Eric
Posts: 5743
Joined: 10/10/2003
From: Seattle, WA
Status: online
|
Between a bit of traveling and working on a pretty significant UI overhaul to the site, it has been a little while since I have posted a release note. For the past few weeks I have dribbled out some details about this UI overhaul in this thread.
As of late Saturday evening, the first beta release of the new site UI is in place at: http://www.cellartracker.com/newui/
In general, it was a bit of work to colocate the old and new site, and there are a few glitches that only occur because of this temporary state. Namely, if you edit your profile in the new UI and take advantage of some of the new display settings, then go to the old UI and edit your profile, well your changes to these new settings will get nuked. Also, you may have to log in to both the main site as well as the new 'sub site'. A number of people have run into this.
Anyway, onto the core UI. This is still a work in progress with a few loose ends to button up, but people are already excited about what is done so far. Check out this excited/exciting thread on the eRobertParker bulletin board.
There isn't a huge amount of functionality, but a number of people have been surprised to find functionality that has been there all along and hiding under a cluttered UI. Here are some of the strictly new things:
- Direct links to Wine-Searcher and Wine-Searcher Pro are now exposed on the site. The latter didn't exist before, and the former was hopelessly buried.
- In general, the wine drilldown has had the greatest improvement. Now it is easy to see other vintages of a wine or add new ones.
- In your profile you can now set whether or not to show inventory/purchase data from other users by default. (You can still always toggle on the fly.)
- In your profile you can now set whether or not to show tasting notes from other users by default. (You can still always toggle on the fly.)
- In your profile you can now set whether or not to show price/valuation by default. (You can still always toggle on the fly.)
- The Amazon and PayPal donation mechanisms are going the way of the Dodo bird. Now you will be able to easily enter a credit card number on a closely integrated VeriSign payment page. No goofy memberships or trying to remember your old passwords. Per the note below, the UI is there and the infrastructure is 99% in place, but payments won't be accepted until tomorrow.
- The restaurant-style wine lists have some new options. Namely, now you can generate a varietal-centric list and still have big subheadings by country and region. Also, Grand Cru Burgundy vineyards are now properly treated as appellations.
- The HOME page now has lots of MRU (most recently used) lists of: wines you have most recently edited/created/added to; purchases; consumed; added to inventory; written a tasting note. I used to just show the last 3 bottles consumed.
- As of last week, both the new and old site filter the list of varietals you see by type AND country. It makes things a LOT cleaner and simpler when picking a varietal (type of grape or blend).
- And of course there is LOTS and LOTS of UI cleanup. The way it always should have been. It actually makes sense now.
Here are the todo items. I have already gotten a ton of great feedback in the last 36 hours, but more is welcome! I anticipate I will be chipping away at this for another two weeks before I put things into full swing. (Right now you can use the new UI or the current site.)
- The biggest area of feedback is around summarization and how I can further expose this. For now, all of the summary links are on the Reports page. Look for the next beta 'real soon now' to see where we are really going with this...
- There are a number of NYI hyperlinks. Also, the link from the main site to add a tasting note does nothing special right now. Soon it will offer a shortcut to find/add your wine and then jump right to the tasting note screen bypassing the wine drilldown.
- I haven't yet played with the DHTML dropdowns in order to expose some more of the reports and recent wines closer to the top level. I do plan to do some of that.
- The new donation/payment UI with direct VeriSign integration is functional but not yet hooked to a live payment backend. Per the little warning on the site, you can play with it. However, I won't have things going until tomorrow morning.
- I haven't yet done any work for the PocketPC, so don't even try browsing to the new site on one, pretty please.
Anyway, give it a try. Let me know what you like and dislike. It is a work in progress.
_____________________________
Cheers!
-Eric LeVine
|
Printable Version
v3.0.0 (beta 1.0) Release Notes - 
New Messages
No New Messages
Hot Topic w/ New Messages
Hot Topic w/o New Messages
Locked w/ New Messages
Locked w/o New Messages
Post New Thread