[Laszlo-dev] Thoughts on deployment?

[Michael Duffy]

Jon,

I like your site a lot. 

Apart from the obvious reasons why any red-blooded male would like the
site, I found that it was fast (despite the initial loading time) and it
kept me interested because content was always readily available.

As a critique, I could offer the following suggestions...

1/ Have some sort of preloader at the initial loading of the screen. I
am on a T1 connection and I know the basic behaviour of Laszlo. However,
a dialup or slower connection could have the impression that nothing is
happening on the screen and may abandon before they get a chance to see
the goodies.

2/ Adjusting for different resolution types. I think your Laszlo app is
customized for a higher resolution - 1280x1024 if I'm not mistaken.
Personally, I prefer browsing at 1024x768 and this meant that I had to
scroll around to see the full content of the site. In LPS 2.x, it is not
possible to adjust the size of your movie via percentages (%). This
means you would need to do some type of javascript detection of the
screen resolution and output the <EMBED and <OBJECT tag widths
programmatically. I guess the bottom line is that it would be nice if it
adjusted itself to my screensize - some users may not scroll.
3/ Related to 2/ above, some scroll bars or indicator that scrolling is
available would be nice on the image sets on the left.

I hope I have not sounded overly critical. As a first time user of your
site - these are the things that hit me via a first impression - so I
hope this helps.

Cheers,

Mike

-----Original Message-----
From: Jon Gilkison [mailto:misterfingers at gmail.com] 
Sent: Saturday, 22 January 2005 6:35 AM
To: Michael Duffy
Cc: OpenLaszlo platform development and bug reporting; OpenLaszlo user
community discussion
Subject: Re: [Laszlo-dev] Thoughts on deployment?

> Would be interested in seeing your prototype in due course.

http://64.106.255.20/ky/

login: Laszlo
password: openlaszlo

Warning: Not Safe For Work.  It's not porn, but there is nudity.

This isn't designed, this is a demonstration of the functionality and
represents about 15% of the total backend.  Everything is data driven
on a .NET backend.

Some notes on usage:

To view a gallery, click on any of the images on the left hand side. 
You can scroll that list by moving the cursor towards the top or
bottom of the list.

Once you click on an image, thumbnails will load and you can click on
a thumbnail to view the image.

Once you are viewing an image, you can:

- Change image sizes by clicking on one of the four squares in the
title bar of the image viewer.
- Navigate to previous/next images using the arrow buttons on the tool
bar.
- Start a slideshow by clicking on the icon that sort of looks like a
monitor.
- Find similar images by clicking on the magnifying lens icon.  You
will be presented with a dialog that allows you to specify what part
of the content of the image is more important than other when finding
matches.
- Vote on the image by clicking on the stars in the toolbar.
- You can change thumbnail sizes by clicking on one of the four
squares in the thumbnails title bar area.
- Scroll the thumbnails by clicking and dragging on the scrollbar.

Other non-obvious things.  To get more viewing area, double click the
image viewer's titlebar.  To restore the view, double click on it
again.

Again, the visuals are not designed.  We build an HTML prototype
(ASP.NET) and then discovered laszlo.  As our creative director is
currently snowboarding in tahoe, I had to sort of retro-fit the look
and feel into the laszlo app.

Let me know what you think!

Best,

Jon.