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日本語Portals Are UP!
by Kristopher Tate | 22 August 2006 | Announcements, General | 25 Comments
Hey Everyone, Kristopher here. Lots to explain about this release of Zooomr, but I’m pretty tired. Of notice: Robert Scoble talked a little bit about Portals — We were also posted on TechCrunch again.
I managed to shoot a video for your distinct viewing pleasure, though — More to come later today.
-Kristopher
http://beta.zooomr.com/photos/tags/portal
Nice experience !
A loading square stay, while in your video doesn’t. Why ?
Congratulations, an excellent feature! (It’s a bit slow on Opera 9, but lightning fast in Mozilla, so it’s just a broswer limitation, probably with transparency and friends)
There are a few rough edges you way want to work on:
1. when the portal is very close to the bottom margin (see for example http://beta.zooomr.com/photos/oblomov/77013 )the note text pops up outside of the image. This is not a problem, except when you are the author of the note and you want to edit it: in this case you have to be very fast in moving your cursor over to the note, since otherwise the popup disappears. This only happens for notes which pop up outside of the photo.
2. when picking a photo for the portal, you may want to default to the same tags as the current image being portalized: while this makes no difference for the user that has to input new tags, it speeds up the job when the next image has the same tags as the current one: an improvement for some users that costs nothing to the others
3. small glitch: when picking the photo for the portal, double-clicking on the thumbnail will insert the photo twice in the preview.
Some other suggestions follows:
a. you may want to add a small icon to the thumbnails of the photos to mark the ones that have portals/notes in them
b. as a general usage improvements, you may want to introduce is autocompletion (or pop-up suggestions) for tags
A future enhancement
Thanks, Oblomov. Lots of your suggestions are already being worked on — didn’t know about the glitch though.
I’ll try to get it patched soon.
-Kristopher
Ahem sorry clicked Submit too soon:
A future enhancement you may want to provide is the ability to open portals to photos in other people’s account. Such a thing would probably require the “receiver” to give permission for the portal to work, something like the following:
PersonA creates a portal from one of his/her pcitures to some picture of PersonB. When browsing his photos, PersonB sees that there is such a link requested, and he can choose to allow it or not, with the option to disable it again later on. As long as the portal is disabled, it only appears in PersonA’s view, or when PersonB views PersonA’s photo (so that PersonB may see where is PersonA linking from)
This could be part of a more general mechanism that allows people to create notes/portals/peoples in photos taken from other people. Such “unofficial” notes&co would be marked as such, and the author would always be allowed to remove them, or prohibit them altogether (globally or per-picture)
Just brainstorming here, of course
I know that’d be quite a lot of work, and maybe not even worth it. I’m just amazed by the possibilites this portal thing allows … it’s really an amazing idea.
One last note: is it possible to know which photos are linked to by portals, and on which photos the portals are?
(Now that’s what I call a fast response … not even the time to write the correction and you already replied … good service :))
Definitely working on this stuff Oblomov! I’m loving some of the stuff you’re putting together already.
I’m going to have some of the permission system online later today, so that idea isn’t so far-fetched.
As for notification of portals — I’m working on some things.
-Kristopher
Good job!
Oblomov, if you tag you portal-photos with the “portal” tag then you can find them here, along with other peoples’ portals: http://beta.zooomr.com/photos/tags/portal
Also, I suppose it isn’t too far fetched to assume that something similar to this mockup screen will be on the site, soon:
http://beta.zooomr.com/photos/oledoe/153199
…maybe that’s what Kristopher is alluding to in his post? Hey K, it’s in the middle of the night where you are (I am guessing). Don’t you ever sleep?
Good work, thanks.
Ole.
Thanks for this feature,it is terrific and I am now brainstorming my next photo adventure in order to take advantage of the portal system
I do have one note/bug/issue and have now tested it with 2 different browsers (and 2 different PCs) to make sure it wasn’t a fluke. Once you create a portal and save it, there *sometimes* is a way to resize or move it. Once in a while when you hit the EDIT option, you get the sizing box and can move, other times you do not. You also cannot click on the box directly to resize (like the notes box) because the portal kicks in before you get the chance.
For right now it seems that the only option is to delete the portal and recreate it to get around this issue.
Thank you again for these additions, they really do rock.
Well, that’s awesome and win, I agree with the idea of opening portals to other users and are glad you’re getting on it so soon. This is amazing, especially since i have only just discovered geo-tagging thanks to Zooomr, open portals seem a natural progression.
Kris,
Excellent functionality.
The issues with IE on the first photos page of any user are still present. When viewing my homepage www.zooomr.com/photos/gaz all of my sets are pushed down to the bottom of the page.
This means that all of the people I’m giving my homepage to aren’t able to find my sets because they all use IE. I’d love to tell my gran to download firefox but it’s not going to happen!
Sorry to keep bringing this up but it seems like such a simple thing to fix.
Cheers,
Gareth
I’ve tried watching my homepage with IE and the photos come on top. The right-hand bar with the Stats and Sets is pushed to the bottom, though.
The reason is probably that the IE doesn’t follow the CSS specs and it interprets the “width” directive in CSS styles are referring to the box, outer width (including padding and border width), whereas CSS says it refers to the content, inner width.
As a result, the content_wrapper is smaller in IE: even if the difference in size is minimal (probably just a couple of pixels) this is enough to prevent the two main body elements (the phots and the stats/sets) from being displayed side-by-side.
Sadly, the only solution to this problem (apart from telling your friends to use a more standard-compliant browser like Firefox, SeaMonkey or Opera, which you should do anyway :D) would be to make the contet_wrapper a couple of pixel wider, or the immediate inner elements a couple of pixel thinner.
Hope this helps Kris.
(Sigh I really feel like I’m monopolizing the comments here … sorry)
Another glitch: if you check out this photo:
http://beta.zooomr.com/photos/oblomov/69710
you will see a portal that takes the whole left half of the photo. Since it links to a photo with similar dimensions, the take-a-peek hovering effect shows a changing gray area together with half of the target picture: this ‘void’ decreases as you move your cursor towards the top of the portal, but it’s always there.
This might be WAD for cases in which the portal has a dimension which is as big if not bigger of the corresponding of the target, or a side-effect of the way browsers clip imgs, but I think it might be better to clip the target differently (OTOH, this could make the thing slower because you’d have to compare the target dimensions to the portal dimensions …)
Excellent. Very good. Now - where’s those API docs - I need to write this Windows Live Writer plugin this week while i’m on vacation
I have to say, the problems with IE are frustrating. It would be great to use Zooomer but most of the people (family/friends) I send to my photo site are using IE (version 6 of course).
None of the zooomer features seem to work. GeoTagged maps show up offset to the right, Portals do nothing, “Stats and Sets is pushed to the bottom” on user main page.
Are there plans to program this stuff to work with IE6, or are you waiting for IE7? Will they work with IE7?
Since it seems that we’re leaving bug reports here, I’ll jump in as well. I can’t get portals to work in IE 6.0.2900.2180 (XP). I tried it on two machines to no avail. The white outline of the note shows up, but the “portalized” image does not, nor does the link work.
Very cool, stuff Kris, but I think that more than just a few people are being left out.
Hey, Kristopher,
Zooomr is absolutely the besh photo hosting now, I really like what you are doing and the way how the whole community is being developing and I am looking at the future of Zooomr.com with huge optimism!
http://beta.zooomr.com/people/shotwave
i am still experiencing difficulty in merging my google and openid accounts … i get a 500 internal server error when i authenticate my openid details, the second part of the merge. is there any way someone manually doing this for me? i have kinda stopped posting photos since the 2.0 launch because of this :/
[…] Zooomr released a new feature called “Portals” which lets you define hotspots in your photos - kinda like Image Maps cross QuickTime VR. VR stands for Virtual Reality, in case that term has long been paged out to disk (sorry, geek joke) long ago. If you think that that’s so 1990’s you’re partially right. What is so ingenious about this is that it works right out of your browser and it so smOoOth! You’ve got to see it, and you will love it, as I have. […]
Zooomr progresse, mais ne corrige pas encore !
Kristopher Tate annonçait cette semaine le lancement de Portals sur Zooomr. Une technologie qui au premier regard fait penser aux Notes de Flickr, mais qui les dépassent largement ! En effet, comme il le montre dans la vidéo de présentation, la
i’ve tagged my starting portal photo with the tag portal and the one that you go to as portaled so I can find which ones have been used for which.
[…] I have been playing with zooomr again. This time using their new portals feature to make a little montage of a walk to the station. It’s not that interesting but entertained me for a while. Listen to this podcast […]
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