PicLens Support

[Monolith]

Quick news bit: For those of you using PicLens (http://piclens.com), an awesome image-browsing browser plugin: J2O now supports it, showing the latest screenshots. - Stijn (http://www.jazz2online.com/J2Ov2/user/profile.php?userID=281)

Great! Now where are the latest screenshots?

What about the user pictures?

[Cpp]

Coool! I can now browse images in 3D!

[Stijn]

Great! Now where are the latest screenshots?
Well, http://www.jazz2online.com/J2Ov2/screenrss.php. If you have PicLens installed, click its icon in your browser (or wherever you placed it) while browsing J2O and you'll see the latest screenshots, grouped by upload.

If you mean a page like the Picture Index which shows the latest screenshots neatly arranged in a grid, I'm afraid I have to disappoint you. Making an RSS feed was a much more trivial task than a full-fledged HTML page, so the latter is still on my todo list :)

What about the user pictures?
Adding those in wouldn't be hard, but I wasn't sure whether those uploading their pictures would appreciate such a public display of them. Then again the amount of people that actually use PicLens probably isn't that high, so this might not be a real concern. Thoughts?

[Nonomu198]

*sob* so far for http://www.jazz2online.com/jcf/showthread.php?t=17645&highlight=programme >:[

Neat.

[Monolith]

Well, http://www.jazz2online.com/J2Ov2/screenrss.php. If you have PicLens installed, click its icon in your browser (or wherever you placed it) while browsing J2O and you'll see the latest screenshots, grouped by upload.
Ah, I see it's changed. Last night I figured out that the button was enabled when I was in the downloads section. Now I see it for the front page too. But kind of my point is that it doesn't make any sense for PicLens to launch into the recent screenshots from the front page. The way I see PicLens used is that you go to a page that would give you a bunch of pictures, and PicLens provides an alternate way of looking at them. Having PicLens support on the downloads page kind of makes sense, but having PicLens support on the main page does not make so much sense. What would make the most sense is having a page just for the latest screenshots, and that page would have the PicLens support on it.

If you mean a page like the Picture Index which shows the latest screenshots neatly arranged in a grid, I'm afraid I have to disappoint you. Making an RSS feed was a much more trivial task than a full-fledged HTML page, so the latter is still on my todo list :)
Ok, just curious.

Adding those in wouldn't be hard, but I wasn't sure whether those uploading their pictures would appreciate such a public display of them. Then again the amount of people that actually use PicLens probably isn't that high, so this might not be a real concern. Thoughts?
Umm, the user pictures are already sitting there on the site in a public display. Switching from the user pictures index to the PicLens wall would make no change in how public the pictures are. Besides, you already have a nice picture index for the user pictures to neatly launch into PicLens. :)

[Stijn]

Ah, I see it's changed. Last night I figured out that the button was enabled when I was in the downloads section. Now I see it for the front page too. But kind of my point is that it doesn't make any sense for PicLens to launch into the recent screenshots from the front page. The way I see PicLens used is that you go to a page that would give you a bunch of pictures, and PicLens provides an alternate way of looking at them. Having PicLens support on the downloads page kind of makes sense, but having PicLens support on the main page does not make so much sense. What would make the most sense is having a page just for the latest screenshots, and that page would have the PicLens support on it.
The way I saw it was that you use PicLens to browse J2O in a more visual way (only pictures) than normally. Since the only parts of the site that are both dynamic and involving images are the screenshots and pictures section, I decided to take those as a "purely graphical representation" of J2O and add it as PicLens reference on every page (user photos were left out initially) for reasons discussed earlier and below, leaving only screenshots).

I suppose an alternate approach could be to show screenshots at the downloads page, photos at the pictures page and nothing at the rest of the site, or a mixture of screenshots and pictures at the whole site and only those images relevant at the downloads and pictures pages. Personally I'm more in favour of the latter.

Umm, the user pictures are already sitting there on the site in a public display. Switching from the user pictures index to the PicLens wall would make no change in how public the pictures are. Besides, you already have a nice picture index for the user pictures to neatly launch into PicLens. :)
Having them on a page named "pictures" to which people consciously upload their photos is something different than having a full-screen display of them one click away at pretty much every part of the site. I know it's probably not a big deal to pretty much everyone who has ever uploaded his or her photos in the past, but I'm cautious about doing anything with the pictures section that expands on what it was originally intended to be, since after all photos are a bit more sensitive content than a JJ2 level or screenshot.

This is of course not a concern if I enable it only for the pictures section pages, and I'll try to add at least that functionality soon.

[Monolith]

Look at how PicLens is utilized on other sites. The pictures it shows is always in the context of the current page. If you're looking at the page of a "set" on Flickr, PicLens shows the pictures for that set. It's not like it shows all the pictures for that user, or for all of Flickr. On Facebook, if you're in a photo album, you'll see just the pictures for that photo album. If you're on a profile page on Facebook , you'll only see the pictures that are directly on the profile page. So it makes sense that if you're in the "User Pictures" section of J2O, PicLens will show the pictures in the "User Pictures" section, or if you're in the recent downloads section you will see the pictures for the recent downloads. You could extend this to the main page which shows the news feed to show the pictures in the news feed, but there aren't all that many pictures in the news feed, so I'd just disable it there.