posted by papajay
It often seems more problematic to change post launch.

I meant "genericly", not so much Smugmug-specific.






Another reason why Smugmug has so many loyal customers...your customer feedback system is about as "public" as it gets through Dgrin. It takes some guts to open the doors to criticism, to accept responsibility , and to do something about it when warranted, all in a public forum. :bow

:wave join us in our TESTING PARTY, papa :D
http://www.dgrin.com/showthread.php?t=51791 and you can see us tonight all with our hair down :lol3

[nocturne1]

Not sure if this was previously mentioned, but when you click on "Share", it has links for email and blog, however, the forums page is the only one that's active, even when you click the other ones:
Flaunt your photos: email (http://hotness.beta.smugmug.net/gallery/share.mg?how=email&AlbumID=243&Page=2&ImageID=5930) | blog (http://hotness.beta.smugmug.net/gallery/share.mg?how=blog&AlbumID=243&Page=2&ImageID=5930) | forums

[onethumb]

We're getting really really close now, and as a result we're on to RC2 (http://www.dgrin.com/showthread.php?p=465748)!

Don