You asked, and PJ has responded: Here's a list of things the Pixel Joint site is going to correct and update, in the first incremental update.
Click the news article for exact details, folks!
There are several other little tweaks made that I've lost track of, but rest assured they are life-changing.
Updates will go live this Friday or Saturday (May 28/29)
-- SEDGEMONKEY
A few hours as in "Up to 24 hours" :P
@jal: as in how soon? (\( º Д º )/)
lol, didn't know timezones had a big difference like a day or something i figured it was just a few hours difference.
Enjoy the last minutes of 'old school' PJ. Very soon everyone can be part of the 'old PJ days'
*-BOOM-* gain experience *-BOOM-*
well they said by 28 or 29. its now the 30th and so i was expecting this to be updated by now.
i'm not really fussed but keeping to deadlines you guys set for your selves i'd imagine should have been important... anyways my excitement is being kept for version 3. because that will be more graphical updates i'd assume.
How much are you expecting hope its not a disappointment.
Forgive my ignorance - I assumed it would be some kind of Java software thing, just like when you scale in GIMP or any other program, and the code (e.g. Javascript) would be universal.
It would bypass the browser's built in scaling code with its own scaling code - hence the buttons to push.
In fact, the update to Firefox 3 must be in its chrome or Java controls, so theoretically someone with enough programming savvy could write a plug-in for Firefox 2, or any other browser.
Is this impossible in some way, or just really really hard? (wish I could do it, but my plug-in writing knowledge is pretty restricted to making buttons for other plug-ins...)
I wish there was a way to fix blurry pixels on chrome :/
The only way to fix the blur problem in a totally browser-independent way would be to take each image that's uploaded and scale it server-side to 2x using nearest neighbor, store it on the server somewhere independent of the 1x image, then display it instead whenever someone zooms. And of course you'd have to do this for each scaling factor, up to, say, 8x? Although I imagine people would want to zoom even farther than that sometimes. So every image would now require at least 205 times as much space on the server*, plus the CPU cycles to scale it at least 7 times, plus the extra bandwidth to send the larger sizes to everyone who clicks the zoom button. In short, it's just not practical. We are all at the mercy of our browsers.
The zoom-blur fix was designed for Firefox 3, and while this is arguably the best browser in da whole dang werld, I am using Chrome. Why? Cos it's so dang fast.
I keep Ff 3 for all my non-pixel links, and all the necessary plug-ins to make the web an even more usefuller place than it is already, but I keep Chrome with everything I need for pixelling. It's a convenience that will be pried from my cold dead hands.
So if it can be done in site code, to become "browser agnostic", you'll be helping more people than you know (especially if there are future changes to Ff that render the fix obsolete...).
I also second what StickyTape said about the image being cropped by the zoom. When I brought this up before, it was politely suggested that I just view the image in a new tab and use the browser zoom. So, erm, why have buttons on the page that sit there, teasing you to use them, when the real and true functionality must always involve the context menu, control + & control -, and the back key, instead of a single button that was supposedly designed just for this job. It just don't make no sense.
(sorry for the rant - PJ is already a site so cool that <hyperbole mode activated> it has changed my life! And you guys are the awsomest! )
the hype that this place could be updated at any moment is killing me :P
@ jinn:
heads gotta be 2x! adds to the overall pixelness of this site i guess
thats awesome Jinn, not sure about having the head bigger though.
@surt: Hopefully I just fixed the www issue.
@Jinn: Nice layout for the header... right now the upcoming is stripped down. Tackling design related issues will come after we finish cleaning things up.
And yes, we will be displaying scores. Not showing scores was meant to discourage exploitation, but exploiters will exploit no matter what you do.
Any hope of getting the seperate cookie problem for pixeljoint.com and www.pixeljoint.com fixed?
I would love to see something different in the top banner..
Don't know about the CSS, but i think it's possible to do something like this:
i.imgur.com/avyt8.gif
Gallery doesn't blur, forums still does. Issue's been brough up before and someone from the Mod Squad said it can be fixed by adding a line of code to the forum.
Zoom function doesn't blur for me. Not a site issue, update your browser.
yeah and ninja crows as well, thats two things thats bothered me heaps, that and the zoom function blurs the peice. which destroys the peice from being pixelart. which basically makes it a meaningless feature in a pixelart forum/site
x-death's, adaris's and sticky tapes's suggestions are definitely worth to think about!!!
(at leatst its excactly the things that botherd me all the time....)
Why not try making a twitter bot that automatically updates with news and stuff? I'm sure lots of the pixel artists here use it, anyways.
If you are going to have only a single place for ratings (on the art detail page - which makes sense) please let it display the current average rating for the piece (say in yellow rather than blue dots - and when blue dots overlap the yellow dots they turn green?).
Also, please let the site be able to auto-detect when the small icon and detail file images are exactly the same - I don't like never knowing if a piece gets any bigger or not, even when a magnifying glass is present (I try to always click anyway, but...).
Looking forward to the updates!
One change that is needed for sure is that when you zoom past the set width that the gallery piece is nested within, it just crops it and becomes un-viewable past those borders. There must be a way to make it similar to the Pixelation forums where once you've zoomed past the width limit, it will add a scroll bar to the bottom of that person's post to scroll left and right within that (or whatever scrolling method you choose to use like clicking the scroll wheel to navigate).
actually i didn't realize that the google bar worked for pixeljoint like that (is it just the same as doing site:pixeljoint.com ?), so that's more useful than I knew
Kudos on the work so far.
One quick thing about ratings: If they're not gone, are we actually going to be able to see the scores now? Because that's one thing that's always confused me, what's the point of rating things if you don't get to see the overall score?
I'm not saying we do a Nixon's Enemies List where it says who rated what, but at the very least it should say something like "3 people gave your piece 5 stars, 2 people gave your piece 1 star, etc." Actual stats right along with number of comments or number of favs or number of avatars a piece has.
The only problem with the PJ search is that it doesn't work very well... it's using simple SQL 'LIKE' on a few tables. We're not doing away with the PJ searches and they might be worked into the header eventually. Right now the Google search is limited to Pixel Joint domain (that's why we're not relying on the browser search bar) and I'm going to try and leverage the Google search so we can have it focus in on members/news/art.
Sorry for the confusion with the premature news post... all of the above items are 100% done -- they just have not been released yet. They will be up this Friday or Saturday depending on how many other items we can squeeze in.
Forget the google search unless the site gets money for it, we have them everywhere already.
What I'd rather see is a members/artwork search that's truly functional, that works with the enter key and doesn't disappear if your cursor falls a few pixels off the very tiny box. Here's hoping!
yeah this post was far to misleading it says thats everything thats been done, but yet i can't see any of them.
i didn't mind if sedge wasn't the poster of this or not, but it would have been nice to not have been mislead by saying "these have been done". what should have been said is "this is what we plan on doing" or wirte what has and what hasn't been done or something.,,,
also just an idea but i think it would be nice to have roll over system for the images like whats in place for voting for submissions on weekly challenges. that woull dbe nice so you don't have to click into the image to see what lies there. i find some avatars infact alot look good then i click and it turns out to be alot worse tehen i expected.
also you guys should get rid of the google search bar thats in the footer. browsers have one anyway. so it seems rather useless here.
@Reo - "...getting there"
@7even - Ratings are not going going. I suppose this was worded a bit ambiguously; ratings will be gone from only the gallery pages (weekly showcase, hall of fame, newest pixel art). They will still be available when you click on a specific gallery piece's page.
If there is no Rating anymore, how will systems based on them work now? Like the Weekly Showcase.
So, uh, is it normal for me to see no change whatsoever? ;O
@raynoa: Woops. Updating stored procedure and missed the queue stuff. Fixed.
@Dusty: Good idea.
@The B.O.B.: No worries. I brought in the Bruce Lee icon to regulate.
Any chance the zoom buttons can be moved to the top of the pixel art? This way we can zoom in and out without having to move our mouse around(click in to zoom and the buttons move below the picture, thus having to move down under the picture).
Crappity crap-crap. Sorry Sedge. I tried submitting this the first time, and I think I accidentally chose the wrong news category...
PS- THIS NEWS ARTICLE WAS SUBMITTED BY SEDGE....I JUST KINDA' GOOFED IT, WHEN SUBMITTING...
One day the dream will live.