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New Upcoming features
Did everyone see the new Upcoming.org awesomeness?
In general, I'm very happy:
- More events in the DB - awesome.
- More configurable searching and filtering - awesome
- Flickr photos - awesome.
- Buddy Icons - awesome
- Better homepage - awesome
- New Event Page - distinctly un-awesome
I'm sorry, but the new event page is just not working for me. There's much more information available now, which is great. Unfortunately, the layout just feels totally wrong. I'm still trying to quantify why, so let me think through it here.
1. The visual hierarchy is wrong. The orange headline gets lost. The red header above and the black type below totally overwhelm it. I would bet that if you got one of those freaky eye-tracking systems, you'd see people scan from top-left-corner, to red header block, to black-on-grey content area, to map, totally skipping the headline. That's what my eyes do, anyway.
2. The informational hierarchy is wrong. The things I want on to know about an event, are, in order: What is it? Where is it? When is it? Who's coming? and Where's the link? Unfortunately, the stuck the "Where is it?" answer over in the sidebar instead of with the item title and date. And they stuck the event link all the way at the bottom.
3. The new attendee/watcher list is awful. It's much easier to scan a vertical column for names you recognize. This overly cramped paragraph-style list is impossible. I do like the big "attendee total" numbers. But they feel like they're in the wrong place.
[LATER]
I got tired of trying to describe the problems. Here's a mockup of how I might change things. Start by looking at it in small size first. That helps you see the relative weight of the information without reading the content. See how much better the black headline is? Notice, I actually just moved bits around. I really do like the general style and color treatment.
P.S. Find me on Upcoming.
Continue reading "New Upcoming features"
August 28, 2006 | Permalink | Comments (2)
If only this sort of thing worked....
Boycott IE. It's a cancer on the Web that must be stopped. IE isn't secure and isn't standards-compliant, which makes it unworkable both for end users and Web content creators. Because of their user bases, however, Web developers are hamstrung into developing for IE at the expense of established standards that work well in all other browsers. You can turn the tide by demanding more from Microsoft and by using a better alternative Web browser.
On the other hand, IE7 will at least be better than IE6. And the recent announcement that Microsoft is planning to push IE7 through Windows Update is welcome news. The quicker we can transition off of IE6, whether by convincing people to use a better product or by Critical-Updating them to IE7, the better my life will be.
August 8, 2006 | Permalink | Comments (0)
Leopard packs a new wiki server
http://www.apple.com/server/macosx/leopard/wikiserver.html
No clue as to which one they chose, though. But assuming they keep to previous pattern, it will be one of the BSD-licensed, open source ones. But that's a pretty slick UI they put on top of it, I must say.
August 7, 2006 | Permalink | Comments (1)
