Another new UI preview

[Conan]

Dragoneer has posted another new UI preview. People were raising a stink about it on FAF, so I guess it was time for another preview. According to some information posted elsewhere, he said on his Facebook that there's still no ETA.



Some people have noted that on closer inspection, almost all of the text on the page is anti-alised, indicating that the page may just be a Photoshop mockup. Sure enough, a preview posted earlier this year has text that looks "correct". Blotch's userdata in the preview appears to be recent, though, off by only about 20,000 views.

For those keeping track, the original teaser image is here.

[a pigeon]

Tried to tweak it a bit:



There is a certain logic to swashes/ligatures since they developed from how people wrote the letters.

[ColonThree]

I'll never understand Dragoneer's thought process. He locks the UI thread, then posts that on Twitter the next day, where it has now spread to here and lulz. Yet he has declined so far to post it on the forum. Why does he post so much shit on Twitter which is never heard of again? Does no one criticise him there so he feels safe or what? I don't get it at all.

[Pi]

Why does he post so much shit on Twitter which is never heard of again? Does no one criticise him there so he feels safe or what? I don't get it at all.

Twitter is more of an insular hugbox. The block tool removes all criticism, leaving him with a shiny stream of dicksucking.

[Ketsuban]

So it's still irreparably shit, but now it's more Web 2.0 because there's transparency and a couple of gradients, and some of the boxes overhang the edges of other boxes.

Ah well, more things for my adblocker to chew on.

[Lynx]

Looks familiar to another site kinda like that FA thingy as well.

http://dragoneer.furaffinity.net/fa_gallery_template.jpg
https://inkbunny.net/

[Freehaven]

FA has a fuckton of technical issues as it is; why is 'Neer trying to finalize a facelift to a shitty system instead of making the system not shitty first?

[greaseyote]

What's with the psychedelic Fur Affinity summer-of-love text anyway?

It makes the website look like a Grateful fucking Dead album cover and not a site about animal-people.

[Conan]

FA has a fuckton of technical issues as it is; why is 'Neer trying to finalize a facelift to a shitty system instead of making the system not shitty first?

"Lipstick on a pig" and what not. Sure, the code might be stuck in 1999, but at least it won't look that way!

[Freehaven]

"Lipstick on a pig" and what not. Sure, the code might be stuck in 1999, but at least it won't look that way!

I'm honestly wondering if this new UI will be using tables for layout.

[Jim Demintia]

Dragoneer's thought process is just that; it's the video-game addled ADHD brain of a loser who would go to sleep at 6am and sleep all day if he didn't have his sweet welfare gig to get to every day. There is no "reason" as to why he posted that, any more than there's a "reason" why your 12-year-old cousin shouts random shit with a lampshade on his head while marching up and down the hall before he gets his Ritalin in the morning.

So. Anyway, isn't the general consensus that they'll never, ever get any kind of UI re-design of that depth into production? Isn't the logic and presentation code so inextricably mashed together that anything "designed" by a UI designer would never be applicable to the codebase itself?

One wonders if Dragoneer understands this, or (more likely) if he doesn't, and thinks that since he can't "fix the code", he will try to fix the UI instead.

[Conan]

@Elion_King We want to set it so that all stories submit are converted to PDF, and displayed as PDF. Universal, easy to display.
@Khorax @Elion_King That's an ideal. Ideally, I'd prefer a WYSIWYG editor w/ rich display. We're still discussing it.

What. I'm wondering if he's confused with how inline PDF viewers like FlexPaper work, and that they're just PDF's converted into images.

[Jim Demintia]

@Elion_King We want to set it so that all stories submit are converted to PDF, and displayed as PDF. Universal, easy to display.
@Khorax @Elion_King That's an ideal. Ideally, I'd prefer a WYSIWYG editor w/ rich display. We're still discussing it.

What. I'm wondering if he's confused with how inline PDF viewers like FlexPaper work, and that they're just PDF's converted into images.

Well he does have a point...on desktop PCs. On Windows, Acrobat will embed itself in Firefox or IE and the process is essentially seamless and instant. On Mac, Safari does this, and I'm sure if you install the appropriate stuff Firefox will do it too. Without a plugin, Mac, and Linux in most scenarios just launch the default PDF application, Preview (mac) or Evince Document viewer (Linux). So it's great.

Where the problem is is on mobile devices. PDF is a fixed-page format, meaning that, most PDFs are typeset for US Letter size pages, which is decidedly NOT the size of most tablet and phone screens. To properly display a PDF, one of two things has to happen: it has to be scaled back to the point you can't read the text, or you have to scroll around in a "viewport" type setup. Not conducive to easy reading. Adobe has a thing called "reflowable" PDFs, that their Acrobat products as well as the Android version of Acrobat Reader supports, but it doesn't work really well and most PDFs aren't created with support for it. Anything that would be an add-on for a web-server would probably not support it. PDF has always been built on the idea of being electronic paper, in a quite literal sense.

The best way to read on a mobile device is using EPUB. As EPUB uses a limited subset of HTML at its core, wrapped in an Open Packaging Conventions ZIP file (the same used by Office XML and OpenOffice), pages of text are inherently reflowable so that the text can be of appropriate size but still fill the entire screen (within the margins of the 'page') like a book would.

All the insane office-doc formats submitted by FA users (seriously people, RTF? why?), could be converted easily ... I don't know how this might scale, but there is a command-line tool called 'unoconv' that bascially hooks into Open Office to convert any supported format into any other.

[Dr. Dos]

Universal, easy to display.

One could say the same thing of ~plaintext~

I await the first PDF upload with an exploit though.

[rodox_video]

Who cares? This is all wanking and vaporware.

The layout change is far beyond the FA staff's ability to implement. Mockups for layout changes and more have been floating around since 2009, and have remained just that: mockups.

I'm reminded a bit of the Ryugong Hotel. A decaying, half-finished hulk that is not getting any less ugly by the day. A giant slab of wishful thinking that stretches further and further beyond it's creator's ability to complete with each passing day.

[Conan]

Who cares? This is all wanking and vaporware.

The layout change is far beyond the FA staff's ability to implement. Mockups for layout changes and more have been floating around since 2009, and have remained just that: mockups.

I'm reminded a bit of the Ryugong Hotel. A decaying, half-finished hulk that is not getting any less ugly by the day. A giant slab of wishful thinking that stretches further and further beyond it's creator's ability to complete with each passing day.

I missed some tweets.

There's a lot of changes based on the last time it was shown. Many of the changes are live on our test. Other stuff soon.

So yeah, a lot of it is apparently just Photoshop mockups at this point.

Then there's these:

Scraps will be part of folders. We have to fix some SQL issues first, then we're working on Folders.

So it looks like gallery folders are once again back to "not started".

No ETA. There's a lot of things we're planning, such as a hardware refresh for FA's backend as well.

as Foxid put it

[23:53:33] <~Foxid> hardware refresh is a term usually reserved for large enterprises
[23:53:48] <~Foxid> and involves systematically replacing older hardware with newer in a controlled and responsible manner
[23:54:12] <~Foxid> so obviously a phrase that has no right being in the same thought pattern as 'fa'

None of the hardware is even that old (save for Bahamut, which went online in 2006 and is now being used as the database backup where it stores one file called furaffinity.tar.bz.) Novastorm (the Sun), is second oldest, going online in July 2008. Given the abuse it's gone through, it's probably the only one that should be due to be "refreshed" (seeing as a leading theory is that it's ready to keel over, thus causing all the database issues as of late.)

[Jim Demintia]

I'm reminded a bit of the Ryugong Hotel. A decaying, half-finished hulk that is not getting any less ugly by the day. A giant slab of wishful thinking that stretches further and further beyond it's creator's ability to complete with each passing day.

My father told me there is a building in North Korea that is similar to that, probably unfinished due to the multi-decade economic clusterfuck caused by the Soviet Union's disintegration, where it is an apartment building that rises up into the sky...but has no walls. You can get around, onto the different floors, but there's no walls...and no electricity or anything.

Apparently people live there; and at night they keep warm...with campfires. It's supposedly quite a sight to see all those campfires glowing from an unfinished high-rise at night.

[Jim Demintia]

Universal, easy to display.

One could say the same thing of ~plaintext~

I await the first PDF upload with an exploit though.

What, do you think they check the Office docs that people can upload *today* for macro viruses? I'm honestly surprised no one has tried this attack vector yet (malicious uploads), which is probably also exploitable via SWF movies, given the fantastic security record of the Adobe Flash  Player.

[greaseyote]

I'm reminded a bit of the Ryugong Hotel. A decaying, half-finished hulk that is not getting any less ugly by the day. A giant slab of wishful thinking that stretches further and further beyond it's creator's ability to complete with each passing day.

My father told me there is a building in North Korea that is similar to that, probably unfinished due to the multi-decade economic clusterfuck caused by the Soviet Union's disintegration, where it is an apartment building that rises up into the sky...but has no walls. You can get around, onto the different floors, but there's no walls...and no electricity or anything.

Yeah, that would be the Ryugyong Hotel, as mentioned.

edit: if you click the link, it looks like they're working on it again, after a good decade of doing nothing, although some say they are only interested in putting the glass facade on the building, and that they don't really plan to make it a useful structure, if that's even possible.

[MazelTovCocktail]

Looks familiar to another site kinda like that FA thingy as well.

http://dragoneer.furaffinity.net/fa_gallery_template.jpg
https://inkbunny.net/

Glad to see I'm not the only one who noticed the, uhhhhh, similarity.