I’ve spent the last few days refining some of the ‘Ajax’ features in IPB 2.1.
We’ve had some great and productive feedback from our customers on the new features and this feedback has motivated the change.
Ajax capable folks now get a floating ‘div’ MyAssistant that’s draggable instead of a new pop up window. This has several tabs each powered by Ajax. (Random thought: I bet sales of a certain cleaning product have gone up in the last few months).
This effectively centralizes all the ajax driven components. I’ve removed the ajax pop-ups from the "View New Posts" and "New Messages" links.
When ajax powered members receive a new PM, their My Assistant is automatically opened and a new tab appears "New PMs" which is already opened. This combines the PM notification with the My Assistant and removes the semi-transparent notification which had a luke-warm reception. Non-ajax folks will get the ‘old’ IPB 2.0 PM notification albeit in IPB blues instead of reds.
The search is an interesting addition. The first reaction is bound to be "Hey, that’s got to be a resource hog" but consider the following: Initial verification is done via javascript which saves a PHP process to determine if the entered keywords are of a correct length and format. You get to see how many matches there are before viewing the results. The current IPB search is in two stages split by a meta redirect. The first part does the search and returns the post IDs and stores them in a search results table. The second stage grabs these post IDs and builds the topic listing. One may consider that "x" matches is insufficient before searching again thus saving the second half of the usual search routine. The resulting HTML is cached in JS (the blob of text, not the page of results) so that if you search for the same thing twice, it doesn’t invoke a PHP request.
Of course, screen shots just don’t cut it anymore, so here’s another (?:adult) movie.
My Assistant in action (Quicktime .mov 3.9mb)
12 comments
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May 3, 2005 at 4:50 pm
Dan
I like… Then again, I liked the original floating PM notification.
May 3, 2005 at 5:55 pm
James
Wow, I’m impressed. Best PM notification system I’ve seen in a while - and I might actually use the My Assistant feature now it’s not in an annoying pop-up!
May 3, 2005 at 6:05 pm
oZaD
Looks good. Matt, what happens if the assistent float is visible and you change the forum page? Does this make the assistent invible or does nothing change?
May 3, 2005 at 6:16 pm
Matt
Currently, it makes the MyAssistant invisible when you (re-)load a page.
I am playing with the idea of allowing one to ‘collapse’ it and store the state in a cookie so that it appears collapsed (or open) on subsequent page loads.
May 3, 2005 at 10:25 pm
mikee aka Nicoo
First of all:
Great changes and moves ! It makes me happy to see that (the good part of) customer feedback is taken in count.
These are for sure great improvments in comparison to v2.1 alpha1/2. It is really great that you took time and energy (!) to change working things that did already cost you nerves(I am thinking of the semi transparent implemenation and the bugs you had).
OK, enough, now the feedback:
When looking at the video an idea came to me at first(besides that ajax and the tabs are looking amazing). I never used the “My assistent” until now (I didn’t like it). The reason was of course that you couldn’t do much with it. And as it wasn’t an “ajax-dynamical thing” and had no tabs also; after opening it, it would just have stayed there, not used, as IPB has a “view new posts”-link on every page.
BUT now, there is this truly amazing widget. I really like it, as it can be very usefull with its tabs an ajax features. That’s the moment were I thought, oh, wouldn’t this be great as a pop-up window NOW (!) ?. I could place it beside my main-window like my instant messenger (AIM/Yahoo/…) and I could look at some PM’s while following a topic in the forum.
Then I read your answer:
[QUOTE]
Currently, it makes the MyAssistant invisible when you (re-)load a page.
I am playing with the idea of allowing one to ‘collapse’ it and store the state in a cookie so that it appears collapsed (or open) on subsequent page loads.
[/QUOTE]
Ok that would be already another very nice improvment. But wouldn’t it be even more amazing to have it opend like an IM-window, now that it is dynamical thanks to the tabs and the ajax features ? Being able to look at PM’s while a topic page loads for example, or searching a word in the new tab, while reading through the topic. Sure you could search also with your new implementation, but often you dislike covering parts of the window you are actually using, especially if you have a big screen. I know form experience, that people are not so comfortable not being able to move a “widget” out of the main window. It feels like jailed…
People like to move things where they want to have it, and this would only work with the pop-up window. This would become a sort of IM. You could even navigate to another website, and still receive a new PM, as ajax can look if there are new PM’s without complete refresh and load it if there is one (gmail like). Perhaps you could even reply to it(I think no RTE is needed, at least not the full one, or just a little input box would be enough).
So I think that a pop-up window would be amazing, even if I never used the old one. I think that the time has come now where it would be usefull.
May 3, 2005 at 11:10 pm
Mike
my ass is phat!!!
My assisstant is looking brilliant, great job Matt.
One sugestion I have is add a fast reply to the PM notification window gmail/ipb forum style. Just a 2 or 3 line text entry box with two buttons - send and more options. That’s all I noticed missing.
2.1 is looking like a stellar upgrade, can’t wait
May 4, 2005 at 1:34 am
Logan
I’m liking.
May 4, 2005 at 4:35 am
someotherguy
Wonderful Matt! This is SO much better than the current PM notification on the IPS forums right now. I hope you keep it this way!
PS: Your doing an AWESOME job on IPB 2.1 right now. I’m so honoured to be a customer of IPS. I cant wait until IPB 2.1 is release!
someotherguy582 — Area09 — PHP Developer
May 4, 2005 at 7:13 pm
Swords
Couldn’t the my Assistant be minimized to the bottom of the screen, like applications were in windows 3.1.
That would be neat.
May 5, 2005 at 12:11 am
mikee aka Nicoo
To have a fixed place where it jumps to could be nice.
Eventually I can see some (at least one) little drawback(s) to the pop-up window method (beside the many positve possiblities), for example for people with little screens.
I usually prefer to avoid having things to work two different ways(a setting in UCP), as it needs some additional work, but in this case I think it could be a big plus to let user choose which method to use (pop-up or not), as already said, it would give more possibilities for most users, while being also friendly to users with small screens.
May 5, 2005 at 2:13 pm
Veracon
Might want to look into what happens when the search returns nothing.
May 7, 2005 at 9:40 am
Jack
Might be nice to have the actual drag cursor, when you hover over a draggable layer?
Also, it would be nice to see an actual Close image rather than [X] .. but I guess I’m being picky…
Also, Us Eye-Candy whores are fans of trasnparency